Walter Dallas has lost his battle with cancer. In loving tribute, we reprint here a profile that I originally wrote in 2005 about this gentle giant.
Dallas told me, “I am an African man trying to exist in America, and that terrifying proposition affects my health. I have high blood pressure and diabetes and, being as inescapable as that reality is, racism is not just something I experience; it’s a minute-to-minute fact of life that all African Americans, those who remain sane, come to terms with. These political and social issues cannot be separated from my work.”
Dallas was one of the theater world’s most respected directors and writers. He was associated with James Baldwin and with August Wilson, and directed over 25 world premieres including Wilson’s Seven Guitars at Goodman Theater in Chicago and John Henry Redwood’s The Old Settler at McCarter in Princeton, and he was artistic director of the respected black company, Freedom Theater.
Freedom Theater gave the world premieres of the pageant plays which Dallas wrote, Black Nativity and Lazarus Unstoned. My review in Philadelphia’s City Paper said: “The glitzy production values equal the best of regional theater, and costumes and choreography that surpass anything seen locally this year.” But when I left that season’s Barrymore Award ceremony I witnessed a poignant scene.
We were on South Broad Street in Philadelphia, also known as the Avenue of the Arts, at one in the morning on October 11, 2005. Theater folks, fresh from the annual Barrymore Awards, are partying in the Great Hall at the University of the Arts. A solitary figure leaves the party and treks up the quiet street. One block, then two. A threesome on their way from the gala talk loudly to each other but they ignore the middle-aged man who walks by himself.
Walter Dallas is used to being alone in Philadelphia. One of his friends says that Walter is generally unrecognized in his own city. Dallas doesn’t think of it that way. He says he likes being solitary for long stretches of time, so he can focus on new ideas.
Dallas was born in Atlanta September 15, 1946. His mother, Katie Sue Dallas, developed cancer and he was raised by his mother’s sister, Lillian Mae Whatley, with no father present. He attended Morehouse College, where Samuel L. Jackson was his classmate. Dallas studied music and theology at Harvard, went to Yale Drama School for directing and graduated in 1971. “I was raised in a very middle-class conservative Baptist church in a very middle-class Atlanta of the fifties and sixties. Musically, I grew up with the Modern Jazz Quartet, Sarah Vaughan, Dakota Staton, Miles Davis. And rock ‘n roll, classical music, all kinds of music. Then I took piano, viola and organ lessons. Even in kindergarten I’d put on pageants and plays. I remember being a mouse in The Nutcracker ballet when I was in the first grade and every year after that I wanted to be a soldier. And by the fourth grade I was a soldier, and by the fifth grade I was the prince.
“When I thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I realized that I already was what I was going to be when I grew up — that is, I was already a fusion of directing and putting on shows with Coca-Cola bottles as characters in my plays, with an eclectic mix of music in the background. “I became choir director, played organ, both at my church and during my short stint at the Harvard Divinity School. I like to think that I am a very spiritual, rather than religious, person. There is great drama in the Bible.”
As a theater major at Yale, Dallas got involved in the emerging civil rights and feminist movements as students tried to get Yale to change its old ways. “Finally the administration called off classes and scheduled workshops to address the issues,” recalls Dallas. “Only Robert Brustein didn’t go along with that. He [the head of Yale’s theater department] went ahead with his production of a Restoration comedy, come hell or high water.”
Though his upbringing, and by his nature, Dallas was traditional and conservative, but he had a visceral response to Brustein. In rebellion, Dallas wore a beret and leather jacket. “I didn’t just want to do Chekhov,” he told me; “I also wanted to do Barakah. I put together an interracial celebration including drama, dance and music.” Lynn Meadow and Henry Winkler were classmates of Dallas at Yale. His closest friend, though, was a white guy with an English accent, Derek Hargreaves, an Economics major whom he met his first day at Yale.
