L. Peter Callender in “Permanent Collection” at the Aurora Theatre through August 5
An Interview, by Wanda Sabir

It is seldom perhaps that a role is created in isolation for an actor without either he or the playwright’s awareness of one another, but such is the case in Thomas Gibbon’s “Permanent Collection,” at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley through August 5.

Unlike bandleaders who often compose with a particular musician in mind, it is almost as if Gibbon’s “Sterling North” was Callender’s role in another incarnation.

There are signs of intelligent life in the universe, and Callender’s role in this play is one of them.

The actor was getting calls from theatres in Arizona, asking him if he knew the play, and he did…way before the 12th version on stage presently at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley. If it hadn’t been for scheduling difficulties what with his directing gig at Sonoma State last year of August Wilson’s “Fences,” Callender might have been reprising the role, a role in what is absolutely one of the most thoughtful productions of the 2005-6 San Francisco Bay Area season.

Callender is busy, but this is fate. The man is so well-prepared, his training appropriate for any stage imaginable: the world his character “Sterling” also has to maneuver, a world no one believes he can handle, a world Callender – the man, is more than familiar with.

Born in Trinidad, Callender was raised by his grandmother until his mother who went to England to study midwifery had her son join her at seven years old. Later when his family moved here, Callender told me of having to purposely lose the accent while studying at the well-known Performing Arts High School in New York because as his teachers explained, his accent would define the roles he’d be allowed to play. Shakespeare spoke truly when he wrote: “all the world’s a stage…” and diction determines where you stand on it.

For years, people would try to place Callender geographically and fail. He sounded so pleased with the enigma he created when he decided to play this role, not “Sterling” specifically, but all the performances Black men are unwilling participants in.

The play, “Permanent Collection,” is about an art gallery and foundation located in a suburb which has come into new management at the death of its founder, Dr. Alfred Morris. Sterling North’s disturbing physical presence is felt both inside and without the institution, his very existence a challenge to its hallowed whiteness, its assumed superiority.

Based loosely on the true story of Dr. Alfred C. Barnes, born in Philadelphia, who established the Barnes Foundation in 1922 “to promote the advancement of education and appreciation of the fine arts,” and the upset his death wrought on the neighborhood where the museum and foundation abided serenely all those years before the good doctor left its management to Lincoln University, an African American institution.

This is where the play begins, “with dismay” and while I’d like to paint a welcoming sign for Sterling, I guess the tune on the dial the welcome party’s whistling is “Dixie.”

In a telephone interview a week after the play opened, I asked L. Peter Callender if he thought “Dr. Alfred Morris,” the foundation’s founder had set “Sterling North” up; after all, he was only the second person of African descent to work there in 25 years.

Wanda Sabir: Do you think he was successful in what he was trying to do? I ask.

L. Peter Callender: “I think his persistence definitely made people see the permanent collection, these paintings which could not be moved or changed in any way, in a different way. No one else had challenged the institution’s inflexibility in this way before Sterling arrived and found all the African art in the basement.

“My final line of the play: I ask my father the question about being ‘the first’ and my father responded… ‘Truth is I was strengthened.’

“I think Sterling was strengthened. He may not have won the battle at the foundation. That didn’t turn out as well as he wanted it to, but I think Sterling North left that foundation being a better person, being able to speak for himself, being able to say what he believes. I think he could go out and start a black business in the corporate world.

“His having that position, from the first scene when he gets stopped by the policeman and says in his mind: ‘Okay this is the script…but I’m over this foundation, let me play with this a bit…live dangerously: a black man and a police man on a dark road.

“Don’t we all want to do this some time?”

WS: I make a sound that means “yes.”

Callender laughs.

WS: “And he knew all the characters: now he can do this or that….” I comment on Sterling’s familiarity with the racist script.

LPC: “About 3-4 years ago, a dear friend of mine, Lisa Steindler, Artistic Director, at Encore Theatre. She called me and asked me, “Have you heard of a play called ‘Permanent Collection?’

