Jeffrey Nickelson likes to say his Shadow Theatre was a company launched on love. Good thing, because it sure wasn’t created by cash.
Nickelson started Shadow in 1997 while living in a subsidized apartment he scored only by lying that he made $13,000 a year. It’s not that he made too much to qualify – he didn’t make enough.
He landed a place to play inside the Emerson Center, where his first office was a room built to be a closet, his stage the size of a postage stamp and his only dressing room the fire escape.
But even after nine years and 32 often groundbreaking productions that have filled a crucial niche in Denver’s cultural community, keeping Shadow alive remains a struggle. Last June, on opening night of its most significant undertaking to date, the Pulitzer-winning “Top Dog/Underdog,” the company had minus $1,500 in the bank.
Nickelson has been on the edge so many times, he could sleep soundly on a high-wire.
“He puts his passion and commitment and money right on the line, every single time,” said longtime advisory board member Reynelda Muse.
Theater companies come and go, but Nickelson just can’t let Shadow go. Not when it’s Colorado’s only full-time black theater. There’s something about having that word – only – attached to your name that gives you a greater sense of purpose.
“It’s bold humility,” Nickelson said. “Being bold in the action and humble in what you have to do to make it go.”
Though Shadow has been on a roll of late, it still collects more awards than audiences. It recently snared excellence-in-the-arts nods from the Denver mayor and Arvada Festivals Commission, and “Top Dog” just won the 2005 Denver Post Ovation Award for best drama.
But Shadow’s numbers are as black and white as … well, red and green: Colorado’s only black theater company has a subscription base that is 70 percent white.
How is it that those numbers aren’t 70 percent black? Board member Fred Lewis says look no further than Nickelson.
“Here’s a guy from the ghettos of Philadelphia who never even saw a play until he starred in one at the age of 22,” said Lewis. “Jeffrey never had the opportunity to delve into that part of culture as a child, just as many young black kids today haven’t been exposed to theater.”
No, when Nickelson was a kid, he was exposed to bricks and sticks with protruding nails. By the 10th grade, tired of navigating another new gang every four blocks, he dropped out and got out. Six months later he earned his equivalency
degree and at 16, he enrolled at Texas College. At 18, he began a 10-year career in the Air Force that landed him at Aurora’s Lowry Air Force Base in 1974.
Not exactly the prototype of a guy who would not only graduate from the Denver Center’s National Theatre Conservatory master’s program, but found his own theater company.
“I do think black people have been less culturized at going to the theater,” said Nickelson, who turns 50 this month. “I understand. I didn’t go to theater as a child. I mean, when you’ve been excluded for so long, why the heck do you want to go see anything that excludes you?”
Shadow drew 4,500 people to its four-show 2004 season, ranking 37th among the state’s theater companies. According to the 2000 census, there were 61,649 blacks in Denver County, or 11.3 percent of the population. Of them, fewer than 1,000 attended a Shadow production.
Something doesn’t add up.
“If you are an educated African-American person in this town, it seems almost unconscionable not to be a member of this organization,” said Nickelson. “Even if you are not wanting to see the shows, I still think it’s important that you support the organization. I think that 100 percent.”
Muse, a KCNC-Channel 4 reporter and anchor for 30 years, “agrees completely.”
“There is no excuse for any African-American adult in Denver not to be supporting him, because he’s building an institution here,” said Muse.
Nickelson’s immediate goal: “To design the type of work that will appeal to the black community who might not ordinarily go to theater,” he said, “and to convince those who have no interest in theater they still have an obligation to support our mission.”
Early survival training
Nickelson’s mission as a kid was simply to survive. If anyone had told him he would one day run a theater, “I would say they are out of their mind,” said the youngest of seven siblings. His family was the second to move into a previously white neighborhood during the suburban “white flight” of the 1960s. Jeffrey was a sensitive kid who blanched at violence, yet he saw plenty. Within this environment, “the idea of art was just not ever even a notion.”
