Sowing the Seeds of Change (One Theater Seat at a Time)

Celebration Arts founder James Wheatley (right) and artistic director James Ellison at the troupe’s black box theater in November

WWhen I first see James Ellison III at the Celebration Arts theater, he’s in his 80s—or so it seems.

Ellison totters on stage with a cane playing Thurgood Marshall in George Stevens Jr.’s Thurgood, a one-man play about the life of the first Black Supreme Court justice. It’s a role originated by James Earl Jones in 2006 and inhabited by Laurence Fishburne on Broadway two years later. Here in Sacramento, on an unseasonably mild October night, it’s Ellison’s turn. After delivering an opening soliloquy with a tremor in his hand and voice, he gently sets aside the cane and poof, he is 40 years younger—the tremors gone, his spine upright, his gestures quick and decisive. As he darts back and forth across decades for the next two hours, Ellison uses his body and breath to open wormholes that take the sold-out audience of 100 enthralled souls on a fantastic voyage back in time, owning the role as if it were written just for him. James Earl who?

The audience rewards Ellison’s performance with a standing ovation. After the show, he stands by the theater door, shaking the hand of every audience member filing out, posing for pictures with a pair of teens who will doubtless from now on want to grow up to be a) an actor or b) a Supreme Court justice or c) why not both?

This young actor, you might think, is going places. Except he isn’t—at least not literally. He’s staying put as Celebration Arts’ new artistic director, having taken over that role in January 2023 from his mentor James Wheatley, who founded the theater company in 1986. The company’s 2023 theater season ended with a certain elegant symmetry: In October, the recently retired Wheatley came back to direct one final show, with Ellison, his protege and replacement, in the title role of Thurgood. Then in December, Ellison directed A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 masterpiece about race and redlining, to close out a season whose theme was “Overcoming.”

Ellison, 41, transformed himself into a Southern gentleman twice his age to play the first Black Supreme Court justice in Thurgood last fall. (Photo by Jonathan Martinez, Courtesy of Celebration Arts)

In keeping with the theater’s mission to celebrate Black culture—elevating and educating audiences and players alike—the 2024 season will be titled “Black Girl Magic,” featuring five plays written and directed by Black women, including an iconic classic, some contemporary hits, and one homegrown original. (Following the season’s end, Celebration will conclude 2024 with another original, the holiday play Tinker the Toy Maker.) Even as Celebration maintains its status as an amateur theater in Sacramento, it punches well above its weight. Celebration Arts alumni have gone on to great things—like Danielle Moné Truitt, who stars in Law & Order: Organized Crime, and Candace Nicholas-Lippman from the Starz series Blindspotting—and in 2024, an unprecedented infusion of cash via a state grant and a partnership with the St.Hope family of nonprofits in Oak Park are positioning this small but mighty company to reach new heights.

I would not have recognized Ellison, meeting him a few days later in his office at Celebration Arts. The octogenarian justice’s regal bearing is gone, replaced by a vital young man with an athlete’s bouncy, loose-limbed lope and an easy, genuine smile that starts in his eyes and breaks frequently into a grin. He is 41, but could—and does—play in his 20s.

Ellison grew up in the Meadowview neighborhood of South Sacramento, watching Silver Spoons, Diff’rent Strokes and Webster. “I wanted to ride on a train, to go down a laundry chute like Webster did, and I thought I had to be on TV to do that stuff,” he says. As a senior at Valley High School, he played Mr. Dowling in Tom Jones. “I was like, ‘Oh snap, this is different,’ ” he says. “I caught the theater bug.”

After high school, Ellison took a few classes at Cosumnes River College just to get cast in their plays. Getting a first role outside of a scholastic setting is hard for any actor, but especially a Black actor. As Ellison recalls, he didn’t consider B Street Theatre and Sacramento Theatre Company as possibilities for someone at his level, and Capital Stage hadn’t launched yet. When a friend told Ellison about Celebration Arts, he picked up the phone and called the theater at 1 a.m., expecting to get a recorded information message—but Wheatley himself picked up. Ellison assumed he must be at the theater at all hours, but the phone number for the company was Wheatley’s home phone line. Wheatley invited the eager youngster to come down to the theater, then at 45th and D in East Sacramento, to audition for the company’s 2003 production of Jon Klein’s road trip comedy T Bone N Weasel.

