Oral History Transcript - Eugene Lee - January 23, 2008
Interview with Eugene Lee
Interviewer: Barbara Thibodeaux
Date of Interview: January 23, 2008
Location: San Marcos, Texas
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Interviewee: Eugene Lee, a 1974 Theater graduate and later a Distinguished Alumnus Award recipient at Texas State University, is an internationally recognized actor and playwright. Mr. Lee currently is artist in residence at Texas State University.
Topics: Ebony Players, Performance of Raisin in the Sun at the LBJ State Park in 1972, Mr. Lee’s contribution to Texas State as an artist in residence.
BARBARA THIBODEAUX: This recording is part of the LBJ Centennial Celebration Oral History Project sponsored by Texas State University. Today is Wednesday, January 23, 2008. My name is Barbara Thibodeaux. I am interviewing Eugene Lee at San Marcos, Texas.
Mr. Lee, even though you have agreed to the terms and conditions of the release pertaining to this interview in writing, will you also verbally acknowledge your acceptance with a yes or a no?
EUGENE LEE: Yes.
THIBODEAUX: Thank you.
Okay. Will you first of all give me some background information that led you up to coming to Southwest Texas?
LEE: Wow! (laughs) My Spanish teacher in high school was about to leave Fort Worth, where I grew up and was in high school, and her husband had accepted a position in the math department here, and she told me about this university. And my parents drove me down for a weekend and we took a look, and I liked it and I applied and got accepted. That was in the spring of my senior year in high school.
I was going to go to OU, but the out-of-state rates went up and I got a letter saying it was going to cost me more than I had anticipated, so I started looking around in Texas, and that’s how I ended up here.
THIBODEAUX: What year was that?
LEE: That was the spring of ’70, yeah.
THIBODEAUX: Were you looking at the theater department then or were you not interested yet?
LEE: No. I was looking at the political science department, and I wasn’t interested in theater yet, no.
THIBODEAUX: Once you came to Texas State—Southwest Texas—I get the names confused—
LEE: (laughs) Me too.
THIBODEAUX: —when did you become interested in theater?
LEE: My first semester. I had to get a minor, you know, with the pre-law and political science, and I had done a couple of plays in high school and I had fun. So I figured that would be my minor. That first semester I actually got involved in a couple of one-act productions, student directed, and I liked it so much I ended up taking on a double major. So, yeah, that’s I ended up in theater.
THIBODEAUX: So when and how did you put together the Ebony Players?
LEE: Well, that was out of, you know, necessity being the mother of invention, as they say. There were not even a handful of African American students in the drama department at the time. And there were a couple of us who weren’t seeing the kind of opportunities available for us to do acting and to do directing in any of the main stage productions, for example, or any of the bigger productions. So we approached the chairman of the department at the time to see if there could be something done to get us a little more involved in what was going on.
And he ended up approaching one of the students—an African American senior student—who was about to do his directing project for his senior class. And they ended up co-directing a production of A Raisin in the Sun that involved all of the drama students who were colored at the time, all three or four of us, and we ended up having to go across campus to finish out the cast to get cast members from other departments. I think maybe even from—no, they were all from the campus, but that was the original group that became known as the Ebony Players, that group who made up that cast for Raisin in the Sun.
THIBODEAUX: So Raisin in the Sun was the first production of the Ebony Players?
LEE: Yes.
THIBODEAUX: Who requested that a command performance be held at the LBJ State Park or Ranch?
LEE: I don’t know. Someone from President Johnson’s home or—I don’t know who that individual was, but we did the production on campus in the spring as a part of the university’s productions in that little lab theater there. Wasn’t on the main stage, it was in the lab theater. And the next thing we knew, we were being invited to—because it was the opening for the park, which is right across from President Johnson’s home. And there is a building there that houses a theater in it—in the park, and that’s where we sort of were the opening act (laughs) for that particular building in the park, but that’s how we—I don’t know who invited us. I never did know.
THIBODEAUX: When did that take place?
LEE: Let me see. So it had to be ’72. It had to be in the spring and summer of ’72.
THIBODEAUX: Do you remember the people involved in the production?
