Race is a complicating factor for Boston Conservatory actress
She sees Broadway diversity but challenges closer to home
Stephanie Umoh and her roommate Anich D'Jae have a lot in common.
They're both seniors at the Boston Conservatory, studying musical theater. They're both from Texas. Umoh is biracial, D'Jae African-American. They're both crazy about Oprah and share the fantasy that she'll discover them one day and offer them a shortcut to fame.
And recently they both starred in the Conservatory's big spring production. They played prostitutes in "The Life," a jazzy, edgy Tony Award-winning musical about Times Square hookers, hustlers, and scammers.
Umoh, 22, played Queen, in love with one pimp and tyrannized by another. D'Jae, 21, was her friend Sonja, tired of servicing three dozen johns a week. They live in a world with "used-up rubbers on the ground," soliciting "horny freaks" by hawking their wares.
By all accounts, the show was a hit. The pair sang masterful solos, loved their roles, and got standing ovations. They were able to act alongside their good friend and classmate Nic Rowe, who played one of the pimps, and their mothers flew in to see the show.
Still, it was not quite what they expected in answer to complaints from some students that there weren't enough Conservatory productions featuring African-Americans.
"Of all the plays about black people," Umoh remembers thinking, "this is the one you pick?"
Like so much else about her senior year, Umoh's triumph in "The Life" made her think hard about the particular challenges she'll face in a career that's challenging for everyone.
While she has plenty of talent, she has come to see she arrived from her suburban Dallas high school with far less training than many of her classmates.
And Umoh, who has a white mother and a Nigerian-born father, has keenly felt her racial identity at the Conservatory.
There was not a single black face in the theater class immediately ahead of hers, and only two African-Americans in her own — D'Jae and Rowe — as well as one other biracial boy.
She and D'Jae bonded the day Umoh noticed her classmate wearing a Texas Longhorns T-shirt. The two and Nic soon became a trio, even sharing an apartment their sophomore year. "We're brothers and sisters," says D'Jae. "I'm the baby, Stephanie's the middle child, Nic's the older brother. ... It's basically like the 'Cosby' kids come to life."
As she approaches graduation, Umoh is quick to say what a "privilege" it's been to attend the Conservatory. She heaps praise on the administrators and her teachers.
Still, it has not always been easy to be a minority student at an overwhelmingly white college. An estimated 10 percent of the students in the theater division are black, Latino, or Asian, according to the program's director, Neil Donohoe. And only one of the 41 faculty members — a tap-dance teacher — is African-American.
Donohoe says in the last four years he has "made a strong point of trying to attract and entice diversity to the program." There are now between four and seven black students in each class of 46 to 68 students, and more Latinos and Asians, he says.
Umoh notices the difference, adding, wryly: "Now you can count the number on both hands and not just one hand."
Yet over the years there have been incidents that have made her uncomfortable — moments when she says she felt "singled out and uncastable." The times during workshops, for example, when she'd choose something other than "your stereotypical black girl song ... and sometimes the response or advice given back is, 'How about some Motown, or some Dionne Warwick?'"Or, "Can you be more belty?"
"People expect you to sound like every other black girl," says Umoh. "But it's not how I learned to sing, and it's not how I sing."
Then there was the difficulty of landing roles in productions at the Conservatory, which mounts four mainstage shows every year. A Conservatory spokesperson says the school does not keep records of which students auditioned for plays or were cast in them, but D'Jae contends that African-American, Hispanic, and Asian students "weren't getting the amount of performance time that they needed, that they deserved."
She includes herself and Umoh in that category. "We got the hint," says D'Jae, a mince-no-words student with rapid-fire comic timing.
Yet they turned setback into opportunity. The two started auditioning for professional shows in Boston, to great success. Umoh starred as Sarah in "Ragtime" at the New Repertory Theater; and SpeakEasy Stage Company's "The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin," among other productions. D'Jae got noticed in "Bubbly Black Girl," too, and was also cast in SpeakEasy Stage's "Caroline, or Change" and "Zanna, Don't."
Donohoe maintains that one reason they weren't cast in more school shows is that they were underclassmen. "There are a lot of students here, whatever their race, who don't get into things until they are closer to their senior year," he says. "It's just the nature of the [theater] division."
Umoh did star in "Lucky Duck" in her junior year at the Conservatory. "The main reason she has not been in more than that is that she has been very busy professionally on the outside," says Donohoe.
Umoh is reluctant to speculate about why she's only appeared in two of the Conservatory's 16 mainstage productions in the last four years. "I'm optimistic," she says. "I like to see the good in things before the bad." D'Jae, she suspects, laughing, "is a little more in tune with reality."
A controversial choice
For a production by undergraduates, "The Life" was dazzling. It was pulsating and titillating; it had pathos and pain and humanity. Still, to some students it was also a disconcerting reality check — a glimpse at what they fear may be the kinds of roles they're likely to get should they be among the lucky few to make it as professional actors.
"I felt the play showcased everyone very well — myself, Nic, Stephanie, the other African-Americans," says D’Jae, who brought the house down with her rendition of a song called "The Oldest Profession." "But I think that [by picking] a play with pimps and prostitutes, unintentionally a message was sent."
Even the director was taken aback when Donohoe first approached her about doing the show.
"I thought, 'Why are they calling me?'" says Jacqui Parker, an acclaimed local actress and playwright, who is African-American. "Why the hell would I want to direct a play about pimps and whores? It couldn't get more negative than that."