Wheatley had a unique process. Unlike most directors, who call actors in to audition one at a time, Wheatley assembled all of them in the theater together, watching each other’s readings—the better to learn from one another. Eyeing the competition, Ellison remembers thinking, “I’m way too young for this. I can’t do this.” He assumed another actor would get the part. But Ellison got the call to play T Bone. The role earned him a leading male nomination for an Elly Award (named for arts patron and former McClatchy Newspapers president Eleanor McClatchy)—the erstwhile local version of a Tony Award, annually bestowed by the Sacramento Area Regional Theatre Alliance until 2020. In 2007, he won his first Elly for Topdog/Underdog, and in 2009, The Sacramento Bee praised his performance in Sizwe Banzi Is Dead.

Ellison moved to Los Angeles in 2010 to have a go at film and television, but he never took to the constant auditioning, and he missed the deep character work of stage acting, so in 2015, he moved back to Sacramento for good, just in time to rejoin Celebration Arts’ community at a critical juncture. In 2017, the organization lost its lease on the D Street space they’d called home for 20 years—a neighboring gym has since expanded to take over most of the building. This was a do-or-die moment, and Ellison recognized it. “It was time for the next generation to step up,” he says. So he did, showing up for Celebration—and for Wheatley—by helping out with everything from running lights to running errands even as the future looked uncertain, actions that made the line of succession clear. Longtime Celebration supporter and dance teacher Pepper Von even started referring to them as James and James Jr. “When I saw Wheatley pass the torch to James Jr., that really sang to my heart, because I see the passion he has for Celebration,” Von said. “The legacy will continue.”

There’s no place like home: Ellison, who grew up in South Sacramento, tried his hand at Hollywood, but came back to the capital city to rededicate himself to life in the theater. In December, he directed his first play, A Raisin in the Sun.

Just as Celebration’s props and lights were being moved into a storage unit, the B Street Theatre relocated to its new $29 million digs at the Sofia Tsakopoulos Center for the Arts on Capitol Avenue, leaving its former home at 28th and B streets available. The Society Church moved into the former mainstage building, while Celebration leased the former children’s theater space in December of 2017. The company went from performing in a 50-seat theater to 100 seats. It had no problem filling them.

In earlier decades, Celebration’s little-theater-that-could operation chugged along with five figures of annual revenue, drawing roughly half from ticket sales and half from gifts and grants. (By comparison, B Street Theatre raised more than $4 million in 2022, with $875,000 in ticket sales.) Since 2013, Celebration’s revenue has grown overall, according to its public IRS filings, and stayed in the low six figures despite the pandemic. In 2022, Celebration hired a new marketing director as its first paid employee, and then in 2023, a windfall arrived: a $714,000 grant from the State of California, to be disbursed sometime in 2024. The theater facility itself will see capital improvements like new sound and light equipment, and the rest will go to fund staff—who will then have to stimulate further growth to pay for themselves moving forward. From the grant, Ellison will finally begin to draw a stipend; to date he, like Wheatley, has been a Celebration volunteer, earning his living acting in professional theater and commercials and modeling. (If you missed him on stage in Murder on the Orient Express at Sacramento Theatre Company, you might catch him in an ad for Burlington Coat Factory or Raley’s.)

“The purpose of the organization is to provide training opportunities for people in theater, dance and music,” reads Celebration Arts’ original mission statement, framed on Ellison’s desk. But he has even more expansive ambitions for Celebration Arts, envisioning a company with a national profile as “the place for the Black experience, through theater, dance, music,” he says. But he also thinks strategically and locally about that growth, offering comedy shows and poetry nights as lures to attract new theater audiences. “I might give them a discount,” Ellison says, “or give them free [theater] tickets for showing up to the poetry: Now come to the play. Come see what we do here.” Ellison also plans to schedule scholastic weekday matinees aimed at attracting young audiences. (Celebration has run its Kids’ Time drama workshops for grade-school children almost since its inception.)

The company’s profile received another boost last year in one of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods: As part of a new partnership with St. Hope, founded by former Mayor Kevin Johnson in Oak Park, Celebration mounted its 2023 season-opener production—Direct from Death Row: The Scottsboro Boys—at the 200-seat Guild Theater in February for Black History Month, and patrons lined up down the block to get in on opening night. “You don’t really see that in Sacramento theater,” Ellison says, grinning. “A line. To see theater. This is crazy.”

Even crazier? While the season opener broke attendance records for a Celebration Arts production, Thurgood broke them again with its successful run of performances.