LEE: I remember some of them, and they’re all so much older now. (laughs) We’re all so much older now. But Thomas Carter and myself, Doc Lee Jackson, who was from Bastrop, Texas, was a theater major at the time. Leonard Wilson, who was actually the senior amongst us, and it was his directing project that he co-directed with then chairman of the department James Barton. Dottie Nesby played the daughter. Linda—her married name is Alexander because she married a Distinguished Alum, Marcellus Alexander, and they both live in the Washington, DC and Maryland area near Columbia, I think. But Linda played the wife, and Leonard Wilson’s sister, Cynthia Wilson, played the mother—played Mama. Cynthia now teaches in Dallas, I think at the Dallas Magnet and Drama School, has been doing that. She’s been active as an actress and a singer professionally a bunch and doing quite well since we all graduated from here.
I don’t remember the name of the young man who played George Murchison. He wasn’t in the theater department; he was one of those that we recruited from elsewhere on campus, and the two moving men. I think one of them was Russell Oldmixon and the other was a guy named Louis Fancher. I don’t remember the young boy who played the kid. I can’t remember his name, I can see his face. But they were a wonderful group of people—I mean, group of kids to work with. It’s a good production. I say so myself.
THIBODEAUX: What was your role?
LEE: I played the role of Joseph Asagai, who was an African exchange student in the play, who was a suitor for one of the daughters. And the biggest compliment that I got in my career up until then was Lady Bird actually thought I was an actual foreign exchange student from Africa after the play when we talked. I signed her—I gave her my autograph. She was the first person that I ever gave my autograph to. Ever as an actor. So it was a big—it was a lot of fun.
THIBODEAUX: This may not be a very good question. (laughs) I just wanted to ask you to describe the performance, but I’m sure there’s nothing outstanding about—that may be hard to do, but is there anything about the performance that you can share?
LEE: It was hot. It was July. I do remember that, and the president himself was—I mean, she was concerned about him sweating and overheating because I think he’d had a bout with some not so great health in the weeks prior to that. So we were actually sort of told prior to the play that there was a good chance that he wouldn’t stay for the entire evening. But he ended up staying and then coming up on stage and talking to us afterward, so that spoke to, I think, how good we were (laughs) and his commitment to helping for what he did. But I do remember that.
The place was jam-packed and it was hot. And there were Secret Service men all around there saying, “He may not stay,” but he ended up staying for the entire play and then afterwards as well. He actually wrote a check on the spot. He took out his personal checkbook and wrote us a check for several thousand dollars. I remember him saying, “I don’t know what the needs of this group are, but I hope that this will help,” and it’s something that sort of made the Ebony Players valid, (laughs) which gave us some footing for the next season, for the next year when we were able to do another play as well because the money he gave went to the department, but they had to give some of it to us as well. So, somewhat of a victory.
But it was hot. I remember peach groves around that park with huge peaches on them. And I remember while we were setting up this white limo pulled up, and naturally we all crowded around it and it was President Johnson himself. This was before the evening. I guess he was out taking a ride and he came over and said hello to everyone and then pulled off and came back later that evening for the show.
But the play—you know, I didn’t see the play, so that’s funny. (laughs) We did what we’d been doing, and apparently, it was received very well because I know we got a standing ovation, and that place was crowded. It was packed. I mean, it was packed. It was packed. And he had some guests with him who I think were Broadway producers or had been Broadway producers of the original production of the play. So, yeah, it was great. It was great.
THIBODEAUX: Oh, I bet that made you nervous.
LEE: No.
THIBODEAUX: Wow.
LEE: No. (laughs)
THIBODEAUX: What an amazing experience. (laughs)
LEE: Yeah. No, it was. I mean, I think I can appreciate it more now than I could then. The undauntedness of youth and, yeah, yeah. As I look back, I see it for more than what I thought it was at the time. (laughs)
THIBODEAUX: Of the people there, were they all guests of the Johnsons, or was it open to general public?
LEE: I don’t know. I think it was open to the general public. I don’t think the place seats a lot of people. I mean, there aren’t, like—it’s not, like, a thousand-seat venue. Probably a couple of hundred at most. And you know, there were family members from some of the cast and people from the university. That was some of the crowd, but I think it may have been just open to the general public as well there at Johnson City.
THIBODEAUX: Was there a reception afterwards?
LEE: Sort of an informal reception. I don’t think it was something that was planned. I just recall the president coming up on stage and realizing how big a man he was. I mean, huge. This man was just—he was titan-like, if you know what I mean, just his physical stature alone, and he came up on stage and he talked with us. He shook all our hands and spoke with us, and Lady Bird was there and she was very kind and open with all of us. As I said, he wrote that check. But that’s as close to a reception that I can remember having. I’m pretty sure he left not long after that.