Acknowledging that the show "was a bit of a risk to us," Donohoe defended it as a nuanced play "revealing a human truth." It was less about sex and prostitution, he said, than about friendship and bonding, "about women trying to emancipate themselves from men trying to subjugate and exploit them."
Parker agreed to direct it after falling in love with Cy Coleman's music and seeing an opportunity to cast minority students in strong roles. "I said to the school, please make sure all the African-Americans come out," she explains. "Those students of color deserve a platform to show off their talents, as long as they can handle the songs."
She also saw it as an opportunity to "put a human face" on prostitution, since the subject matter was close to her heart: a childhood girlfriend grew up to be a pimp in Boston's combat zone. Parker tracked her down and brought her to the Conservatory to speak to the actors. "We used it as a reference point whenever they would shake a butt and forget what was behind that shake," Parker says. "I would say, 'Remember, you are playing a human life.'"
"It was very eye-opening," says Umoh. "We're very lucky to have had Jacqui as director. She put a soul on it." Donohoe says the show opened up "a very, very healthy conversation about the presentation of controversial material" — about onstage nudity, and whether the play was "unfairly representing the African-American population."
D'Jae, who advocated for a show that would highlight minority student talent, has mixed feelings. "It's still a black story, but did you notice who gets killed in the end?" she says, pointedly. "The blacks. The white people go on to become movie stars. Thanks, Boston Conservatory."
Signs of progress
Like many of her fellow musical theater students, Stephanie Umoh has her sights on New York after graduation. And if she looks at the marquees on Broadway right now, she'd have reason to be optimistic.
Theaters are a lot more relaxed about nontraditional casting than they were just 17 years ago when critics were alarmed by a 1991 off-Broadway production of "Pygmalion" that cast a black Colonel Pickering, Henry Higgins's sidekick.
"Opportunities are growing, in my opinion," says Rachel Hoffman, a casting director at Telsey + Company, a major New York casting agency. "I think there is a trend, somewhat, toward nontraditional casting and more and more directors and producers and creative teams seem to be open to that idea."
Right now an all-black production of Tennessee Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" is a hit on Broadway. An all-black rock musical, "Passing Strange," drew rave reviews. And multiracial casts are prominent in such longstanding hits as "Rent," "Avenue Q," "The Lion King," and "Hairspray."
"It is changing. A lot," maintains Umoh. She recites the names of African-American actresses in prominent Broadway roles, and her list is long. There's Anika Noni Rose in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," LaChanze in "The Color Purple," Phylicia Rashad in "A Raisin in the Sun," Heather Headley in "Aida," Brenda Braxton in "Chicago."
And "Audra of course," she adds, referring to her idol, the Tony Award-winning singer and actress Audra McDonald, whom she is frequently told she resembles. She met McDonald during her freshman year, when she and D'Jae traveled to Schenectady, N.Y., for one of her concerts, and lingered at the stage door until McDonald came out.
"We told her we were students at the Conservatory and she said, 'Be yourselves, in whatever you do.'" Umoh recalls. "She's such a beautiful person. She's been very inspiring to me."
But perhaps nothing has been more inspiring to Umoh, D'Jae, and Rowe than seeing "The Color Purple" during their sophomore year. Afterward, they waited by the stage door for an autograph from the show's star, LaChanze, and were spotted by the actress' sister, who invited them backstage. As it happened, the cast was celebrating the show's 100th performance that night.
"There was such a sense of unity and community," says Rowe. "You could tell they were really proud of where they were."
Yet even as more roles are opening up to them, Umoh and her classmates have been warned that the theater world is by no means colorblind.
"We'd be foolish to convince ourselves that African-American actors have the same opportunities as Caucasian actors," says Craig Gartner, a Los Angeles talent agent and Conservatory graduate.
"I know that for many people, I am a black girl before I am Stephanie," Umoh concedes. "Being black, you can't really hide that. When I walk into an audition, I'm a black actress. I'm already categorized."
Leading the way
There's a musical that played off-Broadway in 2005 that wasn't as big a success as "The Color Purple," but which D'Jae felt had a compelling story to tell, too.
It's called &"Dessa Rose," and even though New Rep, a professional company, had it on its 2008 schedule, D'Jae wanted to direct it herself. And she wanted to cast Stephanie Umoh and Nic Rowe as two of the leads. She persuaded the Conservatory to put on the show in its small Zack Box theater. The schedule was grueling: No sooner did "The Life" finish up earlier this month then Umoh and company had to begin rehearsing "Dessa Rose."
Here, too, Umoh played something of a familiar type — the title character, a pregnant former slave who befriends a white woman who harbors runaways. The songs, by the same team that wrote "Ragtime," evoke gospel, spirituals, and folk tunes.
Last week D'Jae was proud to watch a diverse cast fill the stage on opening night. Not only, she said, because the play honored both characters' stories, but because her elderly grandmother — "a lady from the South" and one of 16 children, not unlike Dessa Rose — had flown in to see the show, and loved it.
"I sat back and counted the number of African-Americans," D'Jae reported afterward, "and I hadn't seen that number in the Zack Box before, unless they were in the audience. I definitely feel triumphant, in a way."
So did Umoh. Only this time, she's the one asking the hard question. "Once the three of us are gone and she's not directing anymore, who knows when the next black show will be," she mused. "Or when the next student will step up."
Linda Matchan can be reached at matchan@globe.com