Then Dallas attended the University of California at Berkeley where he became friends with Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Their Black Panther Party advocated militant self-defense of black communities and proclaimed: “We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our black community.” Dallas says that Panthers believed in “working class unity” across the spectrum of color and gender. Walter ran the Black Arts Theater, the creative arm of the Black Panthers. “The arts reflected how society was changing. Music was shifting. Marvin Gaye’s `What’s Going On’ was popular. I wasn’t an actual member of the party,” says Dallas, “but the plays were very political in nature, written by Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins and LeRoi Jones later known as Amiri Baraka. I wore a big Afro, fringe, a leather belt and tight jeans. I taught black kids who were ignorant about their African roots, and I helped them make a connection.”
Dallas says he personally was not especially militant but he hung out with the Black Panthers at The Lamp Post, their restaurant/lounge in Oakland. “I also have a copy of the Black Panther newspaper with a full page ad announcing one of my productions featuring Abbey Lincoln. All money raised went to their breakfast program.” He says his political beliefs have not changed much since then: “I still have a strong commitment to working for the betterment of the African-American community, which is why I felt great when I worked at Freedom in North Philly, in one of Philly’s poorest neighborhoods.
“I am an African man trying to exist in America, and racism is a minute-to-minute fact of life that all African Americans, those who remain sane, come to terms with. These political and social issues cannot be separated from my work: My work, sometimes filtered though an artistic lens, sometimes totally reinvented, always comes from the totality of my experience.”
Dallas lived in Africa in the late 1970s — in Liberia, on the Atlantic coast, and Kenya and Tanzania in the east, facing the Indian Ocean. He also studied music at the University of Ghana, along what was once known as the Gold Coast of western Africa. “In Tanzania I learned to speak Swahili fluently, but they knew from my accent that I was not Tanzanian, so once I almost got arrested as a foreign spy. I saw this beautifully-painted building and took a photograph of it, and it turned out to be a government building. They thought I was an agent for Idi Amin, the dictator of Uganda, and three huge government men with machine guns grabbed me. I finally convinced them that I was a friendly.”
He moved to Hawaii to write, then came home to start a theater company in Atlanta which he called The Proposition. “I promised something new every time; I didn’t want us to be pigeon-holed as a Black theater company,” he explains. Bernard Havard had just been hired to run Atlanta’s prestigious Alliance Theater in 1977. He heard about the quality of Dallas’ work at The Proposition and attended a performance of Chekhov’s The Sea Gull there.
“I was fresh from lily-white Edmonton, Alberta,” says Havard, “and I was afraid to go into that black neighborhood, but when I got there I was impressed. Walter cast the higher-class Russians with light-skinned blacks and the working people were very dark blacks. It underlined the class differences.”
The establishment-type Havard would seem to have little in common with Dallas, but they became colleagues and friends. Havard liked Dallas’ work so much that he gave The Proposition a 300-seat space in Alliance’s building. Havard also hired Dallas to direct For Colored Girls in Atlanta and on tour. The state was to sponsor a performance in Columbus until a member of the legislature objected to what he called the obscene language in the script. Georgia withdrew its financial aid, but the show went on with private funding. Havard even put Dallas’ cutting-edge version of Oedipus, called Asafohene, on his main stage. “Oedipus is an African army chief. He knows it’s his mom but he goes ahead and sleeps with her anyway.”
Havard and Dallas were uneasy collaborators, however. When Havard hired Jane Alexander to star in Antony and Cleopatra, Dallas led pickets who demanded that a black actress be hired instead because Cleopatra was a Nubian, from Africa. Havard remembers Dallas as “a firebrand who could be madly irritating. We argued about black actresses who auditioned for For Colored Girls. Many of them had sibilance or slushy L’s, and I rejected them. Walter said to me: `That’s the way we speak,’ and I said, `Bullshit. James Earl Jones doesn’t talk that way and neither do you.’”
Nevertheless, Havard recommended Dallas for an NEA Emerging Director fellowship, and Walter then worked for a year at Center Stage in Baltimore. There, in 1980, Walter directed The Amen Corner by James Baldwin. A local television personality wanted to play a part in that production, but Dallas turned her down. Her name was Oprah Winfrey. Baldwin called this a definitive production, and a Baldwin-Dallas friendship began.
