Theater pair reflect on decade of work bringing diversity of voices to Eugene stages

The play “Intimate Apparel” is about Esther, a lonely Black seamstress in turn-of-the-century New York City, who sews lingerie for wealthy Manhattan clients and tries to find a place in the world. 

“Intimate Apparel” is written by Lynn Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and acclaimed playwright of Black, working-class stories. But in Eugene, the play — currently running until June 21 at the Very Little Theatre — is more than a production of a work by an award-winning writer.

It also marks the informal end of a creative partnership between two local theater professionals, Carol Dennis and Stanley Coleman.

Nearly a decade ago, the two founded Minority Voices Theatre — an affiliate group of the Very Little Theatre — that strived to bring more work from underrepresented voices to the VLT main stage, including plays like “Intimate Apparel.”

The company also has hosted monologue nights for transgender and nonbinary performers, helped fund theater rentals for local writers to stage their work, and produced plays in other languages, including one, “La Gringa,” put on entirely in Spanish. 

In a firmly liberal city like Eugene, it can be easy to think that arts from all walks of life are welcome and readily available. But to Dennis and Coleman, who both moved to Eugene decades ago in search of progressive homes, the work has to be actively fought for to truly be done at all. 

“The move was to try to stop helping liberal white Eugene feel like they’re doing their part, when they’re not,” Dennis said. 

‘I think now is the time’ 

Dennis, a 73-year-old nonbinary lesbian originally from Miami, came to Eugene in 1990 after work in stage managing and event coordination in New York City and Los Angeles, which took her behind the scenes for the 1984 Olympic Games and Disneyland’s 30th anniversary. She had heard from her girlfriend that Eugene was a haven for lesbians, just like San Francisco was for gay men. That retreat was needed for Dennis, who was grieving after friends died en masse from the global HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Carrying an Actors Equity card, Dennis started dropping resumés around town in what was a lean time for Eugene theater, and didn’t find much work. She decided to start Little Apple Productions, which put on plays by and about women, from 1993 to 2000.

Coleman, 75, moved to Eugene in 2008 with his spouse, Bill Winkley. He first fell in love with performance as a child in Eunice, Louisiana, where he would stage plays with Ken and Barbie dolls and sing in operettas in church.

In high school theater, he performed in the play “Day of Absence” by Douglas Turner Ward, about a day in a small Southern town where all of the Black people had disappeared. The twist is that it’s a reverse minstrel show, played by a cast of Black actors in whiteface. “It was a clown show,” he said. “It was wonderful.” 

That taste for radical, irreverent Black theater followed him into college, where he started at his local Louisiana State University branch and wasn’t “getting great parts” at the predominantly white college. He transferred to Dillard University, a historically Black college in New Orleans. There, he got involved with the Dashiki Project Theatre, an all-Black theater company formed in 1968 with a taste to accurately represent Black lives on stage, and produce works directly challenging racism in their southern environment. From there, he had a career as an academic, teaching, directing and acting across the years. 

Coleman and Dennis met via the local theater community, and bonded in particular over an email thread of local directors. Coleman had been left off of the thread on a few occasions, Dennis said, and she was quick to chime in and add him back. They found they had a shared taste for theater that “the audience is going to chew on,” as she described it, and had talked here and there about doing something together one day.

When Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in November 2016, Dennis called Coleman: “I think now is the time.” The two officially launched the company on Jan. 1, 2017, and later that year it formally joined VLT.

“We expanded to go beyond just African American,” Coleman said. “We wanted to reach the Hispanic community, we wanted to reach the Asian community, the gay community, the trans community.”

In its first year, productions included a staged reading of “Having Our Say: the Delany Sister’s First 100 Years,” about a sister pair of Black civil rights pioneers, the literary historical lesbian romance “Vita & Virginia” and “Now I Am Your Neighbor,” where local playwright Nancy Hopps wove together true stories from Lane County immigrants in the wake of the 2017 order to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.  

More recently, it’s been “BlueJay’s Canoe,” a take on modern Native life co-written by Theresa May and Marta Lu Clifford and staged last fall with May and Clifford’s illioo Native Theatre, as well as this spring’s “Intimate Apparel.” 

“I thought the same thing that [Dennis] thought: We’re never going to get stories like this story told on these stages, and we have people here in this community who are not represented on these stages,” Coleman said. “I thought, well, this is a good start. This is a good opportunity to start looking at some of the pieces. We were doing pieces that people had never really heard about, had not read, had not seen, unless they’d gone to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.”

More than programming

A few years back, Dennis read a review of a local theater production about Black life that ended with a sentiment that she brought to Coleman: “The last line was, ‘When will we stop doing plays about minority community lives for white audiences?’” 

Thinking of who was actually in the room led them to their 2018 Spanish-language production of “La Gringa” by Carmen Rivera. Most of the audience was made up of native Spanish speakers, Dennis recalled, but that didn’t stop a few requests for English additions.

“We had so many people from VLT say, ‘But I want to come. Isn’t it going to be translated? Can’t you have a …’ No,” she said. “This is your turn to come and be immersed in a different culture.”

Thinking outside of the white theatergoing audience also pushed the two of them to go beyond programming works focused on minority stories to direct funding. That took the form of splitting their box office revenue 50/50 with community organizations, and sponsoring rent for some productions in VLT’s Stage Left theater. 

Concrete investment in a production tied to a local community filled the house with specific audiences where just programming titles hadn’t before. One evening done in collaboration with the gay and lesbian organization TransPonder, both a staged reading of the 1998 play “Transfigurations,” about transgender Oregonians, and the first “Trans Monologues,” an evening of local monologues from transgender and nonbinary performers. 

Now, Coleman is directing “Intimate Apparel,” and isn’t sure what the future holds for his place in Minority Voices Theatre. But the hope is to keep the company going at a time when both founders say its mission is vital and, crucially, unfinished. “I even told Carol one time, you know, there was a time when I didn’t feel welcome here in this theater,” Coleman said. “And I’m not sure that’s disappeared.” 

After “Intimate Apparel,” Dennis is stepping back from Minority Voices Theatre. The mission of the project has been personal: their only models for nonbinary identity as a child were Mary Martin playing Peter Pan or Anybodys, the tomboy character in “West Side Story.” That led to disillusionment about having a place in the world, which Dennis sees as especially relevant amid the current presidential administration’s policies restricting gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary children. 

“I didn’t see myself, so suicide was my first option. I don’t want to live in that world,” Dennis said. “I want people to be able to see their stories, so that they know that they belong somewhere. I didn’t belong anywhere for a very long time.”

How to see ‘Intimate Apparel’ 

“Intimate Apparel” runs at the Very Little Theatre through June 21, with performances at 7:30 p.m. on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and at 2 p.m. on Sundays. The Very Little Theatre is at 2350 Hilyard St., Eugene.

Tickets are available online, at $21 for adults and $15 for students on Thursdays and $26 for adults and $20 for students on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.