She sent me a copy and said there’d be a reading of it. The author had sent it to her and asked her to consider it. She considered it, but she couldn’t put it in her season right away and the next season was already planned. We sent comments to the playwright. I don’t know what he changed…except at that time “Ella” (the only other African American hired in 25 years at the foundation before Sterling) accepted the check. Anyway, I thought, what a beautiful play, what a gorgeous play.

“Lisa said, ‘Anywhere that’s doing the play, you have to do it. It is so you.’

“I kept the script for a good long time and then the Arizona Theatre Company Rep called me and asked, ‘Do you know this play?’

“I said, ‘Yes, I’d love to do it,’ but I was directing Fences at Solano College. I do a show up there at least once a year. I directed “A Raisin in the Sun” (the season before).

“They wanted me to come out there on a Tuesday and my show opened on a Thursday. I said: Can I miss the first three days of rehearsal because I can’t leave my cast two days before the show opens and we went back and forth. Ronnie Washington was my Troy. I couldn’t leave and that fell through.

“And then the Aurora Theatre called and asked, ‘Have you heard of Permanent Collection?’

“‘Yes, and I want to do it.’

“This was a year ago.”

WS: Well that’s great! I comment.

LPC: “I finally had a chance to do this play.” Callender concludes.

“The playwright doesn’t know me at all.” The actor commented when asked how he happened to get all these calls and I wondered aloud if the playwright was sending work his way.

“Lisa knows me. The Arizona Theatre called unsolicited. The artistic director, Samantha K. Wyer, from Arizona, had seen me in something. She was in town for another meeting and we read the first monologue together and she hired me then and there, but we couldn’t get the schedule together.

“And then the Aurora with Robin, who I adore, she is one of the brightest directors I have ever worked for, ever ever. She is so smart and so patient and knows how to work with actors, and knows new plays. She knows new plays better than anyone I have ever worked with ever. I’d done a reading with her early last year and we hit it off so well, when she got the play she called me and said, ‘You’re the only one I want to work with on this play.’

“When an actor gets that kind of call, it just makes everything so worth while.”

WS: It all worked out for you too, it’s closer; you don’t have to travel. I added.

“I love the Aurora.” Callender continued to gush. “This is my second show there. The first was St. Joan, the very first production in that space.

WS: What character did you play? I asked.

LPC: “The Grand Inquisitor.” Callender asked.

WS: Oh wow, what a different kind of character…well, yeah. I observed.

LPC: “I’m glad I have the type of training that let’s me play…I can go from an August Wilson to George Bernard Shaw, to Shakespeare.” He answered modestly.

WS: What character are you in As You Like It at Cal Shakes this summer? I asked the company member.

LPC: “The Duke.” Callender replied. “I want to shave my head bald. I did once for Casio in Romeo and Juliet, I liked it. Every two years I like to change my look. “I’m supposed to do a show at the Magic Theatre (in San Francisco) called Rust in February, 2007, by Kirsten Greenidge, a black playwright. (“ In this biting comedy, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben must reclaim their lives and help a black football superstar play the game on his own terms. With fantastical flourish, Greenidge's bold theatrical imagination explodes cultural stereotypes.”)

WS: Could you talk about your character, his passions, his position and hopes? I asked taking the conversation back to Permanent Collection which has been extended twice.

Starting with Sterling’s passion, what drives him? I added.

LPC: “I think Sterling has great ambition, as you saw in the play, his father was a minister. I think he was raised very strictly, very proper… respectful, with a passion for work, success. He grew up in the white corporate world and he was very proficient in it.

“The stuff he had to go through to become who he is, when he is given this position he knows it is something he really wants to do. When I first read the play I thought he didn’t really want this job until he walked in and realized what the fight is.

“When I first read the play, I thought he didn’t really want this job. He was appointed, but I believe the passion came when he realized the fight was there.

“The passion came from the fight. The position gave him an opportunity to speak his mind and that’s when his mind, body and spirit came alive. He realized now he (could) define what he believes, how he believes and why he believes it because he’s in charge.” Callender said.

WS: You don’t think that passion was stirred when he saw the door from ancient Egyptian tomb and what was above the door? I asked.