Dallas wanted some prestigious theater people to see his work: “I invited Joe Papp [head of New York’s Public Theater], Lynn Meadow [Manhattan Theater Club] and Douglas Turner Ward [Negro Ensemble Company] to Baltimore to see my production,” says Dallas, “and Joe and Lynn came. But Ward was the one I really wanted to impress, and he didn’t respond, and I was pissed.”
The Negro Ensemble Company was founded in 1967 by actor/producer Robert Hooks and playwright Douglas Turner Ward. They met when both were in the road cast of Raisin in the Sun. Together they dreamed of starting a theater company run by and for black people. The company was designed to produce professional theater in which black artists, performers, writers, directors, actors and craftspeople could oversee their own creative destiny. “So,” says Dallas, “I went to his office in New York. I put on my military cap and combat boots. Steam was coming out of my ears. We met, and we talked for four hours and he invited me to open his next season.”
“I moved to New York and directed Sons and Fathers of Sons for Negro Ensemble, with Phylicia Rashad, and I got a good New York Times review, which was important to me at that point.” During this period Dallas married a Jamaican actress. They later divorced. He has no children.
“But I have many ex-students who are my sons and daughters,” he says. “A kid in Ghana calls me `Daddy.’ And many of my `children’ are living and working in New York and LA. One of my former students flew in from Italy to see me when I was ill. He arrived at the same time a former student flew in from LA. She was in Spielberg’s War of The Worlds. My students know that if I teach them once, I am available to them for life.”
Dallas traveled to England, France and Russia as a guest director, but he didn’t have a steady income. Back in the USA he took a day job selling credit reports on the phone. In 1983 Bernard Havard, now running the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, recommended Dallas for a job at Philadelphia’s College of the Performing Arts. The school, changing its name to the University of the Arts, hired Dallas to run its theater program, and he gave up his day job. He was director of the school for the next ten years, while also guest-directing around the world.
Barbara Silzle, who went on to head the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, was an administrator at UArts when Dallas started the theater school. She enjoyed working with him because of his “brilliance and vitality. He has, by far, the most accomplished international directing career of anyone in Philadelphia, but he never flaunted that. He’s a natural-born teacher and totally dedicated to his students. He cares deeply about affecting and empowering young people.”
Jennifer Childs and Peter Pryor, who later founded Philadelphia’s 1812 Theater, were students of Dallas at the university. Both claim his teaching impacted them. Pryor says “He was a great dean; very involved personally.” Childs says that Dallas stressed individuality and didn’t want his pupils to appear as if they came from a cookie cutter, with proficiency in only one method. Childs also observes that some students were scared to approach Dallas because of his fame. “I myself felt kind of star struck. I had to learn how to approach him but then I found him to be very warm.”
During the period when he worked at UArts, Dallas visited Freedom Theater for the first time. He directed Under Pressure, a youth production, in the 1983 season, and War Heroes on the mainstage during the 1985-86 season. In 1992 he left his tenured professorship and the UArts directorship to become artistic director at Freedom. “I saw it as an opportunity,” he says, “because I didn’t want to stay in academia; I wanted to produce professional theater. And most of all, I wanted to live and work in the black community.”
The Freedom Theater company bought the old Edwin Forrest mansion at Broad & Master streets in the heart of North Philadelphia, and opened a new theater inside it in 2001. “Our first play, would you believe it, was by a white Irish American!” (Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, with a black cast.)
Public relations consultant Suzi Garber, who worked for Freedom Theater, is white and Jewish and she stresses that fact: “This company is all-inclusive.” She points out that Freedom welcomes white people to its theater where “parking is free and safe, and the atmosphere inside is warm and inviting.” Barbara Silzle agrees about Dallas’ broad approach: “He is color-blind in his relationships. He has an expansive, interracial vision.”
During Dallas’s years at Freedom’s there was a unique graciousness. Its audience members are dressier than elsewhere. The Freedom milieu is a throwback to the days when gowns and black ties were normal at cultural events. It’s also reminiscent of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s, when New York’s Amsterdam Avenue was a boulevard of fashion.
