Wilmington troupe aims to 'reclaim' Black experience at Thalian Hall

For more than a decade now, it's been a dream of Kevin Lee-Y Green to stage the musical "The Color Purple" on the main stage of downtown Wilmington's Thalian Hall.

That dream comes to fruition Thursday, Oct. 19, when "The Color Purple" opens at Thalian for a two-weekend run with Green as director and choreographer.

For Green, a University of North Carolina School of the Arts-trained dancer and choreographer who founded Wilmington's Techmoja Dance & Theatre Co. with his late mother, Donna Joyner Green, nearly 15 years ago, opening "The Color Purple" on Wilmington's biggest stage for community theater is just part of what has long been a larger goal.

"One of the things that we've always been dedicated to is creating a body of theater and dance work that tells the stories of people of color, done by people of color," Green said. "I've been working super-hard to make sure that all aspects of the storytelling are done by people of color."

For decades, Wilmington's main, so-called Black theater company was the Willis Richardson Players, which got its start in the 1970s and is named for the Wilmington native who was the first Black writer to have a show produced on Broadway. But the Willis Richardson Players haven't been active since 2019, and the troupe's longtime champion, Lela Thompson, died late last year.

Green has publicly acknowledged the debt Techmoja owes the Players, saying "theirs are the shoulders on which we stand" during curtain speeches at Thalian Hall and other venues. He said making sure the Black experience is well-represented on Wilmington's most historic stage, which marked its 165th anniversary this year, is a big responsibility.

"It's kind of like a reclamation of space," Green said.

For decades, Blacks were only allowed to sit in Thalian Hall's third-floor balcony, known as the gallery, if they were allowed in the theater at all.

"Every time I go in there," Green said, "I literally have to acknowledge the third floor. I want them to know that all that they went through was not in vain. This is for our ancestors."

Green has directed shows on the main stage at Thalian Hall before, including "Dreamgirls," in 2020 and "West Side Story" this past summer. His bona fides extend beyond the theater, as Green has won a major national grant for the creation of one of his original dance pieces and choreographed for film and TV, including a viral routine on hit Amazon Prime drama "The Summer I Turned Pretty."

This year, Green and Techmoja have had more of a presence at Thalian Hall than they've ever had, something that "came after years and years of trying to get space, fighting to get space. The tables turned after the pandemic."

"We have had, like, two shows there this year. It's great," he said. "We finally have a presence and I hope we get more."

The stage version of "The Color Purple" is based both on Alice Walker's 1982 novel and on Stephen Spielberg's 1985 movie. The Oprah Winfrey-produced musical, with book by Marsha Norman and music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray, hit Broadway in 2005, scoring 10 Tony nominations and running for over two years. (It was revived in 2015.)

With music that spans "the lexicon of black culture," Green said, including gospel, blues, ragtime and jazz, the story spans several generations of a Black family in the South from the early 1900s to the 1940s, focusing largely on the stories of Black women and how they support each other through impossibly tough times.

"Black trauma tends to be a theme that exists," Green said. "But the thing that's so beautiful about this show is how they deal with it in community. So it's like, yeah, there's all the traumatic stuff that happens, but people actually have a reckoning with it."

Because the show is so focused on the experience of Black women, Green said, he wanted to have a mostly female creative team and ended up at about 75%.

"We've got a woman set designer, a woman stage manager, a woman lighting designer, a woman hair designer," Green said.

Stage manager Lily Nicole called "The Color Purple" the rare piece that affirms the stories of Black women, and that shows them loving themselves and supporting each other.

"Our stories are being erased, so it's important that we tell stories about Black love and Black hope and Black joy," she said. "We are trying to prove we belong, and to prove that the stories we tell matter."

As for being part of a predominantly Black team putting on a show, something that's fairly rare in Wilmington, "It's something that you know instinctively needs to be done, but until you're in the midst of it you don't know how important it really is," Nicole said.

Terrill Williams, costume designer for "The Color Purple," said that when most of the creatives in a show about the Black experience are themselves people of color, that naturally finds its way into and strengthens the work.

"Sometimes, when you're more closely aligned with it, you're more willing to give yourself to it. Your reasons behind it are more personal," Williams said. "There's an understood language about how we dress, what our hair can do, what colors we can wear that people of color instinctively understand."

"Some of the women in the show, I talk to them as if I'm talking to my mom," Williams added. "The facade comes down. It's easy to act like family."

As for Green, staging "The Color Purple" has been "a labor of love, but it's also been very difficult," he said. "The last time I did the show (in 2012), I was working very closely with my mother to produce it."

That show, staged in Brunswick County, turned out to be "a debacle," Green said, because it had to compete against a version of "The Color Purple" that was running in Wilmington at the same time.

In some ways, he sees this week's show as a shot at redemption not only for him, but for his mom, who passed in 2014. He said he sees his mother in the character of Nettie, "Because she's taken away from me too soon."

"I can find so much of myself and people I know in these characters," he added, "and so it has been emotional."

Want to go?

What: "The Color Purple," with book by Marsha Norman and music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray. Presented by Techmoja Dance & Theatre Co.

When: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 19-21 and 26-28, 2 p.m. Oct. 22 and 29

Where: Thalian Hall, 310 Chestnut St., Wilmington

Details: For tickets call 910-632-2285 or go to ThalianHall.org.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Techmoja to stage The Color Purple at Thalian Hall in Wilmington NC