THIBODEAUX: Do you remember any comments they made? Is that too many years ago? (laughs)
LEE: You know, I was trying to think about that since we spoke earlier. Other than giving Lady Bird Johnson my autograph—and I jokingly said to her, “I should give you my autograph.” She said, “Well, yeah, you should.” And so I signed it and I remember thinking—I probably said to her, “This is the first autograph I’ve ever given in my life,” and I signed her program. I don’t remember comments though. I just had this sense that they were all very positive and very encouraging for all of us in terms of what we wanted to do with our lives and what we had done that evening, that they were impressed. But I don’t remember any specific sort of commentary or critique.
THIBODEAUX: Was there anyone else that you met that were, I guess, guests of the Johnsons or part of the Johnson administration?
LEE: That evening?
THIBODEAUX: Yes.
LEE: Or that day? Not that I remember, no.
THIBODEAUX: Through your association with the university, have you had any further contact with the Johnson family since then?
LEE: No. No, I haven’t. Well, not long after this event, there was that tragic event that took him away from us.
THIBODEAUX: Um hmm.
LEE: I do recall a closeness to our event to that for some reason that it came, like, right on the heels of when we were there with him, not long after. But, no, I haven’t had any other contact with the Johnson family.
THIBODEAUX: Pat Murdock mentioned one thing. She said it was the first time that, I think, LBJ had been seen with the long hair.
LEE: He did have long hair there, I do remember that, yeah. Yeah.
THIBODEAUX: Was that kind of surprising?
LEE: Yes, it was. We liked it too though. I mean, you know, it was a retired president. And he was at his house and all. So we all kind of thought—it just made him that much more of a kindred spirit for all of us, if you know what I mean. But, yeah, that’s right, it was—I can recall even from the pictures now that he had longer hair. (laughs) Yes, he did.
THIBODEAUX: And he wore it pulled back in a ponytail, or was it that long?
LEE: Well, no. It was probably that long but it wasn’t in a ponytail. It was just below his ears and maybe with a little flip at the end of it down here. I do remember that. I can see that for some reason in my mind’s eye just that it was below his ears and in back. And it was gray, it was white. And the perspiration. The man was sweating. It was really very hot in there because she was trying to get him to take his coat off when he was writing a check. He was writing a check and talking. Huge man. I mean, his stature was just—I was awestruck with just the man’s size.
THIBODEAUX: And you’re tall yourself. So that must have been quite a—
LEE: Oh yeah. No, I knew he was bigger than life. He really was bigger than life, and that’s the biggest thing that stands out for me from that whole experience beyond my first autograph with the first lady. He was really an imposing figure.
THIBODEAUX: I know you did have kind of an association. In 1997 you were made the LBJ Distinguished Alumni at the time.
LEE: Oh, right. Right. Yeah. That’s an honor that I will always hold dear. Because it’s something that he and I share. In fact, oftentimes when I talk about—I say, “Yeah, President Johnson and I are both Distinguished Alums from the university.” That’s special.
THIBODEAUX: I think I’m going to go off the subject for just a couple of questions. I just can’t control myself, and I know you will be probably contacted later on about talking about the university. But there are two things that interested me. You have such a distinguished career, of course, known internationally and nationally as an actor and a writer and director—I couldn’t remember—
LEE: I’ve done a little bit of that.
THIBODEAUX: —and directing. So I was so interested in why you graced the university with your workshops. You’re going to come back and do a little teaching and workshops here.
LEE: Because I can. I’m a teacher at heart. I actually wrote the hundred-year history, the centennial history. There was a presentation that was done at the big gala, a theatrical sort of presentation that I wrote, that I went back and did the research and looked at when this university was still just what they used to call a Chautauqua, which was just a bunch of wagons and tents that pull together and people from miles around came together to share what they knew with each other.
And that eventually developed into the college on the hill, and it was for a long time a teachers college and it turned out teachers. My grandmother was a teacher and my aunt is a teacher—or is a retired teacher. I have a saying in one my plays I wrote about a teacher who declares that teaching is the purest form of love, and I honestly believe that. So, yeah, I’ve always come back to give a little back and in a lot of ways because nobody did when I was here. Nobody that was actually out there doing it in the business every day and working at it ever came back to give us some real honest nuts and bolts about the craft. So, yeah, I’ve always come back just to share the things that I’ve learned.
