Ricardo Khan

Ricardo Khan is the co-founder of New Jersey’s Tony-winning Crossroads Theatre Company and served as its artistic director before leaving in 1999, after 21 years. He was TCG board president from 1995 to 1998.

Beginnings

I was born in Washington, D.C. My parents were both at Howard University, my father from Trinidad and my mother from Philly. So they met there, got married, and had me.

I think I was in Washington for about seven months, and then we moved to North Philadelphia. We moved to a farm in Norristown, Pennsylvania. We moved to Camden. Spent most of my time, I think, in Camden, growing up: Camden, New Jersey. Then we moved to Cherry Hill just as I was going to Rutgers College in New Brunswick.

On Discovering Theatre

I remember picking up a paperback copy of Raisin in the Sun and trying to be Sidney Poitier. That was the beginning of my interest in theatre, but it wasn’t really serious.

When I was in high school and living in Camden, we were taken on a bus to Broadway to see Hello, Dolly! That was probably the most important event that got me thinking about theatre–Cab Calloway was in it, Pearl Bailey was in it, it was an all-black cast. And there it was, right on Broadway! It was the first time I ever saw anything like that. We were coming up to the Great White Way and watching a play with people who looked like us. On the way back on the bus, I remember everyone getting together and saying, "You know, we could do that. Let’s do that." So we did. We started to put on plays, whether they were in schools or in the streets in Camden.

Early Theatrical Experience

I went to school to study anything but theatre–that was what my mother and father said. So I went through architecture, I went through pre-law, I went through urban planning. I eventually settled on psychology, because psychology at Rutgers gave us the most electives, and I used all my electives in theatre. Theatre was what I really wanted to do. I just wasn’t allowed to major in it.

Later, in grad school, I built up the courage to say, "You know, this is what I really want to do." I was in the first class the beginning year of Mason Gross School of the Arts [at Rutgers]. That was an incredibly free time for us all. Flexible.

After graduation, I sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door. I went into New York every day to audition, and I auditioned for anything I could get. I was trained as an actor. I was trained as a director. I discovered that most of the roles available at that time for people like me were pimps or drug addicts, drug dealers, what have you. That was flying in the face of everything we learned at Rutgers.

On campus you could be whoever you wanted to be. This was your opportunity to learn everything you could. We would spend all day in class. We would then go to rehearse Romeo and Juliet or whatever the school was doing at the time. Then after rehearsal for that, at 11 p.m., we’d go and rehearse in a basement as the Paul Robeson Ensemble, and we’d do shows by Ed Bullins, by Don Evans, by Amiri Baraka. It was a wonderful experience that taught us that we could really control our own destiny.

Lee Richardson was a friend of mine. We came out of school together, we both did the rounds together, and we said, "You know what? We could and need to start our own thing," and that’s what we did.

That was the beginning of Crossroads. We were lucky because at that time, 1978, we had CETA, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act.

On Crossroads Theatre Company

Crossroads was really about creating an environment for us to do our work well. It was not a political statement or the fallout of a social phenomenon. What Lee Richardson and I wanted to do in 1978 was simply to create a space for us as actors and directors to do our work–and that’s what we did. We wanted people to understand that even though we were a professional theatre, it didn’t mean that we were different from or outside the community, the community there being primarily black and Latino. Also it didn’t mean that there was no role to play (in the audience, at the board table, on staff or on stage) for people who were traditional theatergoers, who were predominantly white in the area. So that’s where we get our name, Crossroads. It’s the coming together of people from many backgrounds to try to create a whole new world within a structure that was an old former sewing factory in New Brunswick.

All the same, Crossroads was intrinsically black in perspective, because that’s who we were. Whenever we did works that brought in another culture–whether that other culture was South African, or West Indian, or European American, or Jewish–it was always to help us redefine our relationship as African-American people with that other culture.

Works like Mothers by Kathleen McGee-Anderson explored our relationship with Asian Americans, and pieces by folks like Migdalia Cruz described our relationship with our Latino brothers and sisters. That is probably something we all need to continue to do.

