I really wanted to be an actor, says Reggie Montgomery who is currently directing Suzzanne Douglas in Lady Day at the Emerson Bar and Grill,at the George Street Playhouse (October 2000). But, Montgomery also could have gone down a different entertainment route. He was the first African-American to be trained and hired as a clown for Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. Learning to be funny and making people laugh was not a bad first step, although an unusual one, for a young black man back in 1970 with his hopes pinned on a very different kind of theatrical career.
The gig with the circus and the job of making people laugh lasted a full year. It was enough. But neither training at regular college, clown college nor studying acting and directing with the greatest teachers in the world can prepare someone for what happened on September 11th, also the first day of rehearsal for Lady Day...
On the morning that Montgomery was on route by train from New York to New Brunswick, he and his fellow riders received the terrifying news of the "Attack on America." Looking out the window, he said he could see the smoke coming from the twin towers. Carrying that catastrophic event with him to rehearsal was difficult enough, but the next day brought another devastating shock. He was informed that his long time dear friend and fellow actor Tommy Hollis had been found in his apartment, dead at 47. Hollis' body, he said, had gone undiscovered for days. Hollis lived alone and suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure. Hollis had appeared with Montgomery in The Colored Museum but was also lauded for his performances on Broadway in August Wilson's plays. They were close friends.
As I suspected when talking to Montgomery, following a less traumatically-punctuated rehearsal of Lady Day at the Emerson Bar and Grill, there has been little need or motivation of late for him to call on his reserves to be funny. He admits saying to the stage manager recently; "I don't know how I can do this." I remind Montgomery of a vivid and wonderful memory I have of him playing one of a pair of preening pimps at the Crossroads Theater in 1989. It was the world premiere of George C. Wolfe's Spunk. In it, Montgomery is seen standing on a corner in 1930s Harlem surveying the scene and wearing a canary-yellow zoot suit ("it was green," he corrects me) -- a lasting impression. He's pleased.
While Montgomery openly shares his feelings of depression, he says that rehearsals have also been affected in a productive way. Neither he nor Douglas is into denial, and they proceed to talk about the things that need to be talked about. "Thank God, I have this play to work on to direct my energy," he says commenting on how Holiday's life was so full of denial and focused on escape through the use of heroin.
Montgomery is eager to move on, carry on and empower Lady Day... with all the creative artistry he can muster. Although Montgomery has worked with Douglas ("it seems like one hundred years ago") as actors in an Actors Studio production of The Obeah Man (a musical version of Moliere's The Doctor in Spite of Himself), it was only after Montgomery had directed a recent workshop production of a new musical, Comfortable Shoes, that his name was mentioned to George Street's artistic director David Saint as someone who could direct Lady Day...
"It is great because I feel like the new kid on the block, but I am also excited because Douglas, a terrific actor, has such respect for me."
"Especially being of color," I am always figuring out a way to survive in the world and in the theater," says Montgomery. "I grew up in Tallahassee, Florida in the 50s where people were still being lynched." With his parents high school teachers and his father soon to become a football coach at Florida A & M, Montgomery says he knew "no one was going to harm us, referring to his two sisters." While Montgomery played football in high school to please his Dad, he says, "I was always about theater." His love of theater started in childhood when his family recognized little Reggie had a serious speech impediment, serious enough to require surgery. Through the persistence of an aunt, six-year-old Reggie was enrolled in a theater program at A & M. run by Randolph Edmunds, noted for being the father of black theater.
"Not to digress," says Montgomery, about the program in which he stayed for eight years, gaining confidence and perfecting his speech ("almost too much," he adds with a chuckle), but Edmunds was the first of the giants I was privileged to work with. Others included Lee Strassberg, Paul Baker from the Dallas Theater Center and Jack Jackson from the Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles.
When the program ended, Montgomery had entered high school. It didn't take him long, and with his father's blessing ("That's good. Because you really aren't very good at football"), decided that he would rather be rehearsing in a high school production of A Raisin in the Sun than running for a touchdown.
