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It was June 2020, the height of the pandemic lockdowns, when playwright Will Power found himself in the position of moving his family to a brand, new town. Imagine. Two teenagers in tow, totally new environment, and everything is shut down. Such was the situation when this hip hop theatre innovator and verse playwright came to the city of South Pasadena. “People were really good to us – and so nice,” remembers Power. “We ended up knowing two families who lived here who connected us with other families and we were able to meet people and gather outside. People were so friendly and went out of their way to make sure we knew where to shop, where to go. And now, I would say in the last year and half, we feel a very solid sense of place and it’s good. It’s real good.”
He doesn’t deny that the first year was rough, saying “yeah, with the kids going to school online – it was crazy.” But since then, he points out the city’s Festival of Balloons on the 4th of July and Halloween as some of the fun things they are loving about South Pas and wanting to hit the Rose Parade and check out the South Pas float and The Eclectic. Each member of the family has staked out their local “spots” from Two Kids Coffee for his wife’s morning stop, to Teamorrow for his daughter’s daily boba fix, his son is hooked on The Habit, and as for Power, he enjoys the early morning peace of Garfield Park to sit and write. He truly makes the point that there is something for everyone in South Pasadena. Both kids started out at South Pas schools, but, declaring themselves artists as well, now attend California School of the Arts.
Power was living in Decatur, a town near Atlanta that he likens to South Pasadena in its vibe, when he got the call to come teach at Occidental College. After considering living at the beach, they decided to call South Pasadena home and be closer to work. The irony is that, for the moment, Power is commuting every day to Culver City where rehearsals are in full swing at the Kirk Douglas Theatre of his play “Fetch Clay, Make Man.”
Originally from San Francisco, Power spent many years in New York, beginning as a child visiting his grandparents who turned him on to theatre early on. “I spent my summers with them and we would see a show every week, you know, stand in line for the discount tickets. The first theatre show I ever saw was the original production of The Wiz if you can dig that! I mean, it was just incredible.” After that dramatic introduction, Power was hooked and his mother got him into a politically progressive children’s theatre company in San Francisco. “I saw very early the power that theatre could have to affect change or make people think about things,” he says. “We were saying things about politics, society, cultural inequities, addiction, and racism – and doing it not only in a serious way but with humor as well. So I started seeing how you can affect people with theatre, with comedy, and spark a conversation – and so that has always stayed with me and I’ve kind of been doing it ever since.”
Getting at the complexities of a question is a goal of most of Power’s work and he points to a recent piece he produced that some people loved but others hated. “That’s kind of exciting as a writer,” he says amused. “I mean I don’t want fist fights, but it was great to have people really passionately talking about what they saw on stage.”
He first put pen to paper when he was about 14 when he started writing rhyming raps and says he was always attracted to the storytelling aspect of rap. He began to expand into playwriting in high school and then at NYU. Known as one of the first verse playwrights, his work was a precursor to shows like Hamilton and in the last 18 years, he has focused more on traditional plays and musicals. “In the late 80’s I wasn’t seeing any plays that reflected what I grew up with – I grew up in a kind of poor community that was culturally rich, very vibrant – and I just didn’t see that being expressed on the American stage at that time. So that’s what I was exploring in my early work and then as I’ve gotten older, it’s become about historical plays like the one I’m doing now, “Fetch Clay, Make Man”. It’s about rediscovering these moments that have been forgotten, or characters that people don’t know about – or in the case of Muhammad Ali, he’s a well-known, iconic American figure – yet this chapter that I’m talking about in my play, most people don’t even know about it.”
Growing up in the historic Fillmore District in San Francisco, Power says Muhammad Ali was extremely revered – a hero in the black community. What he didn’t know, before researching for his play, was just how much Ali was hated and feared by many parts of American society in the 60’s. Early in his career, he was thought of as a braggart and then when he came out as a Muslim and changed his name from Cassius Clay to Ali, a lot of folks didn’t like that. But by the 70s he had become accepted and looked at as a hero, especially to a young African American boy like Power. “He was like our superhero,” he explains, “you have to remember, this is before a lot of representations of African American culture, so he was one of very few.” The other main character in the play is the actor Stepin Fetchit (born Lincoln Perry). “I learned about him from some of the elders in the community as everything to be ashamed of. He was considered a traitor to black people for doing this stereotypical, lazy, shuffling character – so that’s how I thought about those two people – Stepin as a traitor to his race who played these stereotypes to make money, and Ali as the ultimate hero.” Years later Powers was in a bookstore and a photo stopped him in his tracks – an image of Ali and Fetchit together. “It blew my mind and called into question everything I knew of these two men. How could they be friends? And the caption said that Stepin Fetchit was Ali’s secret strategist. And I was like, what?!”