Sacramento got lucky the day James Wheatley moved to town to take a job as an administrator with the state Department of Rehabilitation. It was 1972, and the amateur singer and dancer was about to change the Black performing arts scene and beyond, raising the creative consciousness of the Black community and the racial consciousness of a theater community that had yet to reflect its famously diverse melting pot of a city on stage. Fifty-one years later, he’s sitting with me at a kitchen table on Celebration’s stage, surrounded by props for the upcoming production of A Raisin in the Sun, telling me his origin story. It is also Celebration’s origin story.

Wheatley’s distinguished face has gravitas, and he carries himself with the erect posture and leonine stillness of a person who is used to a great deal of authority. Actors I spoke to later told me he gives very little direction, which he confirms. Wheatley merely nudges people until they realize they have the power to do great things. “It’s more than just telling them, ‘Take two steps that way,’ ” he says. “What’s on your character’s mind? That will tell you where to stand, when to sit.” Wheatley is literally the man behind the curtain.

He grew up one of seven kids in Los Angeles, where his mom was a homemaker and his dad a mail carrier, and his grandfather worked for the city in street maintenance. Wheatley was steeped in artistic opportunities, from community dance classes to the church choir. In the 1960s, when he was in college, he joined the Young Saints, a burgeoning local vocal group that ended up playing Tahoe, Reno and Las Vegas with the singers backing up lead performers. “It was with big stars like Danny Kaye,”he says. “We didn’t play lounges—always big rooms.” Wheatley earned a graduate degree in vocal arts from USC’s School of Music (now the Thornton School of Music), but he still followed the family tradition of working a government day job like his dad and his grandfather. He loved that career path as well, until the day he retired in 2002.

James Wheatley, 83, has traded in treading the boards for a walk in the woods, retiring to his forested property in Auburn. “This morning I woke up and there were deer in the yard,” he says with a smile.

To Wheatley, performing regularly while holding down a 9-to-5 was no sweat. Or just the right amount of sweat. So when he arrived in Sacramento and found no scene to plug into, he organized his own recitals. Pretty soon he formed a dance and singing group, connecting with people who wanted to join him. Wheatley thought, these Sacramentans didn’t know what they didn’t know, and they needed instruction to help guide their performing endeavors. “We got a space over at the First English Church in Oak Park.” Wheatley says. He had never taught dance or voice, but what the heck? No one else stepped up to do it. “I had no idea where it would go,” he recalls. “I just knew I had people who wanted to learn something, so I said ‘OK, let’s try it.’ ”

Then in 1986, after years of workshops and performances, the troupe was invited to audition for a government-sponsored goodwill tour to the Philippines. They got the gig and flew to Manila. “We were like stars over there,” he says. “When we landed at the airport, they had a brass band to entertain us, and motorcycle escorts everywhere we went. The biggest thing for me was, we got the recognition that we were good enough.” Fittingly, upon their return, Wheatley learned that the incorporation papers he had filed prior to the trip had been approved, and Celebration Arts was officially born in June 1986. Earlier that year, the group had expanded to include the theater arts when it mounted its first stage play, a production of Samm-Art Williams’ Tony-nominated 1979 comedy, Home.

The momentum Wheatley created had already begun attracting new talent. Pepper Von, the longtime Celebration supporter, was a veteran professional dancer touring the world in the 1970s and ’80s. After a career that included dancing with the Sacramento Ballet, Von decided to form his own dance company, and at the time Wheatley had the only Black troupe in town, so he reached out for advice. “He said, ‘Tell me what you want to do and I will support it. We’ll do it together,’ ” Von remembers. Young performers in the arts are used to authority figures acting as gatekeepers, dispensing rejection. Not Wheatley. “He embraced me like he was my dance dad,” Von adds, marveling still at Wheatley’s open generosity toward a stranger.

They put on a dance concert together, and Von stayed in Sacramento. (He connects with me today from his 7,500-square-foot Step 1 Dance and Fitness Studio in Natomas, where Von and a rainbow of instructors teach everything from tap and jazz to hip hop.) Von also worked with then-State Senator (and current Sacramento mayor) Darrell Steinberg’s office and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation on gang intervention, using dance to help divert youths from gang life (and prospective prison life) by teaching them how to express anger through art rather than violence. These efforts turned many of them to a different path—another ripple from the Wheatley effect.

“You remember those bumper stickers from back in the day that read ‘WWJD’?” Von asks, alluding to the What would Jesus do? meme that was everywhere in the ’90s. Von cracks a grin. “Well, my WWJD would always be, ‘What would James do?’ When I find myself in situations, I think of his calm manner, his depth of consideration, compassion and resilience. That tells you what kind of inspiration he has been, and is to this day.”