While stationed at Lowry in 1978, a buddy talked Nickelson into auditioning for a play at the late Denver Black Arts Company. He agreed for one reason – “It was fun to be around so many women.” He was cast as the lead. Six years later, he won the U.S. Air Force’s worldwide talent competition for drama. In 1990, at age 34, he became only the second black student ever accepted into the NTC’s graduate program.
Putting this ghetto kid into master’s classes was beyond daunting – “easily the hardest thing I had ever done,” he said. “It was a real challenge to learn this other world, but fortunately I embraced it. The conservatory certainly expanded who I was as an artist. But I’ve always been hungry. I’m dangerous to give information to.”
The idea of Shadow was born in 1997 at Goodfriends restaurant, where a group of friends bemoaned the lack of opportunities for black actors. “Let’s create our own place,” Nickelson said. By then he had experience in the military and as an accountant, security officer and janitor – “all great prerequisites to be a producer,” he said.
The first person he approached was Muse, and the adopted sister he calls “Baby Girl” gave him his first $500.
“I did it because I believe in Jeffrey,” said Muse, who had met Nickelson in 1990. He was staging a play at the Changing Scene and Muse wanted to learn all about what happens behind the scenes. He made this well-known TV personality his novice stage manager. “I really got a chance to see what a brilliant person he was,” she said, “and I decided right then and there that I would attach myself to that brilliance.”
Nickelson chose the name Shadow for both the Bert Andrews photo book “In the Shadow of the Great White Way,” and the St. Francis of Assisi prayer, “Where there are shadows, we may bring light.”
“A shadow is so many different things,” Nickelson said. “It’s mysterious. It brings comfort when it’s hot. I didn’t think of it in terms of black and white so much as shades of gray, where you can’t really be sure of anything. For theater, it felt right.”
Shadow’s mission would be to perform plays that “speak to the heart of the condition” – all shades. His first production was the incendiary “Immortal Thoughts,” about Jewish and African-American relations. The canon includes an array of playwrights: Edward Albee (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”), Carlysle Brown (“The African Company Presents Richard III”), Anton Chekhov (“Evils of Tobacco”), Pearl Cleage (“Bourbon at the Border”) and Athol Fugard (“Blood Knot”).
On Friday, Shadow opens “Visions,” an evening of staged readings honoring the late August Wilson, at the University of Denver’s Cable Center.
For actors, Shadow has meant employment and an artistic home. For audiences, the opportunity to explore what binds rather than separates humanity. “It has meant the possibility of building bridges where whites and blacks can be equally comfortable,” Lewis said.
Given how important it is for any minority to see their own stories brought to life, Nickelson ponders why more black adults haven’t signed up for a $100 Shadow subscription.
“I have to be a little bit bold and take a risk here,” he said. “I don’t mean this in any harmful way, but there are people who have come from poverty-stricken backgrounds, and once they have been educated and they can generate large incomes, sometimes the last thing in the world they want is to be reminded of where they came from.
“But this is about theater and its use in healing, and in communicating to people of all cultures, ” he added. “So I keep saying, ‘Well then why aren’t they embracing this organization?”‘
Muse cannot imagine Denver without Shadow, without even one company regularly communicating the black experience. “We would be diminished,” she said.
To survive, Nickelson knows he needs more corporate support, a better permanent venue, and a stable bottom line. He’s taken a decade-long vow of poverty for his dream, making as little as $16,000 a year doing so. He lost his mother two weeks before his first production opened, his dad three weeks after the last. A brother and a sister in between. It cannot always be this hard.
“James Baldwin once said, ‘Anyone who lives in poverty knows how terribly expensive it is to be poor,”‘ Nickelson said. “I believe you have rich churches and poor churches. I want my church to be somewhere in-between.”
In the meantime, it’s back to the edge, a place Nickelson knows so well. “There is a Patrick Overton quote,” Muse said, “that always makes me think of Jeffrey: ‘When you come to the edge of all the light you have, and must take a step into the darkness of the unknown, either there will be something solid for you to stand on, or, you will fly.’
“Jeffrey knows how to fly.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