He went on to discover that in fact Fetchit was the first African American millionaire in Hollywood and was actually a phenomenal actor. He had broken in with those stereotypical roles but his idea was always to go on to do other roles. But he never really got the chance due to the racism, particularly in Hollywood at that time, which kept him typecast. There really was no room for black actors to do anything of substance until Sidney Poitier finally broke through. But Power found out that Fetchit indeed tried to at least infuse his characters with as much humanity and complexity that he could. It turns out that Ali brought Fetchit on because he knew the secrets of the boxer Jack Johnson – specifically the punch Ali used to knock out Sonny Liston. He learned it from Fetchit!
“That sent me on a course – there’s a play here somewhere! I got a commission from the McCarter Theatre in New Jersey and so I read and did a lot of research at Princeton – I spoke to scholars, I found people who knew Ali well. I got some travel grants and thoroughly researched this for a couple of years before I even started to write it.” He tells us the piece is a lot of fun, has a lot of humor, but also delves into the idea of who you are in your public presentation and who you are behind closed doors. “All of us present a side to the public,” he says, “which usually is a part of us, truthfully, but not the whole part.” It is a five person play with Ali and Fetchit at the center of it, along with Ali’s wife, who is wrestling with trying to bring her full, authentic self into the public domain, Ali’s bodyguard, and William Fox, who was the founder of Fox Films. “In those early days of Hollywood, people remade themselves, often changing their names to drop their cultural background, so the whole piece deals with people trying to evolve into something else and it’s very complex.”
The play is helmed by Tony nominated and Emmy Award winner Debbie Allen in her Center Theatre Group directorial debut and is the first foray into theatre by The SpringHill Company’s Emmy Award-winning studio team, founded by LeBron James and Maverick Carter. “Debbie Allen is someone who I watched from the time I was a little kid, so working with her has been amazing,” says Power. “Incredible! It’s weird for me to even say this but I feel like sometimes people sleep on Debbie Allen because she’s an icon and done a lot of things from her acting, dancing, choreography, television directing – but people don’t think about her first as a theatre director but she is an amazing, top tier theatre artist and director. She’s performed on Broadway, directed on Broadway and her theatre work is phenomenal. So every morning, she warms us up and I just feel like I’m in heaven. I get to warm up with Debbie Allen – you’re never getting better than that! The cast is phenomenal and working with SpringHill on their first venture into live theatre – that’s exciting.”
What Power wants people to know is that it’s a real L.A. story because it deals with television, movies, and the complexities of who we are in front of a camera. “Thirty, forty years ago, there was less opportunity to carve out your own narrative – unlike now, with social media, you can do it all from your phone. But the flip side of that is that you don’t really know who people are and this play is kind of the beginnings of that. In the mid 60s when Ali was one of the people, along with Kennedy and a few others, who were on the forefront of utilizing the camera – manipulating it and being manipulated by the camera. Ali was surely the first sports figure in that modern era to really utilize that. And then the play jumps back to the late 20s as Fetchit became a star as silent films became talkies, so he came up at that critical moment. So what is the genesis that really laid the foundation for what came later, including social media. So it really is an L.A. story in that way and I’m really excited for L.A. audiences to see it and I hope that they are able to have conversations coming off of it.”
“Fetch Clay, Make Man” plays June 25 through July 16, 2023 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre located at 9820 Washington Blvd. in Culver City 90232. Ticket Prices: $30 – $79 available online at CenterTheatreGroup.org, by calling Audience Services at (213) 628-2772 or in person at the Center Theatre Group Box Office (at the Ahmanson Theatre at The Music Center in Downtown Los Angeles) or at the Kirk Douglas Theatre Box Office open 2 hours before performances.