Our agenda was not about being multicultural–we already were that. It was about trying as African-American people to be honest on stage with our desire to redefine who we are for ourselves and for our audience–and to explore in depth our relationship with other people. It was black because we’re black.

Productions at Crossroads

The first production to get national attention at Crossroads was The Colored Museum. In 1985, or ’84, there was a national playwriting contest and playwrights were given the opportunity to submit their works to any of, I think, five companies around the country. We were one of them. We were blessed that George Wolfe decided to submit The Colored Museum to Crossroads. I would say that upon producing that play, Crossroads was put on the map.

Because we were a CETA project, funded by federal money, we could not call ourselves black. We were considered an ethnic theatre company. But the works that we did tried to provide roles for African-American actors in a way different than it had been done in the past. We had done Slow Dance on the Killing Ground, written by William Hanley, who was a white writer. We had done Albee and we had done Mamet.

But we were also doing new works by Don Evans, who was from Trenton, and we were doing works by Leslie Lee, Ntozake Shange, Derek Walcott–works that really gave us strong roles, you know, and also presented more honest images of who we were as African-American people. But again, it was for everybody.

Before we decided to do Sheila’s Day, Mbongeni Ngema from South Africa had been doing Serafina. I know that there was a lot of conflict about "these South African people coming in here and bringing in all these South African actors," and what was happening with the actors here in America. Mbongeni Ngema and a writer, Duma Ndlovu, had really wanted to try to correct that picture and work with American actors on their next go-round.

We began to talk about that. I was interested in the South African culture, and especially I was interested in how we might be able to bridge the two cultures. As we began to talk, we figured, well, let’s try to do a piece where we have half the cast come from South Africa and half from here, and let’s create an experience in workshop that is truly extraordinary when we bring these people together.

At that time Crossroads was operating on a letter of agreement with Equity, so we were considered a developing theatre, and Equity allowed us to really pursue this. We had to put in a pitch for it, because it was against the rules, but it was based on the fact that–unlike our training using European models and being able to learn about folks like Peter Brook and Grotowski and all these other folks–we never were able to learn about township theatre, about the way that South Africa creates theatre. So this is what we wanted to do.

The South Africans needed to learn about the civil rights movement in America, and learn about American actors here. The American actors had to learn about township theatre and what it’s like to create a work in workshop without a script. Had to learn about the Zulu traditions and language. So it was just a wonderful learning experience for everybody.

As we were working on Sheila’s Day, the thing that got to us the most was how incredibly alike we are, regardless of the waters and the time that has divided us, anywhere along the African Diaspora. Anytime we have had the opportunity not just to connect with a different culture because of a play, or literature, but to include people who are from that culture–anytime we can bring those cultures together on the stage or at a design table or wherever–we’re doing some incredible stuff when it comes to the repatching of our lives and our life history. We’re doing incredible stuff when it comes to the act of making us whole again as people.

Sheila’s Day was a blazing example of what it’s like for African-Americans to reconnect with Africa, in particular South Africa. The beauty of theatre is that it is necessarily a collaborative art form, and it is that collaboration, when given those juices, that can really, really make you whole in your present day, regardless of what the past has done.

My hope is that the industry of theatre in America will get to the point where it can recognize that international connections can become a very, very important thing, and a necessary thing, to the growth of the American theatre. They certainly were, for anybody involved at Crossroads with Sheila’s Day. You could probably point to anybody in the American theatre who has had an opportunity to work with another culture, people from another background, from another nation, and they’ll say, "You know what? That was incredible. That was an experience I’ll never forget."

I think that the experience of cultures coming together and nations coming together has to be a part of the future of the American theatre, because it’s part of everything else in our life. We don’t operate with just a United States economy. Borders don’t get in the way for other parts of our life. Why should they get in the way of how we create work? International connections should become a part of our future, because–whether people want to believe it or not–the rest of the world is a part of our past.

