Samuel H. Wilson Jr. died Sunday. He was 73. He was one of the founders and guiding spirits of Arena Players, Inc., the oldest continuously operating African American theater in the country. He was a Baltimore institution. The city is the poorer without him.
And so, on a blue Monday, I pushed my way through the winter chill to see Baltimore attorney Edward Smith Jr., Arena's chairman of the board.
"We're at a crossroads right now, we're teetering on the brink of something totally unknown and it's scary," Mr. Smith is saying. We are in his office on St. Paul Street, the day after Mr. Wilson's death from pneumonia.
"We're facing a great void that we know we have to cross," Mr. Smith continues. "But now we have to do it without the prestige, without the national reputation of Mr. Wilson. It is going to be scary. But we're going to have to do it."
Mr. Smith became chairman on Dec. 27, but this is not the first time I have been told that Arena Players is at a crossroads. The theater company has teetered on the brink of extinction for over 10 years.
Mr. Wilson helped found Arena Players in 1953 as a community theater dedicated to showcasing the works of black playwrights and performers. For the post-World War II generation, Arena became an important arts institution in a segregated city.
"But now," says Mr. Smith, "times have changed. The generation that came out of World War II remembers Arena Players, remembers how important it was. But that generation is getting older, slowing down, they aren't going out to the theater the way they used to. And Arena Players hasn't been able to capture the next generation -- my generation, the 40-something generation."
Mr. Smith shows me the results of an audience survey taken two seasons ago. The median age was 56 years. Most of the audience had learned about the theater through word of mouth.
"That tells me we are not communicating effectively through the media and we are not broadening our base," he says.
In fact, Mr. Smith says, Arena's base has been getting smaller. Corporate support is only a fraction of what it was in the mid-1970s; audiences hover at around 30 percent of capacity; and the theater's most ardent supporters -- African American churches, fraternities, sororities and other social clubs -- have begun to drift away.
"Times have changed," says Mr. Smith. "Arena Players must face a lot more competition today than it did in its glory days. And the African American community has become so diversified today that I'm not sure 'community' means the same thing today that it did a generation ago."
At the same time, Mr. Smith acknowledges that most of Arena's problems are self-inflicted: the theater has failed to solidify its traditional bases of support, he says, nor has it reached out to new groups. The theater has been plagued by poor management and inadequate marketing. Even before Mr. Wilson's death Sunday, Arena Players' board had launched a major reorganization effort, including an evaluation of all positions and the establishment of a five-year plan.
Mr. Smith predicted the board will face difficult choices in the near future: Such as whether Arena should remain a volunteer theater or go professional, and whether it should cater to the comedy-oriented tastes of younger people.
"I do know that my generation shares many of the same values of our parents," he says. "We understand, as they do, the importance of supporting our institutions, of keeping them alive. Arena Players just has to get the word out to them. Look at Center Stage. Two of their most successful productions in recent times were by and about African Americans. ["Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill" in 1993 and "Two Trains Running" in 1994.] This tells me the market for our kind of productions is there."
As I say, Arena Players has faced such challenges in the past -- as have many other black institutions that were founded during segregation: Adapt or die. Define new priorities. Reach out to new audiences.
It is a tribute to the energy and determination of Mr. Wilson and others that Arena has survived, while many other African American theaters that were established during the same era have died. But the theater stands at the crossroads yet again.