Arena Players

Tiffani Barbour's mother first noticed her daughter's talent and flair for the spotlight when the little girl was 3 years old. "She just liked performing - wherever - as long as there was a crowd and people to watch," says Barbour's mother, Charlene D. Williamson. Barbour still gets the same thrill in front of an audience; she calls it "performance butterflies - your head gets swelled a little bit and you feel like you're going to lose a little air, but it's a rush." Now, however, that thrill comes from playing a supporting role in the touring production of Mamma Mia!

When the late playwright John Henry Redwood daringly titled his 2000 play No Niggers, No Jews, No Dogs, he surely knew he'd raise some hackles. The words are ugly, and that's the point. This is a play about the ugliness of bigotry; the title is taken from a sign seen in the South in the 1940s. The play is also, however, about familial love and the kind of understanding that transcends racial boundaries. It's a hard-hitting script, but one tempered with touching and ultimately hopeful moments.

Ever since it opened at Arena Players last fall, director Randolph Smith's production of Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years has been having its say all over town. "I don't think there's been anything like this [at Arena Players]. We did this in November of last year, and then we went out to Catonsville Community College in February, and we were at Artscape over the weekend, and we'll be at Cockpit in Court at Essex Community College on Aug. 1," Smith said. Adapted by playwright Emily Mann from the 1993 memoir by Sarah ("Sadie")

Each December for the past two decades, a group of actors from Arena Players could be found busily learning lines from a play that won an annual contest for the region's black writers. The production was prepared for broadcast the following February on WMAR-TV. Those activities won't be happening this winter. Station officials have canceled the competition, saying that they haven't been able to find any advertisers in recent years to help defray the $20,000 to $25,000 cost of the awards and of producing the play.

Arena Players has been a cultural presence on Baltimore's west side for half a century, and now it's preparing to be part of a cultural center on the east side as well. Leaders of the nonprofit community theater, now in its 50th season of performances, have agreed in principle to be part of the recently announced Media Arts Network School, a 30-acre campus proposed for as many as 1,800 college students in film, television and other media. The campus and an adjoining retail district are being planned for construction along both sides of North Avenue between Broadway and Gay Street, including the vacant Goetze meat factory at 1940 Belair Road.

When Andre De Shields was growing up in Baltimore in the 1950s, black people who wanted to act and sing and dance were often looked down on by their community. In a segregated city in which black audiences weren't welcome at the major performing arts venues, he says, it smacked too much of a minstrel show, of shuffling and jiving for the white folk. That's why the Arena Players was so important. "It was a place where black people appearing before a black audience were living out my dream of one day being a performing artist," De Shields said in a telephone interview.

The new theater season marks milestone anniversaries for two Baltimore theaters. Center Stage turns 40, and Arena Players, billed as "the nation's oldest continuously operating African-American theater," turns 50. The fare at both is eclectic, and, indeed, variety is a keynote at most of the area's theaters for 2002-2003. At Center Stage, variety comes in the form of a blend of old and new, starting with the season opener - artistic director Irene Lewis' new take on J.M. Barrie's classic, Peter Pan, starring Jefferson Mays as the boy who refuses to grow up. Other highlights include the theater's first-ever co-production with Washington's Arena Stage, a revival of the Fats Waller revue Ain't Misbehavin' and two premieres that originated as Center Stage commissions, Warren Leight's No Foreigners Beyond This Point and Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel.

After an absence of 15 years, Arena Players returns to the Baltimore Playwrights Festival tomorrow night with the opening of Kermit Frazier's Interstices. Frazier, who teaches writing at Morgan State University, is a playwright whose work includes Sacred Places, a one-act version of which was the first winner of the black playwrights competition co-sponsored by WMAR-TV and Arena Players, back in 1982. Interstices, set in 1973, concerns two American expatriates in their 20s who move to a Caribbean island and become entangled in a political uprising.

Ten new plays by Marylanders will be produced by eight area theaters in this summer's Baltimore Playwrights Festival. The list of theaters includes one newcomer, Baltimore's newest community theater, Paragon, and one former participant returning to the fold, Arena Players. "I think this is the year of diversity," festival chairman Rodney S. Bonds said, referring not only to the fact that the plays range from historical dramas to romantic comedies to a murder mystery, but also to their racially diverse dramatis personae.

To August Wilson, the blues and playwriting are inextricably linked, and the play that best demonstrates that link is Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Wilson's first Broadway play, Ma Rainey (1984) isn't merely about a recording session with the legendary blues singer, it's full of blues-style riffs. Characters break into extended solos, motifs weave in and out, and it all blends into a melody that is variously comic, rueful, exuberant and tragic. Also like the blues, the play needs performers who have the "chops," to borrow a bit of musicians' lingo.