LPC: “It didn’t come together until he saw the pieces in the storage room. That’s what I’m saying. This man (Dr. Morris), now dead, gave him this opportunity to direct the foundation, and then when he saw the storage, 28 pieces of African art, he realized he’d seen it before at the entrance – the female pieces of the Akan people of the Ivory Coast and he saw the cobb door, he put it together and he realized this was his cause. (That) his family was descents of the Akan (also) made it personal.”

WS: These were his people. I added.

LPC: “Exactly, once that became a part of the equation the passion came alive.”

WS: I was so amazed at the audacity of the Paul character. I said to Callender. The education director didn’t realize the privilege he was operating out of, the disrespect he showed the new chief of the organization. It was amazing how Sterling didn’t comment on everything said or done but he noted it all, and so did Kanika, Sterling’s assistant who remarks later: “Do you remember when you did this? You threw that at him… you lectured him.”

It was like wow.

LPC: “In rehearsing it director Robin Stanton made me it so clear to me that this man takes it in. I do the same thing as a Black guy in America, as a Black guy in general. I find myself in situations where I’m the only Black member of a company, such as with Cal Shakes. My first day of rehearsal I look around and it’s just me. There are plenty of other Black workers behind the scenes, terrific doing a great job, but in that rehearsal hall I’m it. Sometimes things are said in rehearsal or people just say things… I’ll think, did they say what I thought they said. You take it in; you don’t let it upset you until perhaps later on you think about it that was racist. Sometimes I comment on it, sometimes I don’t.

“The first thing said to Sterling by the reporter Gillian, in the interview, is ‘if you’re not an expert then why are you here?’ Little things people say make him realize, it'’ about that.”

WS: Gillian (actress Melissa Gray) is so good. I’ve been told a lot of times how ‘Black people can’t trust white people, when it comes down to it, they side with each other.” Gillian on the surface seems unbiased, and intent on getting the truth, and all she is, is a gossip, whatever the wind blows….

LPC: “She stirs up trouble.”

WS: She certainly does. She continues to say confidential material is “off the record,” when nothing is off the record. What I thought was amazing was when Sterling apologized for that statement about the Klu Klux Klan because he couldn’t get Paul to drop the lawsuit.

LPC: “Two scenes before he says to Paul (actor Tim Kniffin) we both know the steps to this ritual: first the denial, then the admission, a carefully worded apology with admits no responsibility.’ Then in a final scene with Paul he says, ‘There’s a script to be followed, and I will follow it.” So in the final moment, he follows that script (in his comments to Gillian: ‘It was an unguarded moment, Gillian, a private moment – that’s the denial part. Here comes the admission: ‘I was speaking metaphorically. Then the carefully worded apology which accepts no responsibility, he says: ‘Obviously that’s no excuse, I said something I shouldn’t have. If that offended anyone, that was never my intention and I apologize.’

“The carefully worded apology that accepts no apology: he follows the script exactly the script he says he will follow.

“That will be in the papers, the board asks him to say that. He does and then he resigns and moves on with his life. It’s really a perfect script.”

I agreed with Callender. Sterling’s life is so scripted and Kanika, his secretary, (actress Karen Aldrige) wants to avoid the script, but her life is scripted, the collection is what it is.

WS: I thought it really great when Paul came out with it and said, “Yeah this art is much more superior to that in the basement.” He didn’t say of like that of course, I laugh.

LPC: “Kanika, is, which is why she’s in the play…you have these old guys she says, ‘You guys don’t listen to each other.’ She can have a white friend, she can have an Asian friend, she can do that in her life because she has not been tainted with all that racism, then she comes into the world of this foundation and she recognizes that these guys don’t listen to each other and it’s the big picture for the Black and White race in general, we don’t listen to each other. We think metaphorically. Kanika’s role in all this – her youth, through her eyes this is a world where people do not want to talk to each other, but in her world whites can talk to blacks, blacks to Asians. It’s wonderful how she sees this.”

WS: It’s her hope but she sees this is not necessarily the case when she goes and talks to Paul, and she says he’s not “ruthless enough…” I thought, oh my goodness….”

LPC: “She is planting seeds….”

WS: Yet, she thinks Paul’s her friend and friends do sell out friends. He didn’t even think about her well-being. The worse thing you could be called as a white person is a Klu Klux Klan member.

LPC: “Yeah, Paul went back to the paper, and that’s what got her fired.”