Whenever Dallas attended Barrymore Award ceremonies in Philadelphia, it seemed that many members of other theater organizations looked right through him. Hardly anyone spoke with him. This seemed not to be related to race, but to the fact that he was from an older generation and not a member of the “club.” But Dallas said he liked being solitary for long stretches of time: “That’s when I can focus on new ideas, on my writing and on the curriculum of my school.”
“In New York City, I can’t go very far without running into actor friends, and we get something to eat or drink. But when I’m in Philly, some people recognize me and stare, or they ask me about Freedom, but they allow me my space, so I am more solitary. That’s not a bad thing. It’s like Hollywood people who buy a ranch in Wyoming where they can go to be alone. Or like James Baldwin, who was a celebrity in the United States but when he was home at St. Paul de Vence he was accepted without fuss.”
When Dallas talks about Baldwin he speaks as a close friend of the preacher-turned-author and black activist. Baldwin would stay at Dallas’s Philadelphia apartment, but Walter did not publicize that fact. “Once an acting student of mine was having problems doing a scene from a Baldwin play, so I asked the student to come to my place and run lines. Jimmy was waiting in the next room as I asked the student to walk away from me as he did his lines, then turn around. You should have seen his face when he saw Jimmy standing there.
“Baldwin and I would hang out at Apropos on South Broad Street, drinking Johnnie Walker Black, which was his drink of choice. I directed a reading of Jimmy’s The Welcome Table at Lincoln Center, then staged it for Ruby Dee at the University of the Arts. Jimmy was weak and couldn’t finish the script. He told me that he trusted me to complete it.” Baldwin died in 1987 and Dallas spent a week in Rio assembling the script.
At Chicago’s Goodman Theater, Walter directed the world premiere of August Wilson’s Seven Guitars. Of his work on this play, Newsweek reported, “Dallas leads a superb cast in an ensemble performance that raises sincerity to a force of shattering power.” Vincent Canby in the New York Times said that the Broadway production, without Dallas, was inferior to his staging at the Goodman.
When Walter directed the pre-Broadway production of Wilson’s Jitney at the Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, NJ, in 1997, the two men appeared together at a press conference. When asked what was the secret of working successfully with Wilson, Dallas answered: “I don’t ask him a lot of questions. I get answers by just getting to know him better.”
As Dallas directed Jitney, he made a significant addition to the script. As he tells it, “There was a point in the play where a costume change was taking more time than we anticipated. The men working at the jitney station learned of the death of their boss. The very next scene had them returning from the funeral in suits, dress shoes and ties. August didn’t want to write a scene to cover that. He asked if I could think of anything.
“I told him about a time when I was a child that our neighbor from across the street, Mrs. Jones, was seen coming toward our house in a black dress with a black veil covering her face. Most of our neighbors would enter the house via the back door, so you could see them as they passed the windows on the side of the house as they walked towards the back yard. Well, she was seen walking to the back dressed in black, but she never came into the house. After a while, my cousin went out back to see where she was. My cousin’s brother was in the yard picking figs and said that he hadn’t seen her. Then the phone rang. It was our neighbor across the street calling to let us know that Mrs. Jones had passed away the night before! So I created a scene where a woman in all black and a veil, comes to the window of the closed jitney station and looks in for a moment. It was an eerie moment that really worked well for us. August loved it and kept it in the show.”
Dallas directed successful productions of Wilson’s Two Trains Running and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at the Philadelphia Drama Guild, but he directed only one Wilson play, Jitney, for Freedom, at the Annenberg Center’s Zellerbach Theater. He could not do more Wilson for Freedom because the playwright insisted on casting his favorite actors from New York, which would add significant cost for their salaries and for housing them in Philadelphia.