And I like here a whole lot better than I like Los Angeles. I’ve lived in Los Angeles. I’ve lived in New York. I’ve been around the world, and it suddenly dawned on me that I don’t have to be in any of those places to get a job there anymore. There was a time when I felt like I needed to be in LA in order to get a television job. But I’m realizing now they know where I am. (laughs) So if they want me, they call me. So I don’t have to be in New York to get a Broadway play. And Texas is home, so it’s kind of like coming home. It’s not kind of like coming home, it’s very much like coming home and raising my family here. I have a family. This is familiar. There’s a lot less road rage. (Both laugh)
THIBODEAUX: Oh my, it must be really bad out there.
LEE: Yeah. My work didn’t get me into it a lot, but my wife’s an attorney. There was my mother, she had a three-hour roundtrip commute to work. You know, an hour and a half each way. That’s a tough job just getting to work. (laughs) So I like it here. It’s home, and I love the Hill Country. I’ve always loved it since I went to school here. So, yeah, those are all the incentives. And I still get to go do acting. I still get to go write, not now because we’re on strike. But I still get to do television and movies and Broadway. It’s sort of the best of both worlds now.
THIBODEAUX: You had a very interesting concept to me. I just have not heard it before. So with the workshops or the plays that are produced, they are kind of a visual aid for the writers so they can see what it looks like?
LEE: Yeah. There’s a process involved in writing plays, and I guess in any artwork or whatever, but there’s a process involved. For this particular workshop, we solicit plays from writers all over the world, and last year I read about forty-five or fifty plays there were submitted, and I choose two—two plays and two playwrights.
These are first-draft of their plays. This isn’t a finished product. We don’t want plays that have been produced or published because it’s a work session this week. It’s an opportunity for that writer who sat in a little room by himself or herself and put these characters on a page to have them come off the page from someplace other than inside their mind, so they really have a sense of what’s going to happen with this play when somebody does it. So if they want to move some things around or change some things—and all week they’ve got a professional director, they’ve got at least one professional actor and some student actors from the university, and they have a dramaturge—a professional dramaturge for support and to just see what they have first. And to see how they want to change it, if they need to change it, or if they don’t want to change it that’s okay too. But if they want to go back in to the hotel that Monday night and rewrite the second act and bring that in, then we’ll read that for them. So they can hear that and they can do whatever they want in terms of tweaking or whatever and take suggestions from the cast and from the dramaturge and from the director. And they do a week of that.
Then that weekend the actors will do a script-in-hand public presentation of it for an audience, totally objective audience for the most part but kindred. Nobody with tomatoes or things like that or any hatred for a writer. But just to give the writer a sense of what the plays does outside themselves, so that they can see what works or what’s not doing to work or what has the potential to work or what have you.
Then they get talkback from the audience. After the play is over, I moderate and I get the audience members to say what they liked, not to tell the playwright how to write his or her play but to respond to what they’ve just heard.
And it’s proven to be very helpful. None of the scripts that we’ve done in any of the years when they finished was the same script that they started with. So that’s in terms of development. It’s a great little piece of nurturing that a lot of playwrights don’t get. You can sit in a room and write one, but you’ll never know what happens—really happens with it until you take to that next collaborative phase or that interpretative phase, where someone interprets what you’ve written, what you’ve created. So that’s some of the stuff in the process.
And this year I intend to include high school students. I want to bring them in and just to give them—a high school playwright—to provide them with the opportunity to see what that process is like on a professional level with people who come in and all that they’re doing is working on your play. Because a lot of times you get actors and they’ve got a day job where they’re doing something else, but for an actor to be able to commit and do eight hours a day for six days in a week to your play, that’s rare. That’s very, very rare. So that’s what the conference does.
The conference was intended to serve as a beacon in a sense to—I should tell you the history of that. Do you want to hear all that?
THIBODEAUX: Sure. I think it’s fascinating.
LEE: Well, they invited me to come down. You know I’ve been coming back over the years.
THIBODEAUX: Um hmm.
LEE: And I do master classes and I come in for two or three days and just do a seminar. But they asked me about directing one of my plays for Black History Month. And I said, “Well, I can’t come out and direct a production because that involves, like, four weeks of rehearsal,” and I said, “But how about I come in for a week and we do a reading of one of my plays?” So they said, “Okay. Fine.”
I come in, and we start to cast the play, and the same thing that happened before the Ebony Players came into being, was true then. There were two black majors at the time. I don’t have a play with just two characters in it. (laughs) We couldn’t cast the play, and I pitched a tizzy fit. “It was thirty years ago when I was here—“ This was true. “Thirty years ago, and now this department is ten times the size it was thirty years ago, but you’ve still only got two black majors here. So your recruiting—well, what kind of recruiting are you doing?” And nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah. I just went off.