On a Sense of Community

When you’re marketing a black play, the best thing is word of mouth. If you’re going to pay for advertisements, then pay for the radio first, as opposed to print, because radio is about personal connections. People know that disc jockey. They say, "Oh, okay. If he says to go, if she says to go, I’ll go." You may hear that there’s a play going on and you’re interested in it, but you don’t know how you’re going to feel when you get there. You don’t know whether you’re going to be made to feel welcome. It was always important to make that one-on-one connection with people in the community. People knew that when you came to Crossroads you were still in the community. I never called any of our programs outreach programs. Why are we going to reach out to something that’s already here?

In the beginning, most of our subscribers were white. At that time, the African-American community didn’t have a habit of subscribing to a theatre. Most of the black people who came to Crossroads came in groups. Eventually we ended up with an audience that was half-and-half for most of our history.

The Spark of the Actor; the Power of Theatre

After all is said and done in rehearsal–and the directors and the designers and everybody get out of the way, and all there is is that actor on stage, and that audience–what happens is a spark that can only be magic. It is that spark that ignites that arc that hopefully changes the lives of people, so that when the audience leaves, they are leaving different from how they were when they came in. I started as an actor because of that spark, because of that power, the ability to go on stage and–if honest and if open–walk through a passage with the audience that cannot be done in quite the same way with any other art form but theatre.

We say at Crossroads that when we do our work well and when we move out of the way finally and there is that actor and the audience, you know it’s right because you feel that God has just walked in the room. It’s pure and it’s magic and it is what changes people’s lives. It’s what turns people on to theatre. It’s what turns an audience on in the midst of social chaos to actually having the courage to come together.

Do you know how many times, how many opportunities there are in this world, especially in the cities, the inner cities, to come together? I mean, we don’t have the playgrounds everywhere we think we have. We don’t have the recreation centers. Everybody is very individually driven nowadays. If you don’t have those places that bring people together in congregation, then I think you’re in trouble as a society.

Theatre does that, you know. It does that whether or not there is racial pressure outside, whether or not there is an election going on or being debated–no matter what’s happening outside, there’s always been somehow a need for people to come together, and theatre has always been able to rise to that occasion of serving that need.

Colorblind Casting and Other Racial Issues

A lot of times if we try to be colorblind on stage, I don’t know that we’re always ready for its outcome, because being colorblind on stage can also suggest that you can use theatre to escape from the realities of everyday life. That’s what I was doing when I was a kid.

When you have an all-black cast of Hello, Dolly!, you know, that’s colorblind. But as a black kid, I was very aware of that color, and I think everybody else was, too. Everybody said, "Wow, I never thought of that before." To me, that is the power of theatre. Why dilute that?

There was a point being made, is what I’m getting at, by David Merrick, or whoever was putting that play on. While the play used nontraditional casting, it was not colorblind. The point being made was very much about color and very much about America. So I don’t know that we’re always ready to say, "Let’s just be colorblind," because we’re not colorblind in society. We shouldn’t be colorblind on stage. If we employ nontraditional casting, let’s be very clear here: this is good, but it is making a point.

Every time you cast somebody in a role that’s never been cast quite that way before, you are making a point in America. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that you’re not making a point about race or about gender or about sexual orientation, or whatever. Don’t lie to yourself. There’s nothing colorblind about it. The points we make on stage carry with them the power of theatre. What we should be doing is turning people on to new perspectives, not turning us off from them.

I believe that race is something that was created. It was imposed on humankind–the way we use race, you know. So because of that, because the whole issue of race has origins that are a lie, we’re not dealing with the real issue. It’s hard to. But what we are dealing with, which has become very real in America, are the reactions to the construct of race. So because of that, when you’re using theatre to get to issues of race so that you can get society to go beyond the past, you’re doing great things. But as an artist you have to be careful, because you can also be constricted by the fact that you are dealing with a whole other layer of your being that can pigeonhole you. I happen to believe that race can never pigeonhole you, as long as you’re aware of the fact that it essentially–at its origin–is a lie.

