Prolific Playwright/Screenwriter, Keith Josef Adkins, is an artist with a deep concern for African American culture and the challenges facing black America. This sentiment resonates in everything he creates; particularly The New Black Fest, a community-building movement that brings African American playwrights together to tackle the growing racism and injustice issues facing our community. The annual festival empowers black playwrights by giving them a creative platform to simultaneously expand the African American narrative while exploring what it means to be black in a 21st century world.
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Adkins’ written works have been performed across the country and highlight the black experience and point-of-view. His plays include The People Before The Park, Pitbulls, Safe House, and The Last Saint on Sugar Hill, among others. He was a writer for the popular CW television comedy Girlfriends, and is the creator of the sci-fi thriller feature film, The First, as well as The Disappearing for Simon Says Entertainment.
This past March, The New Black Fest held a panel in partnership with The Lark Play Development Center, called New Topics in Blackness: The New Civil Rights, which featured Pulitzer-Prize finalist Eisa Davis, Political commentator and Being Mary Jane writer Keli Goff, and activists Kevin Powell and Frank Leon Roberts; the panel was moderated by Grey’s Anatomy staff writer and well-known playwright, Zakiyyah Alexander. The talk-back explored the Black Lives Matter movement, the changing dynamics of African American activism and leadership, and the importance of community building in effecting social change.
In addition to the aforementioned panel, The New Black Fest fosters an environment in which black writers can respond creatively to social justice issues. The Hands Up series, a collection of compelling short plays responding to the Mike Brown shooting, were performed at City University Graduate Center. The works took the form of six monologues, all of which were written by black men, and dealt with the age-old topic of race, the impact of racial discrimination in the black community, as well as its effect on the writers themselves. Featured plays included Superiority Fantasy by Nathan James, They Shootin! Or I Aint Neva Scared by Idris Goodwin, and Walking Next To Michael Brown by Eric Holmes, among others. Facing Our Truth, a series of ten-minute works, focused on the death of Trayvon Martin, race and privilege, and showcased the dramatic writing of noted African American writers, such as Dominique Morisseau (Detroit ’67)  and Marcus Gardley (Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi).
BlackEnterprise.com caught up with Keith Josef Adkins, artistic director of The New Black Fest, to discuss social activism, the role of the arts in bringing about social change, and the significance of his groundbreaking platform, which creates an artistic haven for black artists and their voices.
BlackEnterprise.com: Tell me about The New Black Fest and its role in black social activism.
Adkins: The New Black Fest was started in 2010. I started it because I felt like there was a lack of diversity on stage, as far as the complexity of black voices. That was troubling for me because there seemed to be this one narrative that was being tagged, or branded, as the one black voice. Many white institutions were advocating, producing, and celebrating August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry, which wasn’t allowing for there to be conversations around other voices that were also a part of the black canon of our experience. I felt like the more we could collectively penetrate the institution with the complexity of who we are, the more we could have an authentic experience, as far as theater-going and storytelling. The initial event was to bring together black playwrights from across the globe, share their voices, and make sure that they were very particular and individual in what they were saying about their own specific communities. For example, we brought Kwame Kwei-Armah who was in London at the time, he’s now the artistic director of Center Stage Theatre in Baltimore, but at the time he was still in London and there was a play he had written about a black Londoner who was running for high office and the specificity around what that means for black Londoners. We also had a play from Chicago that was about black women, coming from an Eastern African experience. So
there were all these voices that had very specific things to say about the community; very complex, authentic things to say. We just kept going with the same mission: to advocate for diverse voices that have a certain level of insurgency around them, that would challenge both black audiences and other audiences about what it means to be black, what it means to be in a world where the stakes are so high on so many levels—from environmental, to personal, to spiritual, to economic.The topic of race and racism in this country continues to intensify, with the protests in Ferguson, increasingly publicized instances of police brutality and, now, the controversy surrounding the death of Sandra Bland. How can, or should, the black artistic community respond?