Wheatley in a 1998 Celebration arts production of Uncle Bends: A Home-Cooked Negro Narrative. In the one-person show, Wheatley played nine characters, both male and female. (Photo by Larry Dalton, Courtesy of Celebration Arts)

“James is such a dignified human being. You have immediate respect when you meet him,” says Jerry Montoya, the executive producer at B Street Theatre. “It’s like, ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir.’ ” Montoya also credits Celebration Arts with helping increase the diversity of casts and programming at his and other Sacramento-area theater companies, adding, “They have always had respect in town. They’re unique, and the work they’re doing is serious. It has never been seen as just a community theater. They are a step above that.”

Some who came through the Celebration pipeline have gone on to illustrious careers, like Danielle Moné Truitt, who has starred as Sgt. Ayanna Bell opposite Christopher Meloni’s Elliot Stabler in the NBC series Law & Order: Organized Crime since 2021. By sheer coincidence, Truitt and Ellison co-starred in that high school production of Tom Jones at Valley High all those years ago and are still friends. Truitt was studying theater at Sacramento State when her professor Linda Goodrich sent her to Wheatley, who cast her in the Broadway-style revue The All Night Strut! and in dramas like The Colored Museum and Sisters.

“If it weren’t for Celebration Arts, I wouldn’t have had a platform early on for my acting,” Truitt says from her home in Los Angeles, where she is preparing to return to work after the resolution of the Screen Actors Guild strike. “I needed a place where I could have the time on stage to hone my craft. It’s always good to develop your skills with something you can relate to, and I’m happy I was able to develop doing Black theater. Colorblind casting is cool, but when you’re a Black woman, sometimes you just want to play a role that was written for a Black woman.”

Truitt went on to perform at mainstream theaters soon after graduating, eventually becoming a regular company member at B Street. “The first play I did at B Street, James Wheatley was in the play with me,” she says, laughing. “Theaters in the city relied on James a lot over the years to find Black actors. Having the presence of Celebration Arts has definitely helped.”

Christopher Meloni’s detective Elliot Stabler answers to Celebration Arts alum Danielle Moné Truitt’s tough-as-they-come Sgt. Ayanna Bell in Law & Order: Organized Crime. The co-stars are pictured here in a scene with Kelvin Han Yee, who portrayed Captain Andrew Lin. (Photo by Peter Kramer/NBC)

Truitt returned in triumph in June 2022 to debut her one-woman show (co-created with Sacramento playwright Anthony D’Juan) 3: Black Girl Blues, which she is currently looking to take to New York—the next “B’” Street being Broadway, perhaps. “But [B Street Theatre] didn’t discover me,” Truitt says. “Celebration Arts has definitely helped the theaters in this city recognize that there are talented and gifted people of color in this city who can work at their theaters.”

Today, casts all around town are salted with Celebration Arts alums: Just last year, the 31-year-old actress, playwright, filmmaker and stage director Imani Mitchell made the rounds, performing lead roles in Jump at B Street, Clyde’s at Capital Stage and The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time at Sacramento Theatre Company, while Ellison starred in B Street’s production of Nathan Louis Jackson’s family drama, Broke-ology, about two adult brothers clashing over how to deal with their elderly father. “They didn’t promote it as a Black play; they just promoted it as a play,” Ellison says of B Street’s marketing approach. “I loved that. And we had a standing ovation every performance. More than once, after the show I’d hear the [white] subscribers say, I’ve been coming here for years and this is the best show I’ve seen.’ ”

Wheatley, too, always made time to act. Reviewing his 2019 turn in Between Riverside and Crazy, longtime Sacramento Bee theater critic Jim Carnes wrote in the Sacramento Press: “James Wheatley. James Wheatley. James Wheatley. You can’t say his name enough nor praise his performance at Capital Stage too highly.”

Like his mentor, Ellison is happy to be the man behind the curtain. He will be yielding the stage to his female colleagues for Celebration’s 2024 “Black Girl Magic” season, which will open with a fresh reimagining of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 drama and dance-infused “choreopoem,” for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, to be staged Feb. 2-25 at St. Hope’s Guild Theater. The play is a touchstone for Celebration Arts, which has produced it several times over the years, once with a cast of dancers, once with a cast of older women, once virtually during the Covid lockdown. This version will be directed by longtime Celebration board member Voress Franklin, herself a five-time Elly Award winner, who has watched Ellison”s rise keenly. “His mother is like a sister to me, and he calls me auntie because I’ve known him all his life,” she says. “I’m proud of what he’s doing with Celebration Arts, taking it in a different direction.”