It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues...and Money Woes

Crossroads was doing It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues at the same time it was facing its greatest financial challenge. So we were opening in New York with It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues and at the same time trying to figure out how, on the other side of the river, we were going to make payroll. We were operating two different companies; they were not connected, really. So It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues had its own workings and support and all of that, and that was fine. I’m not sure what the other show was we were doing at the time. I’m sure it was a new play and I’m sure that it was challenging for us to put both on and to deal with the fact that we didn’t have any money, you know. We just didn’t have any money.

A lot of people think that the money problems at Crossroads have just popped up. No, they haven’t. We’ve always had problems with money. We’ve always had to deal with having just a little less than what we really needed, and that little less builds and builds and builds until finally you have a lot less than what you need to operate. It’s really interesting, because in spite of a Tony Award or in spite of a show on Broadway, you are still facing your own reality that has always been your reality, which is you don’t have any money, you know. You never have enough money.

In that, I don’t think we’re any different from ethnic-specific theatres all across the country. You never have enough money. Most mid-sized theatres in America don’t have enough money to be large; they have too much to be small. They’re right caught in the middle there, and there are institutional issues that have to be addressed. Certainly that’s where Crossroads was at the time. In spite of the bright lights of New York, we were fighting real hard to keep the lights on in New Brunswick.

On Theatrical Institutions

We’re not taking full advantage of our potential as a theatre industry when we look to the large institutions to take care of the small institutions. "Take care of" sets in motion a kind of patronizing effect that will ultimately cause the theatre’s doom, even though the intentions were good originally.

Only in a true partnership situation do you preserve the ability to make decisions. There’s got to be some way for partnerships to exist across cultures and across sizes of institutions and across generations–partnerships that can feed both sides.

On His Role in TCG

Upon becoming president at TCG, I wanted to play a role in taking the talk to the walk. It’s always tough to get people to open the door and let others into the room who are of different colors, genders or generations. I wanted to encourage people to move away from just talking about those things and toward actually doing something about it. I wanted to try to say, "Okay, the resistance and the reactions to change, as violent as they sometimes are, are necessary. How do we convert that energy into something positive and actually do something about it?" The fact is that if you don’t do anything about it, it will blow up one day in all of our faces and we will all lose.

On the Robert Brustein/August Wilson Debate

At that TCG conference in Princeton, August Wilson said incredible things that led to a spontaneous standing ovation–and that was wonderful. But what was even more fascinating was that the next morning, we started to get a sense of how people really took to the speech–it wasn’t something that everybody just embraced as, "Wow! That’s great!" It was provocative and resulted in a lot of hard feelings. It showed how divided we were, even though we were in the same room, even though we were all standing up–still, we were divided. Some people were pissed as hell; other people were applauding the fact that he was saying so many things that people had wanted to say all along–and now, because August Wilson was saying it, people were hearing it.

All of a sudden, all around the country, schools were reading about and studying the debate in class. So the real work, the real results, the things that we had expected at that Town Hall meeting, they came later. They came in those classrooms when people took it upon themselves to talk about it and, more importantly, to translate what was being said to their own local realities.

It became very, very clear as Wilson spoke, and as people reacted, that we are an industry very divided about how to bring the black theatres in this country to a healthy place. Do you do it by way of grants to build new audiences in traditionally white theatres to "brown the audience," so to speak? Or do you do it by pumping more money into the creation of new types of works that can put that challenge on the stage through our metaphors? Or do you do that by supporting the black theatre institutions?

I think that one of the things I heard clearly from August Wilson was, however you spend that money, you’ve got to first recognize that black institutions are suffering financially, while at the same time there’s a lot of money being pumped into mainstream institutions’ diversifying and that that, at the very least, is going to cause, or has caused, a very serious conflict, if not a divide, that we need to address as an American theatre.

He could have said that in a discussion solely to the funders. He could have said that solely to black theatres. He could have said that just for academic reasons. But he chose to say it to the leaders of the regional theatre movement in America. That meant that it was on all of us, regardless of our color and our means, to address the fact that there is a very serious divide within our community.

His Theatrical Heroes

Joe Papp was my hero. Sidney Poitier was my hero.

