S. Denise O’Neal, playwright and executive director of Shabach Enterprise, says a short play is not unlike a particularly captivating television ad.
“It’s like a commercial where you capture the audience and then you solve the problem in a very short period of time,” says O’Neal.
You can catch eight ten-minute plays – all from Black playwrights – when Shabach Enterprise presents the Fade To Black Reading Series this January at The MATCH. The series, now in its seventh season, is an offshoot of their annual Fade To Black Play Festival, which occurs every summer.
According to O’Neal, the “overflow of amazing plays” submitted for the Fade to Black Play Festival led to the creation of the reading series. So now, from each year’s submission call – which generates 150 to 200 scripts – ten plays are chosen for the June festival and another eight to ten for January’s reading series.
The plays selected for this year’s reading series include a ghostly encounter with the civil rights struggle in Toma Lynn Smith’s “Voting While Negro,” Krystle Dellihue’s Arthur Ashe-inspired “Match Point,” which touches on a time before the tennis great revealed his AIDS diagnosis to the public; and Dr. Carlton Molette’s “I’m Here to Pick Up Monica,” about a grandfather who meets some resistance trying to pick up his grandchild from school.
“This play makes it clear that the secretary is racially motivated, and that’s why she doesn’t want to bring the child out,” says O’Neal. “She really is hesitant to do it because of the man’s race.”
The series will also feature works from Cris Eli Blak, Gregory S. Carr and Velvia Keithley, as well as a first-time effort from Nana Konadu Cann, titled “Wash and Go,” and returning playwright Kimberly Ridgeway’s “Double Standard,” in which a recent lover confronts a woman while she’s on a date with another man – or so it seems.
In O’Neal’s view, the plays featured in June’s performance series “come alive” with the addition of scenery, costumes and makeup. A play selected for the reading series, however, doesn’t necessarily benefit from “any extra support.”
“It’s good enough for the audience to envision it without all of the scenery and costumes,” says O’Neal. “It stands on its own two feet.”
Though the scripts stand on their own, the reading series benefits playwrights who may need to hear their play so it can be further developed and workshopped.
“Some of the plays do need development, but they’re good enough to have made the cut,” says O’Neal. “We try our best to give the playwright as much support as we can because we want to make sure their rendering on stage is the best it can be. For African-American playwrights, especially independent ones, they just have not had that [support] as a mainstay.”
In addition to O’Neal sharing advice and pointers with the playwrights, they are paired with a director to ensure that when the play hits the stage, it’s the best it can possibly be. Because many Black playwrights have to produce their own work, O’Neal says they often lack such a community of support.
“They don’t have the people in the mainstream theaters that believe enough in their product to produce it. They may have a situation where the theater doesn’t quite understand the culture, or that theater – probably more than not – does not feel like their play will bring in enough patrons to see the work,” explains O’Neal. “So, what we have seen and tried to help correct is the ability for the playwright to be seen in the best light so that no one can say we can’t find any Black playwrights.”
O’Neal adds, “We bring you ten of them each time we do a festival. We’ll bring you [another] eight for the reading series this year.”
Shabach Enterprise is on the verge of bringing even more African-American artistry to Houston, as the organization announced in November the inaugural Fade To Black Arts Festival scheduled for June 8 to 14, 2025.
O’Neal says she started pushing the concept of a biennial, city-wide festival back in 2022, right as Fade to Black concluded their tenth season.
“I was at a crossroads personally, as I always am,” says O’Neal with a laugh. “I was like, ‘We’ve got to do more. What do we do? I want to leave a legacy.’”
Following that year’s National Black Theatre Festival in North Carolina, O’Neal lamented the fact that nothing like it exists in Texas; in fact, there’s nothing like it in the entire southern region of the United States. Inspired, O’Neal figured the state of Texas, and Houston specifically, “would be the perfect place to start a great arts festival.”
“I said, just like starting the Fade to Black Festival, it’s up to me,” says O’Neal.
O’Neal began reaching out to the city’s arts organizations with a proposition: Partner with me, and we will introduce a different demographic of audience members to your organization.
“I said, ‘All you have to do is commit to creating an African-American performance. It can be music, film, poetry, theater, whatever you want to do,’” recalls O’Neal. “They jumped immediately. It was not even a thought. It was an easy ask.”
Though their partner list is still growing, the Alley Theatre, The Ensemble Theatre, Stages, Main Street Theater, Houston Ebony Opera, Houston Grand Opera and Houston Symphony are already on board – to name a few. Even The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, which O’Neal says she didn’t initially contact because it’s a rental facility, offered to sponsor the festival’s kickoff celebration.
“Just everybody doing a little bit here and there will create this amazing week,” says O’Neal.
Though O’Neal says that almost everyone she’s spoken to about the festival has been excited, “there’s always that little one percent that needs it to be proven successful first.”
“I think that they speak and unknowingly project their fears, project their reservations, because they don’t know of the journey…They don’t know that we’ve been working on it since 2022,” says O’Neal. “[But] we have stayed in a smaller lane for the last 11 years. When is it time to do something big?”
Something big is undeniable on the way but, in the meantime, the focus is on the Fade To Black Reading Series. Like the play festival and soon-to-come arts festival, O’Neal says the reading series offers all Houstonians a unique opportunity.
“The playwrights are writing about the human experience,” says O’Neal. “It’s a cool thing because it allows [audiences] an opportunity to tap into African-American culture and experience how well these writers write.”
The Fade To Black Reading Series will be performed at 8 p.m. Friday, January 5; 8 p.m. Saturday, January 6, with an artist Q&A immediately following the performance; and 3 p.m. Sunday, January 7, at The MATCH, 3400 Main. (A pay-what-you-can, invited dress rehearsal is also scheduled for 8 p.m. Thursday, January 4.) For more information, visit fadetoblackfest.com. $30-$40.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
