Terrence Spivey Shakes Up Our Theater Scene

Some people have the ability to change the temperature of the room. Others can change the temperature of an entire community. Theater director Terrence Spivey is one of those people.

When he arrived in Cleveland in 2003 to take over the reins of Cleveland’s legendary Black theater at Karamu House, which turned 100 last year, it was barely on anyone’s radar anymore, its glory days long past. Local theater critics rarely stopped by, rating it as just a mediocre community theater. “Karamu was living off its history a few years back,” he recalls.

Spivey changed all that, restoring its luster with exciting new productions and attracting a horde of new actors, directors and playwrights as well as encouraging others who had left to return.

Productions there became must-sees. He’s proud of all the premiers the theater presented including by local playwrights, the collaborations it forged with organizations ranging from the Cleveland Clinic to the Ingenuity Festival which raised Karamu’s profile in the greater community.

In conversation with him — and he can talk about theater for hours on end — he cites memorable production after memorable production. There was New York choreographer Otis Sallid’s Gospel! Gospel! Gospel! which premiered at Karamu in 2006 and which, says Spivey, “I had an instinct about; we built in an extra week. It was gangbusters, selling out every date.”

There was 2010’s Breast Cancer to Broadway, featuring 11 black women who had survived breast cancer. There was the introduction of serious social/political issues to its youth theater, such as Indiana playwright Nicole Kearney’s The Little Boy Who Shook Up the World: The Emmett Till Story.

“Karamu has been like a resource center over the years, a talent bank,” says Spivey. “I was proud of that, knowing a lot of the people who came through over the years have gone on to other things. I worked with a lot of younger folk and some of them had no resumes when they walked in. Then people came in and grabbed them.”

He also worked tirelessly to network outside Cleveland, attending conferences and events in the black cultural and theater community to make it aware that Karamu was still a force to be reckoned with, “re-educating people about Karamu,” he says.

“Someone asked me why Karamu lasted so long,” he says. “When I walked into that building for the first time, there was a spirit there.”

Sadly, in March the parent organization’s long-brewing financial problems came to a head. Spivey was one of 15 employees let go by new executive director Tony Sias, who took over in September 2015, as he grappled with putting the historical institution on firmly fiscal ground.

“It was probably time for me to move on, time to see what else comes my way and start creating more,” he says. “Before I could do that, I started to get calls.”

But concerns that the Texan, who came here after working in New York for many years, would leave Cleveland — and leave a big hole in the area theater scene — turned out to be baseless. The minute the news came out, says Spivey, his phone was ringing off the hook from other area theaters wanting to engage him.

So far this year, he’s directed Bootycandy, a satire about being black and gay, at convergence-continuum; political drama The Bloodless Jungle (written by one of those people he lured back into the theater, former county commissioner Peter Lawson-Jones) at Ensemble; girl gang drama Breath Boom, currently running at John Carroll University through Sun 11/13 (go here for information and tickets). On Sun 11/20 he’ll be directing a staged reading of Pearl Clague’s Freedom Summer play Bourbon at the Border at the Maltz Museum for Faye Sholiton’s Interplay Jewish Theatre.

His highest profile production this year was for one of the area’s newest theater groups, Playwrights Local. There he directed the brand-new Objectively/Reasonable: A Community Response to the Shooting of Tamir Rice to overflow audiences this summer. It will have another run in early 2017; an excerpt was performed on NPR’s Michel Martin: Going There in October; and another will be part of CPAC’s upcoming Creative Intersections event at the Nash on Thu 11/17. Tickets here. Playwrights Local is in talks to bring the play to Chicago, which has been racked with similar shootings of unarmed young black men, for a weekend.

“I’m still waiting on other stuff that hasn’t been confirmed,” he says. “Most of the things happening now are things I would have loved to do at Karamu but people had other plans.”

“I wasn’t expecting it,” he says of being let go from the institution he is passionate about. “I knew they were going through financial problems. I could see the weight on Tony’s shoulders. It was understandable because of the financial situation.”

He says the severance was largely amicable and that the door was left open for him to come back and direct more shows there.

“[Tony Sias] said, come direct something again, but I got busy,” says Spivey. “When the time comes, when the universe says it’s time. I’ve been offered stuff out of town. But there is a rock that says “Cleveland” that’s keeping me anchored. It was a leap of faith, first leaving Houston for New York, then leaving New York to come to Cleveland. This is a leap of faith too. I’m a zen type of person.”

 

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