I played in Raisin in the Sun in Springfield, Massachusetts, right at the time we got funding to start Crossroads. But I did not play the role that Sidney Poitier had played–though I did, many many years before that, play that role in my own bedroom. But that was not the role of Walter Lee Younger. I was playing Sidney Poitier. I love the way he gets mad. So I’d be in my room getting mad, like Sidney Poitier would get mad.

Role models for me weren’t so much in the theatre, they were outside of the theatre. Nelson Mandela is a role model for me. The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II were role models for me. My mother, my father were role models for me. These are people who have not ventured on a stage to create theatre, though they have created an incredibly dramatic impact on the lives of anybody they’ve come in contact with. And because they have used that power to bring love to the world, to bring something new in terms of humanity and insight to the world, I consider them my heroes and use them every day in my work in the theatre.

Leaving Crossroads

Every place I directed had an impact on me. I was lucky to have a home, first of all, an artistic home, at Crossroads. So anything that I was doing as a director outside of Crossroads, I was doing because I wanted to. It wasn’t because it was just a gig; it was something that really mattered to me, a particular project. It was wonderful to work at the Negro Ensemble Company, because the Negro Ensemble Company was our model at Crossroads. That was our flagship theatre. That was the theatre that said it was possible to do this stuff, you know. And to be able to go full circle and actually direct there was powerful to me. It was very powerful.

My time at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, was an incredible time in my life, because after being the artistic director at Crossroads for so many years, I was finally able to do something in another theatre far away and not to have to worry about the audience and "Oh, why are those seats not filled?" No one asked me, "Could you look at this subscription brochure?" or anything like that. I didn’t have to worry about that; I just had to do my work.

What was really interesting was that my first impression of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was that it was very, very different culturally from what I’m accustomed to. It kind of freed me. We were doing a play called The Darker Face of the Earth by Rita Dove, who was the former U.S. Poet Laureate, and she wrote this play, which was a retelling of Oedipus, but was set in South Carolina. Antebellum South Carolina, right? So I’m saying to myself, "What are we going to do when these people get all upset because we’re bringing in the slavery play?"

It was just an incredible time, because it was a beautiful artistic journey in a beautiful place, far from anything I worried about. Because I had these questions about what are they going to think, it forced me to say, "I have to get to a place where I can’t care about what they think and just take the big, big risks."

So together with a choreographer and a composer and cast and a wonderful staff out there, I set out to create something I don’t think, as a director, I ever would have created in such a way at my own theatre. But, in fact, we succeeded. That was special to me.

The Darker Face of the Earth in Oregon also reminded me, after twenty years at Crossroads, what it is like to get back to my own creative spirit as a director. It set in motion a reinvention of myself, and it was at that point I realized that I wanted to move on from Crossroads. I wanted to reenter a part of my life that I had put aside for a while; the part that was fed in the hills of Ashland, Oregon. And it wasn’t because it was Ashland, Oregon; it was simply because I didn’t have to run a theatre.

There’s an artistic cost in running the day-to-day life of a theatre. There’s a spiritual cost, there is a personal cost, you know, when it comes to your own family, people you put on the back burner while you have to tech a show or you have to do something else. What you find is that while you’re teching the show, your family is saying, "Well, you know, tech’s going to be over in a bit." Yes, it’s going to be over, but then there’s a board meeting. Then there’s this and then there’s that. It just keeps on going. You eventually catch up, and when you catch up to the truth of it, yes, you recognize that toll. I chose to confront that, that truth in myself, and change my life. It was a wonderful thing for me.

Changing from being an artistic director to being a director for hire was like jumping off a cliff. It was about not having a clue what was on the other side. There’s the hope that you will fly, but you don’t know and you don’t know where you’re going. So it was not about going to direct or to be a full-time or freelance director; it was about just going out to find out who this next Ricardo was going to be.

Also, my father’s from Trinidad, so when we were growing up, we never really did anything but visit Trinidad. We would go there for two weeks at a time, maybe every summer, every other summer. When I left Crossroads, I chose to go to Trinidad and really spend time there, spend a year there, because I wanted to know this other part of me, this part that was my father, that was a different culture. It was a different religion, a different ethnicity.