After graduating from Florida's A & M College in 1970 with a BS degree, Montgomery decided to pursue his love for theater. He was accepted as an apprentice at the Asolo Theater in Sarasota. It was there that a scout from Ringling Bros. saw the nimble actor on stage in a bit part in The Visit and made the offer to send him to train for six weeks at the then brand-new Clown College. It was not what the family that had just paid for four years of college wanted to hear. By being billed as the first African-American clown in Ringling's history, he was on the cover of magazines. Montgomery's MA degree in acting and directing would come, however, from Trinity College, in San Antonio.
Montgomery credits the Public Theater's artistic director George C. Wolfe with commending him to other theaters as a director. "As a director you have to assume a lot of responsibility and take care of your company like your children. As an actor I was used to being taken care of," he says, very cognizant of why he and Douglas are carefully exploring the text in order for the story to move ahead without mimicry. "My main task is not to let the show appear like a cabaret, because it is so easy to fall into that trap. Holiday's life deserves so much more than people coming to hear the songs that Holiday sang."
Directing, it seems, is slowly taking over the center ring for Montgomery, who most recently staged August Wilson's The Piano Lesson at Baltimore Center Stage and a number of productions at the Hartford Stage Company. His talent as an actor (he won the Audelco Best Actor Award for his performances in the original productions of Wolfe's Spunk and The Colored Museum, at the New York Shakespeare Festival) and as a director is coming in handy working with the talented Douglas. The latter has appeared on Broadway in The Threepenny Opera, Into the Woods and A Grand Night for Singing.
Under Montgomery's direction, Douglas is preparing to recreate the temperament and musical expressiveness rather than the actual persona or vocal quality of Billie Holiday. While Douglas' critically acclaimed performance, as cancer victim Vivian Bearing, in Wit last season at George Street remains a vivid portrait in many local theatergoers' minds, representing Holiday will undoubtedly also challenge her creative resources, as well as those of Montgomery.
But what are the demands of directing a virtual one-person play, and how is Montgomery approaching them? He explains, "With Douglas it is more about exploration than deciding what's right and what's wrong. She is the kind of artist who isn't afraid to take risks and draws upon things about herself."
What does it take to re-light the flame that burned in the soul of the great jazz singer Billie Holiday? The Holiday Douglas is preparing to bring to us is the tragic singer at the end of the line. The place is Emerson's Bar and Grill in Philadelphia at midnight on a Friday in March 1959 four months before Holiday's death.
Under Montgomery's guidance and assurance and using mostly the songs, it will be quite an accomplishment for Douglas, under Montgomery's guidance, to not only utilize the wide emotional range that infused Holiday's singing, but to also discover the humor in her character. Not even Holiday can play Philadelphia without a few jokes. I have never forgotten this one: "I've been arrested all over the country, but Philly's the only place that's made me a candidate for federal housing."
Both Montgomery and Douglas want to make us feel close to the spirit of Holiday rather than to her ghost. This drama, basically a celebration of the legendary jazz singer, unfolds in songs like "When A Woman Loves A Man," "Them There Eyes," "God Bless the Child," "Livin' for You," and the others. An Off-Broadway production that starred Lonette McKee played during the 1986 season. Written by Lanie Robertson, the play attempts to also give us insights into Holiday's childhood and her debilitating marriage. The performance will include the services of pianist David Alan Bunn, who portrays Holiday's accompanist, with the saloon atmosphere created by Felix E. Cochren and costumes by Karen A. Ledger.
In the play, Holiday, the proud but defeated singer says, "They won't let me sing in New York." But, it is Holiday's triumph that Montgomery says he wants us to see. He hopes it will be apparent as Douglas uses the jazz rhythms, the penetrating lyrics and the evocative milieu to tell Holiday's story. Notwithstanding her heroin addiction, Holiday's life was filled with brave defiance, justifiable arrogance and unavoidable suffering. Yet, at the end, Montgomery reminds me, Holiday ends up able to understand why it happened to her and what she has done to herself, yet able to feel victorious. It is something we can all hang on to.
Currently residing in New York's Chelsea, Montgomery can still see smoke rising out of the destruction of the World Trade Center. He will undoubtedly continue to see scores of people walking about, who, like Holiday, are also bravely defiant. This, as they prepare to come through this test.
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