WS: Yes and what you were saying about Sterling was true of her also. She grew too. She was a teacher, yet didn’t feel she had the depth to handle the kids in the classroom.

LPC: “She left a little wiser.”

WS: How old is Sterling? How old is Paul?

LPC: “Paul is in his 30s. Sterling is my age – early to mid-40s.”

WS: I thought Sterling was his elder. In our culture, you just…no matter who this person is, you speak to them with a certain kind of difference, because of the person’s age. I’m thinking whoa Paul…

LPC: “When you look at our production, can you tell Paul is younger than Sterling?”

WS: I knew he was younger, I just didn’t know how much younger because of the hair. I didn’t know if he was prematurely grey.

LPC: The playwright has us both in out mid-40s.

WS: Oh as peers. At one moment I thought you might be peers then I thought, Paul’s younger. I don’t how much younger. Paul’s been there how many years?

LPC: “17.”

WS: It’s his first real job out of graduate school. He worked at the Foundation 20 years. Just in your bearing you seemed older.

LPC: “I wanted that to be apparent, even if he’s just five years older than Paul.”

WS: He does seem older and wiser about the world. Paul’s world was within the confines of the organization and nothing mattered outside of that, which is typical of the suburbs. Folks in the suburbs don’t seem to have a grip on life unless they go shopping in the malls sometimes.

LPC: “He doesn’t go into the city or do the Blockbuster thing, he doesn’t see that. That’s why the playwright has Sterling say in the very end, ‘You need to get off the soapbox, go to the mall, look at the CDs in the store… it’s rap they are playing, not Bach.

“I remember two-three years ago, I’m sitting on BART and studying a play and I overheard a conversation three-four rows behind me. And these young people were using the N-word all over the place, calling females the B-word, and I thought to myself, why would these young brothers do this. It bothered me but I didn’t turn around to look at them because then they’d know I was disgusted and want to start something, but it just kept going for so long and was so offensive, I finally turned around and it was two young Asian boys and they were….

“It absolutely shocked me. When Sterling said to Paul, ‘Even (your) children don’t believe you (that white is superior). They wear the bling, rapping like black rappers, talking like us, calling each other the N-word, then they go back to the suburb and live in their little cul-de-sac and their parents are, ‘Why are they doing this?’ It’s because they want to be like us.”

WS: They really do.

LPC: “When Paul says the world believes Shakespeare is better than folktales, and Bach is better than rap, the world doesn’t think that at all.”

WS: That’s a great scene.

LPC: “I’m sure a lot of white people believe this, want to say all this stuff is better but most of the people in the world fail to see that.

“(Permanent Collection) is written by a white playwright as well.”

WS: Yes, I know. Did you know the playwright’s work before?

LPC: “No. When I first read the play I couldn’t tell if the playwright was white or black. I was asking everyone else, their responses: No, I think he’s white. No, I think he’s black. He sounds black. No, how could he think like this? He’s white.

“He’s written a few plays with writing that is so beautiful, one …do you know his work at all?”

WS: No. Just from reading about him.

LPC: One play I want to read is ‘Bee-luther-hatchee.’ The main character is an African American woman, editor of a newspaper. It’s the autobiography of a 72 year of African American woman written by a middle-aged white man. That’s one play I’d like to direct.”

WS: Maybe with your students.

LPC: “Another play I’d like to do up there is Black Eagle.”

WS: Is that about the Tuskegee Airmen?

LPC: “Yes, I did that in New York. I’ve been trying to get it to the West Coast.”

WS: We have a lot of Tuskegee Airmen here. They have an association.

LPC: “I teach a master class in Solano, which is right near the Travis Air force base. I’d think that area would be open to a play about airmen, so I’m trying to (mount) it there.”

WS: I really liked the interview with the playwright in my press materials: “Well you’re a white playwright writing African American characters” the interviewer states.

LPC: “I agreed with him too. If I can’t write… (certain characters), I’m working on a play now… does this mean I can’t write as a man a female character, or a rich author write about the poor, the poor author about the rich? If you have the knowledge, the sensibility for (crafting the part) having done the research, the knowledge dialect correct…. I think he does a great job.”