I found personal courage. I think I am trying to find a new way into the issues of race in America, but with a different language, perhaps with a different perspective. Trinidad is very diverse. There is no majority, and yet you have 40 percent of the population of African descent and 40 percent of Indian descent. Then after that it’s Chinese, and then Spanish and Syrian and Amerindian and European. Then, probably the largest part, is a mix of everybody.

So I was looking for a way to reenter the issues of race, but from a different cultural perspective. I was looking to Trinidad to change the paradigm for me, and it did shift. I don’t know where it is yet, but I know that I’m very interested in discovering a new language and finding a new way into the problems we continue to deal with in America, those problems being at the center of most of the work I’ve done on stage.

On the Future of Theatre

In 20 years I hope to see a healthier American theatre, a theatre that is better capitalized, a community that is thriving in all of its diversity. I hope we will not be fighting over crumbs, because we sometimes do that. I would love to see us more global–aesthetically, culturally and economically.

If the spirit dies that led us to theatre in the first place, no money in the world is going to make us whole. I believe that in our reinvention we have to find a way to keep the spirit alive. Without the spirit, all a theatre is is a big building.

Theatre in the Digital Age

As long as the American theatre stays vital and connected to what’s happening today, the digital age will have an effect on the American theatre, will be part of the American theatre. I can’t tell you how, though. I don’t know how, but it will have an effect. It already does. I would hope that it does not keep the human touch out of the theatrical experience. I also hope that it does not distance us from the need to make commitments to the work that we do.

His Own Future

I’ve finished my sabbatical now, and I’m still not sure where I’m going. I do know that in this moment I’ve committed my life to creating a drama club for kids in New Brunswick. Using children from the high school and from the Paul Robeson Middle School. And since Crossroads is closed, I said, "Well, let’s use the theatre and put the kids there." So we actually are using Crossroads and the kids are being bused to Crossroads and we take over the stage. They have been learning acting and set design and lighting design and technical theatre, how to audition, dance, write plays. While the powers that be are rebuilding Crossroads and hoping to open its doors soon, I am trying to make sure that in our community there is a group of people calling themselves the Drama Club of New Brunswick, who will be at the front lines of Crossroads when those doors open. That’s what I want.

I’m developing a new audience, new board members, new actors, new artists, new staff members, new philanthropists, supporters. They’re kids right now, but they will be there one day where we need them to be, or where they need to be. They’ll be there.

Having had the distance from America of being in Trinidad–but also the distance from a theatre I co-founded and spent most of my life with, as well as from TCG–I’m really aware that, whether it is Crossroads or TCG or any company or organization or project or union of people who have at their base the spirit of who they are, if you hold that spirit as important in the beginning, that spirit becomes you. As you grow, that spirit grows with you and you grow with that spirit.

As you are faced with challenges, whether they are economic or institutional, you know that you have to put into place a process of change. And if you’ve changed and you have all the money in the world, you have all the systems in the world, but you have lost that spirit, then you really have no rudder for where you’re going. You just have a boat that’s been righted, but not made whole, not given any direction.

In the old theatre, Crossroads used to have a post in the middle of the stage, and it was a big old post, and other people have posts in the middle of their space, right? But ours was huge, and it stood up and then it reached out. It was a big, big, big ass Y-beam and it just stood in the middle and it said to us, every day, "Find the other way. Find the other way. Go around me. Find the other way." That’s what made us strong. It was a metaphor for us. It caused us to face our challenges head-on and do something about it.

When Crossroads moved to the new building, we didn’t have a post in the middle of the stage. We had entered an era where the obstacles were not as clear. Sometimes they’d smack you in the back of your head because you weren’t looking anymore. But I remember that post and that’s something that will stay with us always, because it’s something that keeps you strong and it keeps reminding you of where you’ve been. It’s rooted to the bottom of your room and it’s rooted to the top, to the ceiling. It reminds you to hang on to your root, no matter where your destination is in the sky, hold onto your root. That’s what I’m trying to get back to as I reinvent myself.