Dallas enjoyed telling me a Joseph Papp anecdote: “Once Joe asked me to direct a reading of The Forbidden City at the Public Theater. Gloria Foster and Danny Glover were to read the lead roles. We were to meet at noon, rehearse for four hours and then read before an audience at 5 pm. Danny was a no-show. So Papp asked me who I would like to replace Danny. Half-facetiously I answered, `James Earl Jones.’ Joe sang out, `Get James Earl Jones on the phone!’ Six secretaries scrambled. Five minutes later, `He’s in London.’ Joe asked again, and not quite as facetiously I bleated, `Morgan Freeman.’ `Get Morgan Freeman on the phone!’ The sound of twelve high heel shoes scampering down the hall. `He’s on his boat, but he can do it. He’s on his way.’ Morgan showed up at 4:45, fifteen minutes before curtain, in his sailing outfit. I quickly told him what the play was about, where to sit, and we opened the house. He hated the play, but he was awesome. By the way, I needed a sax player for the reading and was able to get Dexter Gordon.”
This was a case where Dallas’ musical background and his friendships with musicians were helpful. Walter personally writes some of the songs in his musical productions.
For his production of Having Our Say at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, Dallas received a 1997 NAACP Theater Award nomination for Best Director. His off-Broadway production of Moms won an Obie Award for its star, Clarice Taylor. He also directed at Sundance, the O’Neill and the Public Theater.
Playwright Lydia R. Diamond in 2005 adapted Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, which is the story of a young black girl who wishes for blue eyes, as the “pretty” white girls have. Dallas directed it in Philadelphia and in San Francisco and he revealed his unique approach.
“I hadn’t read the novel when I was offered the play, and I decided to read the script first. If you know the novel when you read an adaptation, the script might not be up to snuff but you’re filling in things from the book. Without the novel as filler, I was looking at the play as a play, and it really sang — deceptively simple on one level and very powerful.”
“I said I wanted to do it with no sets, no props, almost a bare stage, and make it purely about telling the story rather than showing it,” he says. “At Steppenwolf, they told it and showed it very well with lots of sets, props, tables, houses, all kinds of things onstage. My style tends to be more cinematic. This play seemed to me to need that approach to images and shifting places without that break that says, ‘Now we’re moving the furniture.’ It seemed to want to flow like a movie, so we couldn’t stop to change the chairs.
“For example, there’s a scene where one of the girls knocks a freshly baked blueberry pie off a table. Well, if you have a table, you’ve got to have the pie, and then you’ve got to have this other thing. So let’s have nothing. It’s all done with lighting. The lights give us the spilled blueberries on the floor and on the girls’ legs. And the sounds will be generated by the way the girls’ bodies move when it hits. Their physical reactions let us know the exact nanosecond that pie hits the floor and what it sounds like. If it’s a muffled sound, you don’t jump so high. It’s pure theater.”
The largest financial contributor to Freedom Theater in recent years has been Derek Keith Hargreaves, the classmate of Dallas’ from Yale who was elected chair of Freedom’s board. “He is white and British, and he was an economics major, but we became best friends in the 1970s,” says Dallas. “Now he’s chief economist at JP Morgan and active in the arts.” This raises the issue of whether blacks donate enough money to their own theater:
“Blacks give a lot to black churches,” Dallas observed. “With heightened awareness, they’ll give to theater. We have to get the word out. People don’t know enough about all the things we do. An example: A North Philadelphia student was found murdered. We created a play for children called Safety Street and performed it in the community, about how to navigate the streets and the performers were our own school students.”
But financial support was meager. Some board members failed to meet monetary responsibilities and stopped coming to meetings when things got rough. A board of twenty dwindled to five.
Dallas was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2005 and underwent surgery. He spoke at the memorial service that year for August Wilson, who died of liver cancer, and revealed his own illness. “Seven guys came up to me, and I’ve been counseling them since then,” he said. “It became a cause.”
Dallas left Philadelphia to become a resident faculty member at the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland. He said “I’m a director, I’m a playwright, I’m a musician and recently I’ve become a photographer. I play a couple of instruments. I teach. Life is full, and exciting. I’ve lived a charmed life.”
Then he was stricken with pancreatic cancer. He was in hospice and died peacefully at the age of 73.
Below, photos of Dallas.