One of the reasons that The New Black Fest exists is because we as a black community and theater practitioners are always waiting for white institutions—and sometimes even black institutions–to anoint or qualify that what we feel is urgent and important in our own storytelling. So, when issues around race, racism, and institutionalized white privilege, as well as white supremacy, are in our faces and we’re having to see it play out in the media—with police profiling and murders of unarmed black men and women—we often feel like there isn’t a platform for us to exorcise our feelings around it. The New Black Fest was created to give us a platform that was accessible quickly, instead of waiting for some white institution to decide which black playwright they were going to select to speak on race and racism and present that play only to its own audiences, as opposed to having a collective conversation. I think it’s really important for black theater practitioners to create their own impromptu platforms, whether it’s on a street corner, the basement of a church, in the back of a theater or wherever it is, to have these conversations and bring the community into the conversation.
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There has been much talk about the lack of diverse decision makers in Hollywood. But there is also a need for diversity in the arts, as it relates to the distribution of fellowships, grants, and awards. Can you talk a little about that?
There is a lack of diversity in creative decision making, in theater in particular, and definitely in television and film. I think the reason behind that is white privilege, which also feeds into entitlement. There is a certain of level of power that the white institution wants to hold on to when it comes to how it sees the world. As long as it’s not being penetrated or challenged, it will continue to advocate for the black voice and the black narrative that it feels safe with and comfortable with. Because much of white privilege doesn’t have any interaction with blackness, except a removed interaction—via media, what they’re reading, and what the news is showing–they have a tendency to congregate around pathology, like what’s happening in the inner city; as if that’s the only black experience, and only focusing on particular things in the urban environment—high crime, single parenthood, things like that— and then they sort of tag that as being the black experience. When you have creative decision makers who are diverse, you have other voices contributing to that experience and then you begin to have a fuller perspective of what black is, what black story is, and what black voice is. That’s why it’s so important that we get into those rooms.
I have been in many of them and have often found myself in situations where a black play or two comes across the table and there’s a lot of advocacy for it. The play is usually steeped in some form of pathology, some type of deep victim-hood— and I’m like ‘Yes this is very beautiful writing, but we continue to see the same kind of play coming out of your institution and there’s so many other voices.’ Â I’m from the Midwest. My mom’s catholic and my dad was Baptist. I come from an inter-religious, inter-faith household. There’s so many complexities. [We now have] a first and now second generation who are children of African immigrants, who are also a part of the black theater collective, and those voices need to be heard and advocated for.
We spoke about the topic of gentrification in New York City and in urban areas across the country. What are the cultural implications of gentrification, in terms of maintaining our cultural heritage as African Americans?
A part of a group’s sustainability is its economic power. If we can’t stay [in our neighborhoods] because of economics, it dismantles our cultural power. If we can’t hold on to the ma-and-pop row on 125th street in Harlem because of economics, because we don’t own [our businesses] or we’ve been renting for years, then somebody else can just come in and put in a wine and cigar shop where there used to be a black-owned health food store. There has always been an effort within the black community to have economic power: to own, to go to college and bring back those skills and resources to the community to help to build those communities. There is this history of strong advocacy and movement for black economic power, which then of course helps sustain black cultural experience; but then it’s dismantled.
What advice do you have for African American artists of color who hope to respond creatively to issues of black social injustice?
I’m very much interested in collectives—collective art making— and I think there’s something to creating a community in which we’re all contributing to a project. Whether it’s a film or theater piece or dance piece, if we invest in collective creative making then there’s a way to pull all of our resources together. Bring in people who are skillful in generating financing. A creative collective shouldn’t just be all creative anymore. It’s important to bring in someone with economic skills that can help [you] understand how to generate money for the things that [you’re] doing. There are so many black, wealthy institutions that we’re not tapping into or pitching to.
To learn more visit www.newblackfest.org.