“We may be Naptown, but we’re not asleep.” The flame in Ben Rose’s eyes grows bright when he talks about the performing arts in Indianapolis and his role as the founding artistic director of the new Indianapolis Black Theater Company housed at The District Theatre on Massachusetts Avenue.
The 52-year-old Garfield Park resident brings more than 20 years of acting, directing and producing experience to the job. He took on leading roles at the Phoenix Theatre under his mentor, the late Bryan Fonseca, created the Black-n-Brown Soulidarity Festival, and runs his own media production company, The Identity Complex. The Indianapolis Black Theater Company is an equity theater, which means that it will support artists by negotiating wages and working conditions and providing benefits such as insurance and pensions.
We sat down at Tea’s Me Cafe to learn more about his plan to create more local and national opportunities for Black performing artists, his first acting role in fifth grade, his self-care practices, and the contemporary Black stories he wants to help bring to life when the theater opens in the spring.
“Our story is not just a trauma story,” he says. “There are stories that are empowering to people, that make them dream.”
Q. Let’s start by learning a little bit about you personally. Where are you coming from and where are you going?
I was born in Indianapolis and have spent most of my adult life here – this year marks 30 years. I was adopted and raised in Tipton County, so I grew up in a small farm town that used to be a sundown town.
I went to Bloomington for school. I was double majoring in English and psychology (at Indiana University), but I dropped out thinking I was going to write a bestselling novel. Nobody ever pulled me aside to warn me of how competitive and difficult that would be, so I had a steep learning curve.
I went down a lot of different paths to find Black community. I joined a Black church and wanted to be a preacher. I also studied Islam and Buddhism. I joined a Black fraternity.
Over the last 20 years, I’ve been on this path, meeting and forming relationships with people in Indianapolis through theater and community projects, and working with the Westside Community Development Corporation. And I’ve made a living over the last 20 years as a commercial videographer and photographer.
Q. What are some early experiences that brought you to this field?
The first play I ever did was in fifth grade. We did “The Jungle Book.” I was the only Black kid in this town, and everybody thought I was typecast when they cast me as Mowgli. They were mad. But I never got into theater in high school. I never wanted to be in plays like “Oklahoma” or “Our Town.”
I was playing sports, but I was in a band. I was a drummer. It was in me, you know, that love of performing. And I was writing about my life. I once took my ex-wife to an open mic night for musicians at the Jazz Kitchen. I’d never performed my poetry for an audience, but I asked the owner between sets if I could get some of the musicians to play with me.
At first, he was flat-out like, “No.” But he saw the look on my face. I think he could tell I was so passionate.
So, I asked a guitarist, a singer and a drummer if they could play some acid jazz. It was magical. It just charged me in a way that made me want to start performing.
I started going to open mics and performing poetry, and I eventually got a role in August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running,” at the Phoenix Theatre, playing a character who was deaf and mute, sitting at a table and eating beans. I didn’t have any lines, but they figured I could emote because I was a poet.
Eventually, one of the lead actors dropped out, and I begged for the role of Wolf. David Allen Anderson, the play’s director, gave it to me. I primarily worked with the Phoenix from then on. We were always doing new, cutting-edge stories about Black and Brown people like “Topdog/Underdog,” which resonated strongly with me.
Q. What have your experiences been like in Indianapolis’ Black theater community, and how will those experiences shape your vision for the new Black equity theater?
At the time that I was coming up doing theater, the Black community really wasn’t going in great numbers to professional equity houses to see theater. They were going to community shows at somebody’s church or in a gymnasium. It was mostly white audiences, so I wasn’t feeling like I was getting to perform for my community.
Part of my vision is to join these different segments of the Black theater community – from people who love gospel and musical theater, to companies like Freetown Village putting on historical works, to people like Deborah Asante (of Asante Art Institute of Indianapolis), who’s been training kids through musicals and original plays for 30 years.
You’ve got people working with paying equity houses like Indiana Repertory Theatre and Beef & Boards, and people who move between all these segments. So, I see this as an opportunity for a contemporary Black theater company to build alliances with the existing ecosystem by bringing greater visibility and more paid opportunities to Black performing artists.
I want to reach out to Black theaters in other cities. I want to start residency exchange programs so that they can send their people here and we’ll send our people there. One of the things I did in my career was get out of town to perform where people aren’t just your friends clapping because they like you, but because you really had something to give in that performance.
This new company is both supported by and independent of The District Theater. That gives it the ability to travel and be whatever it wants to be, wherever it needs to be, which is important because it’s a Black-led space.
Q. What are some things that you want to bring to Indianapolis through this equity house?
I want to bring a couple of big-name actors in to do productions and host some workshops. The goal is to support and inspire local talent and to give people a place to grow their skills to the level that you see in some of the bigger markets.
I also want to encourage people to imagine the Black community of the future. Right now, we are rediscovering the wealth that has been the Black community, specifically Indianapolis, around the turn of the century, up through the 1950s and ’60s. We had our own Black Renaissance.
I want to produce contemporary theater, to energize people through what’s happening in neighborhoods now, because not everybody’s going to be energized by the past. There are plays out there that are about the prison pipeline, plays about hip hop culture.
And our story is not just a trauma story. There are stories that are empowering to people, that make them dream.
Q. What’s a story that you’ve been dying to tell?
I think it’s time for us to have that hard and awkward conversation about gatekeeping and colorism within the community. It’s a tricky ground for me, being a person of mixed ethnicity.
That we try to tell other people whether they belong in a community, or an organization, or a race or ethnicity is problematic for people that don’t fit neatly into what people say is normal. I’ve been dying to talk about exclusion within our own community.
There’s an infinite number of stories yet to be told about the Black community and I have a firm interest in supporting new writers and their exploration of saying something authentic.
Q. What are some things that you do to take care of yourself?
I was a single dad for 20 years. I’ve got four kids, but I raised my two oldest kids by myself. For a solid 15- to 20-year period, I kept my head down and focused on trying to stay competitive enough in my creative career.
Now I’m a big advocate for doing things like getting a massage. Taking a weekend or a week to go someplace I’ve never been before, especially if I’m feeling stuck. Taking time to just sleep.
We’re not put here on Earth just to make s**t. We’re here to have a firsthand experience with the world around us.
Q. What are some projects you’re looking forward to?
I’m looking forward to being on stage in Ma Rainey’s “Black Bottom” produced by the Naptown African American Theatre Collective in March.
I was recently on the selection panel for the Indianapolis Creative Risk Fund, which the Herbert Simon Family Foundation launched with the Central Indiana Community Foundation. We awarded 11 artists grants to create works that are progressive and innovative, and I’m looking forward to seeing that work come to fruition this spring and summer.
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