Actors Donald Lacy III and Jasmine Washington rehearse for Celebration Arts’ 2023 season closer, A Raisin in the Sun.

Franklin first saw for colored girls with the original cast when she was a teen, and vowed to be in it one day. Which she has been—seven times (including five full productions and two staged readings). Having played in it at various ages herself—and now working under a creative director she knew in diapers—Franklin’s take will emphasize the phases of life. “I’m hoping I can pull together a cast between the ages of 18 and 99, because there’s so much wisdom,” she says. “I’m 68 now. I’m not the person I was at 18, or at 30. But you can learn from a young person, just like you can learn from an old person.”

The next play in the season will be written and directed by Imani Mitchell, the multitalented Celebration Arts veteran. Zora and Langston—which will have its world premiere on the Celebration mainstage March 1–17—is Mitchell’s debut as a playwright, and tells the story of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’ brief and tumultuous friendship, set in the Harlem Renaissance. Mitchell and others say they would like to see audiences continue to grow more diverse, too. She remembers a moment last year, when she was starring in Pulitzer-winning Black playwright Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s, a play about a multiracial group of ex-cons working at a truck stop, at Capital Stage. Mitchell admits that she felt a twinge of doubt, looking out at the mostly white audience, as to whether or not the play’s lingo and lived Black experience were really landing. “I wondered, ‘Am I just a spectacle?’ ” she says. “ ‘Is this character really being understood, or am I just here for show?’ ”

Celebration itself draws upon that devoted theater base; I saw plenty of retirement-age white people in the audience at Thurgood. But the overall demographic was a melting pot, and the experience of seeing Black history amongst a majority Black, yet racially diverse, audience felt important—and right. Even as mainstream stages and audiences diversify, it’s that ability to tell Black stories without question or compromise that makes Celebration Arts essential.

Going into last season, for instance, Wheatley tapped Mitchell to direct Aleshea Harris’ timely What To Send Up When It Goes Down, a searingly topical play from 2018 that addresses the emotional and cultural toll of racially charged violence. “In the beginning of the play,” Mitchell says, “we invited the whole audience on stage to participate in this circle ritual, where people step into the circle if certain statements apply to them like, ‘Have you been a victim of police violence? Have you known someone who has been?’ ” The play continues with a series of vignettes speaking to these issues, followed by emotional personal stories from the audience. “I can’t even really call it a play,” Mitchell adds, likening the show to a therapy session.

Maasai Mack, 7, studies his script during a rehearsal break for A Raisin in the Sun.

The official “Black Girl Magic” season is rounded out by three more powerhouse plays: Suzan-Lori Parks’ tale of sibling rivalry Topdog/Underdog, hot off a 2023 Tony win for best revival, this June; Nottage’s polemical drama Mud, River, Stone in August, and the early Nottage work Crumbs from the Table of Joy this October. The company will end the season on a note of hard-earned holiday levity with Tinker the Toy Maker, an original play co-written by Ellison and Niyah Moore.

That #BlackGirlMagic emanating from Celebration Arts reaches far beyond the mainstage, though, with creators and projects fostered at Celebration taking flight elsewhere in the coming year. Moore, a romance novelist who has been published by Simon & Schuster and has 50 titles in print (and in this very small world, was also friends with Truitt and Ellison at Valley High), adapted her book Major Jazz into a play that had a staged reading at Celebration Arts in 2023. Later this year, Moore will direct a full staging of the adaptation at Cosumnes River College. (She also served as Ellison’s assistant director on Raisin.)

Sitting in her living room under a portrait of the pioneering, Oscar-nominated Black actress and singer Dorothy Dandridge, Moore extols the unlimited potential of “Black Girl Magic.” “Anything you put your mind to, you can do,” she explains. “It’s so fitting, because a lot of times, [as women] we’re not given that type of praise. We’re diminished in a room. So when you hear ‘Black Girl Magic’ it’s like, ‘Shine—shine bright.’ ”

Magic is hard work, of course. On a Tuesday night in October, Ellison and his actors are beginning to block out a scene for A Raisin in the Sun. They’re still at the “Do I come in now?” and “Should I sit or stand?” stage of rehearsal. A precocious 10-year-old named Elton Mitchell—who is sharing the role of Travis Younger with fellow Kids’ Time graduate Maasai Mack—keeps saying his line early. Every time he does, Ellison smiles, bemused, and pats him on the shoulders, the very essence of relaxed patience. He doesn’t have to ask, “What would James do?” Because he already knows.