WS: Ultimately, is this play about art or is it about race?

LPC: “I think it’s about race. Art is the metaphor. The (foundation) is a metaphor for institutional racism. The original story was about a parking lot, the real Sterling was Richard Galanton, I think he was an African American lawyer; and when he was given the directorship of the Barnes Foundation he wanted to expand the parking lot. The neighbors in the white suburb said that meant more cars coming through, (with Black people in them) now that it was a black owned place. And Galanton played the race card. The neighborhood sued the foundation for libel and the whole thing started.

“The initial key to the play was about racism. It really wasn’t about art. Art is the metaphor to bring up the culture of racism.”

WS: It also gives you some visuals to anchor yourself in when art is the metaphor.

LPC: “Kanika says: ‘That’s a lot of naked white women.’ The playwright says really clearly that he is not calling Renoir, Matisse, Van Gogh racists, they painted what they saw, that was their world, however, nowadays you go into a museum culture is on display. When what you see is 98 percent is white is that’s what is being said here that white is dominant. So Sterling says that can’t happen on my watch.”

WS: Do you know the artist Fred Wilson’s work? He plays with objects in a way that adds or subtracts value based on where they are placed. He says in his displays that value is assigned when certain objects are incorporated into museum spaces or taken out of display cases and arranged in ways the eye is not used to seeing them. In the exhibit at the old de Young Museum in San Francisco Wilson moved art from a position of visual subservience to eye level or slightly above.

His displays always challenge these subliminal notions.

Peter said he’d just heard about Fred Wilson recently. I tell him about the website at the UC Berkeley Art Museum where Wilson was a guest curator not long ago. He also was a guest curator at the Exploratorium. It was there that I thought he should get the MacArthur Genius Award, and later that year or the next, he did.

WS: Do you think Alfred Morris set his new director up for failure? Throughout the play the doctor enters and comments on the scenes. Even Paul mentions that his late employer had a playful kind of edge; you never knew what he was going to do.

LPC: “I think he did it to stir things up a bit. I don’t know if he expected all this would happen but I think he enjoyed it.”

WS: He never got upset in his cameos.

LPC: “He certainly watched a lot of the arguments. I don’t think he would not have placed his foundation downtown, but I think he’s happy that more people will see the work in his death. Ultimately, it’s like having a child…

“I trained in Europe and Japan. I take pride in what I do; I don’t like mediocrity. I spent seven years of my life there. Then my mother went to England to study midwifery – midwife. I was raised by my grandmother. She had 12 children so I had lots of aunties and uncles, then I flew to England by myself and then we both came to the United States. I went back and forth to Trinidad several times, back to England to study. I went to Julliard School for the Arts, taught at NYU for a while.”

WS: You lost your accent.

LPC: “You are so sweet.”

WS: Why you think you have it?

LPC: “I would like to think I’ll never lose it. Whenever I speak to my mother, who I talk to 2-3 times a week I go back home (linguistically) if I’m tired and it’s been a long day I shift back.

“People will think: I know he is an American, but he wasn’t born here. I know he’s an actor, I know he’s a Shakespearean actor. I know he teaches dialect, maybe that’s informing his speech, but I know he’s not from New York or Texas, or California. I notice a difference in him, then when I tell them

“I like that. I like not being able to peg him. When I was at the performing arts academy in NY, FAME, my teachers said I’d have difficulty. It’s not lost it’s always there I know… exactly what to do with it….”

We talk about plays I’ve seen him in like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Nicholas Nickleby at Cal Shakes and King Hedley II at Lorraine Hansberry… but not World Music at Theatre First. And even though the actor gets too busy to send me his CV so I can add to his accolades, his commanding presence on stage is more convincing than anything one could read on a sheet of paper.

Now that the play runs through August 5 at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison Street, in Berkeley, there is no excuse not to see it, or see it again. Visit http://www.auroratheatre.org/ or call (510) 843.4822. The box office is always open for orders during performance weeks, hours are extended to: Tuesday 1-5, Wednesday-Friday 1-7 and Saturday 5-7. Tickets are $38. Half-price @ half-hour tickets are available at the box office one half-hour before curtain. Subject to availability, cash only.