And we went across campus, went to Austin and found some people. We did the play. It came out very well. It was a huge success.
And then the next week I get a phone call from the chairman of the department saying, “You made me lose sleep.” And I said, “Good.” He said, “Are you willing to do anything to help?” (laughs) And I said, “Okay.” I’m out here now. “What?” He said, “Would you be willing to serve as artistic director of the Texas State Black Playwrights?” I think he said, “Black Playwrights Conference.” And I said, “What is that?” He said, “Whatever you want it to be.” And there’s a workshop—a conference up at Yale University, called the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference. I’ve been there as an actor. I’ve submitted things there as a writer. I know Lloyd Richards, who ran Yale drama. And that’s the paradigm for what I’m doing.
It’s that process of what I call finding a play, and I’ve done enough plays as an actor and as a writer to be able to mentor other writers and pull together—and producers—and pull together the necessary resources to assist the playwright in taking their play to the next level of its development. So, yeah, it’s been fun. It has been fun. It’s been rewarding. And it’s getting better every year. The caliber of writers that are submitting things—and I literally read forty-five plays last year and some from as far away as Spain and Puerto Rico and Cuba and Mexico and London. So it’s approaching an international level but it’s also a big part of what I want it to be.
And I’m working toward making it even more of a conference, even more of a place where kindred spirits come to exchange ideas about the craft. The mission statement that I’ve created is, “To study the craft. To nurture the craftsman, and to celebrate the work.” That’s the mission of this conference, and hopefully, five years from now that it’s the spot that writers the world over want to converge for a fortnight to talk about the state of the art, the state of the art of playwrighting and to celebrate some work.
THIBODEAUX: That is such an excellent idea. I remember you making a comment—I may have messed it up—but you said once, I think, that acting was teaching.
LEE: Oh, I like to think I teach with all my work. Yeah.
THIBODEAUX: So for your writing and your acting and everything you do is teaching. That’s such an interesting way to look at the arts. I had not thought of that before.
LEE: It’s the way I look at—as a parent. I find that that’s my job. It is. Above and beyond just providing, and I think one of the main things I can provide for my family is what I know. That’s why people—friends of mine sometimes get gifts for Christmas that are stories that I’ve written or copies of plays that I’ve written. That’s the greatest gift that I have to give, I think, is from myself and what I know. An acting teacher told me, said, “Anytime—” and my grandmother always said this. “If you’re going to learn something, learn it so you can teach it. Then you know you know it.” You know you know it. Yeah, inside out.
THIBODEAUX: Well, backing up a little bit. What happened to the Ebony Players?
LEE: I’ve been asking that question. They’ve gone through some changes. They no longer are part of the theater department, and I’m certain that that’s connected with the lack of numbers, that someone latched onto it as a performing group and they’ve been doing some other things. They were doing a soap opera kind of that I’ve heard of. They went through a (laughs) revised spelling, E-b-o-n-i, (Thibodeaux laughs) at one point, Players.
But now that I’m back on campus, I actually have started to set in motion getting in touch with the present members just to try to pull them back into the fold of the theater department if I can. Their events have been sort of sporadic and there’s been no continuity to what they’ve been doing. I’d like to try to bring them around to a little bit more permanent status, a higher visibility. And we didn’t come up with mission statements and things like that when they were created at the time, and we actually never thought that they would last beyond us. So the fact that the name has stayed around though the intents and the work and stuff have sort of deviated from what we might’ve done, me being back now, I think I can refocus it. I hope to. I hope to be able to, and once again make it something that’s a feather in the university’s cap, something that’s a little higher visibility.
THIBODEAUX: That would be an excellent idea.
Well, I think that’s about all the questions that I have. Is there anything else that you’d like to add that I’ve left out?
LEE: No. Nothing I can think of.
I know the thrust of this was that visit to President Johnson and his ranch with that. To say that that was just a thrill is an understatement. It was an honor. It’s something that I’ve always clung to, and in the back of my mind I always remind myself that not many people did that. Not many people got that opportunity, and not just with him as president, with any president. To do a command performance for your nation’s leader pretty much in his living room for all intents and (laughs) purposes which it just made it that much more intimate, that much more special, that much more real. It’s something that I will forever cherish and I will forever hold real dear to my heart because it was special.
THIBODEAUX: Thank you, Mr. Lee. I’ve certainly enjoyed this.
LEE: My pleasure.
(End of interview)