Sheldon Epps has had an illustrious career. He conceived and directed the Tony Award-nominated musicals “Play On!” and “Blues in the Night,” worked with theater companies across the U.S., and directed episodes of hit TV series like “Frasier,” “Friends” and “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Southern California theater aficionados, though, may best recognize him as the former artistic director of Pasadena Playhouse, a position he held for 20 years.
His recently published memoir, “My Own Directions: A Black Man’s Journey in the American Theatre,” is a book Epps wrote with theater lovers and Pasadena Playhouse supporters in mind. It’s also aimed at students and those pursuing theater careers, he says on a recent phone call, “as a way to encourage them just to believe in themselves and follow their own directions.”
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Epps documents his triumphs – like the cofounding of the off-Broadway theater The Production Company, which led to his directorial breakthrough – and his struggles, such as the temporary pause on Pasadena Playhouse productions in 2010 due to financial struggles. Motivated to write his story in part by the Black Lives Matter movement, Epps recounts the ways in which racism impacted his journey.
“There were a good number of discussions that came up as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement that specifically relate to racism and racial challenges in the theater field, and that was very much at the heart of my story and something that I had dealt with over my entire career,” says the Pasadena-based director, now the senior artistic advisor for Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C.
“In my book, many of those challenges that I faced are challenges that to some degree have been remedied. Things are much better,” he says. “Right now, today, there are several leaders of color of major theaters in companies all over the United States. There’s much more representation in terms of the choice of material on stages and in who is participating. I don’t mean just actors, but also designers and stage managers and directors and all of that.”
While the diversity of audience members is “getting better,” he says there’s more work to be done.
“Still, far too often when I go to the theater now, as an audience member, I’m still one of the only people of color in the audience,” he says. “We have further to go with that.”
Epps caught the theater bug at a young age. He spent his early childhood in Compton, where his father was a minister, and actually attended his first theatrical performance at Pasadena Playhouse. After the Epps family relocated to New Jersey, the future director attended Broadway shows often. Multiple times in his memoir, Epps notes that this is because of the low cost of tickets at that point in time.
“You can’t even buy a ticket outside of the theater now for what I used to pay,” says Epps.
That kind of early access to the theater was clearly important in Epps’ career and it’s an experience that today is financially out of reach for many.
“That’s very depressing and concerning to me because that is the way that you build a theater audience for the future is to get people in the habit of going to the theater at a very, very young age,” he adds. “It’s one of the reasons that, during my time at the Pasadena Playhouse, we had student matinees and found the resources to do that, so that we could get young people in there.”
While noting that there are programs that enable youth to buy tickets at a discount, the price can still be high.
“I really lament the price of theater tickets all around, for everybody, but particularly for young people who should be, if anything, encouraged to go to the theater at a young age, as I did, and discover it,” says Epps. “There’s so much to attract a young person now to not leave their room because you can watch so much on your phone or your laptop or your tablet or whatever. We shouldn’t add to that the fact that theater is very expensive as a discouragement for people to go to the theater.”
As a young actor in New York, Epps co-founded The Production Company with several colleagues. They launched the small, off-Broadway theater with a limited budget and took care of jobs from acting to running the box office to cleaning the toilets themselves.
“It sounds like it was hard, and it was, but it was also the most joyous part of my life in some ways because it was all about doing what we love for the love of doing it,” says Epps, adding with a laugh, “So, we loved scrubbing those toilets.”
The experience was a career turning point for Epps, who recently directed “Miss Maude” at Houston’s George Theater and his first TV movie, “Christmas Party Crashers,” which is set to air this month on BET+. He acknowledges that this kind of labor of love would be harder to pull off in today’s economic climate with rent, as well as the cost of materials and utilities, making theater a costlier venture.
“It’s much harder for a young person now, or a group of young people, to try to get something going like that, as I did with my colleagues, my schoolmates, so many years ago,” Epps says.
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In sharing his own story, Epps isn’t just offering words of encouragement for theater students and young professionals, but advocating for continued work in making theater representative of the communities in which they exist.
“Theater should be reflective, completely reflective, of the society that we live in,” says Epps. “It’s important emotionally and artistically, but it’s also important economically because theaters, arts organizations, need the support from as many people as possible.”