M Ensemble Turns 53 With Plenty of History

In Miami-Dade County's arts and culture circles or the broader South Florida theater community, if you say "Pat and Shirley" (or "Shirley and Pat"), last names aren't necessary.

Patricia E. Williams and Shirley Richardson, winners of the Carbonell Awards' George Abbott Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts in 2016, have been presenting the work of Black playwrights, actors, directors (frequently John Pryor or Jerry Maple Jr.), designers, stage managers, and crew members since 1971.

That's when T.G. Cooper, his wife Grace, Williams, and Richardson founded the M Ensemble Company, Florida's oldest still-operating Black theater company. Cooper left the University of Miami the following year to become head of the drama department at Howard University in Washington, D.C., so ever since then, M Ensemble has been the Pat-and-Shirley show.

About to embark on its 53rd season, the company has put together a pair of special events to bookend its three productions at Liberty City's Sandrell Rivers Theater.

On display through Thursday, February 29, and open from noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday is a "Golden Years" photo exhibition highlighting impactful productions from each decade of M Ensemble's existence. A tour of the exhibition will precede the opening night of Layon Gray's The Girls of Summer on Thursday, February 8, with regular performances of the show at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through February 25.

Pearl Cleage's Bourbon at the Border is on stage April 11-28, then Lanie Robertson's Billie Holiday play Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill follows June 6-23. A Golden Gala to celebrate and raise funds for M Ensemble's future is set for Friday, November 16.

Clearly, M Ensemble has come a long way since Richardson and Williams thought of an inventive way to earn seed money for their young company.

"There used to be Saturday night dances in Coconut Grove," says Richardson, a University of Miami graduate who grew up not too far from the Coconut Grove Playhouse. "We'd make roasted peanuts and conch fritters to sell there."

"Dancing made everyone sweaty and hot and hungry," adds Williams, a Northwestern University grad from the Bunche Park neighborhood of Miami Gardens.
The early days were tough. Without grants or solid community financial support, Richardson and Williams did everything from paying the bills to cleaning the bathrooms. One night, knowing the company couldn't pay its rent, Richardson woke up to a strong feeling that they needed to retrieve all the M Ensemble documents at the space they were using — which they did just before the locks were changed.

Until their retirements, both women held demanding day jobs — Richardson as a substance abuse prevention specialist with the Miami-Dade Office of Rehabilitative Services, Williams as director of the afterschool programs at the YWCA of Greater Miami. Now, they can pour their passion for theater into M Ensemble full-time.

"Shirley and Pat are missionaries. They do their jobs and never know if they're going to get anything out of it," says actor and drama teacher André L. Gainey, who won a Carbonell Award for his 2017 performance in Gray's Kings of Harlem, M Ensemble's first production at the Sandrell Rivers Theatre. "It's not Black theater. It's good theater."

M Ensemble's stated mission is "to preserve and promote the African American culture and experiences through the performing arts." The company has done just that for more than half a century, training and showcasing several generations of Black artists, giving uncounted children early theater experiences, illuminating Black lives through the powerful storytelling of playwrights like double Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson, Gray, and many others.

The company has already presented all ten of the plays in Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, with each drama set in a different decade of the 20th Century. Among the talented actors who have appeared in the cycle — some who have since left the area, others who stayed — are Sheaun McKinney (a regular on CBS's The Neighborhood), Ethan Henry, Makeba Pace, Lela Elam, Carolyn Johnson, Chat Atkins, Keith C. Wade and, in The Piano Lesson, MacArthur "Genius Grant" recipient Tarell Alvin McCraney, who is now artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. M Ensemble continues working its way through the cycle again, with a production every two years so that younger theatergoers can experience his powerful voice.

Beginning with Kings of Harlem in 2017, M Ensemble found a kindred spirit to showcase in playwright-director-actor Gray, who finds inspiration for many of his plays in Black history.

"I love telling stories from history that people don't know," says Gray, who is directing The Girls of Summer.
Gray says of the M Ensemble founders, "Pat and Shirley are legends here. They bring unique stories to the stage, and I truly appreciate them for bringing me back. They give me 100 percent creative control. They're like my family in Miami."

The company presented Gray's Meet Me at the Oak (about racism and its deadly legacy in 1955 Louisiana) in 2019, Cowboy (about Black U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves, an Old West legend who also inspired the recent Paramount+ limited series) in 2021, and The Dahomey Warriors (about a fierce women's army in the African Republic of Benin at the end of the 19th Century) in 2022.

"Layon is very popular. Actors come from all over to audition for him," says Williams.

Carey Brianna Hart, an actor, director, and stage manager who has done all three things at M Ensemble over her many years working with the company, is stage managing The Girls of Summer, a rare Gray play not based on a historical event. She has, in fact, stage-managed every M Ensemble production of his plays.

She observes of Gray, "He likes bringing something fresh and new to old stories. The event in The Girls of Summer didn't take place, but the play has a lot of layers. We're looking for people to come back and see it more than once — they'll want to look for those hidden clues."

The play is set in the summer of 1946, as the all-Black women's baseball team, the Red Diamonds, is preparing to play the white Racine Belles (a real team in the American Girls Professional Baseball League from 1943 to 1950, represented in the 1992 movie A League of Their Own) in an exhibition game. The Diamonds are being brutally driven by their coach, Odessa Hicks (Elam), the only woman to have played in the Negro Leagues (in reality, several women did so). Shocks, secrets, and disappearance are woven into the script — those layers and clues Hart mentioned.

Performed by a cast of ten Black women and two males, The Girls of Summer offers an opportunity that is more common in the world of musical theater.

"You don't see a cast of all-Black women in a drama," says Gray, who wasn't certain he could cast the entire show locally — but did.

The fierce Coach Hicks was inspired by his father, grandfather, and mother, who taught him to "stay the course" and work hard to sustain his goals. He worried most about casting that role but was very happy when the Carbonell Award-winning Elam came to auditions.

"She came in with that energy and nailed it. I knew I wanted to work with her," he says.
Elam had never played softball or baseball, but she immersed herself in movies about women who did, including A League of Their Own and, she says, "every baseball movie on the planet." Cast member Toddra Brunson leads movement sessions before rehearsals to help the cast bond as a team.

She is thrilled to be working with Gray, whose vision she describes as both challenging and clear, and overjoyed as she thinks about what seeing a stage full of Black women artists could represent. "I didn't have anything like that when I was a little girl," she says.

This is Elam's first time performing for M Ensemble at the Sandrell Rivers Theater, though she has been in several earlier productions of Wilson plays and others for the company and works at theaters throughout South Florida. She is quick to emphasize the company's importance.

"If you're Black and want to be in theater here, M Ensemble should be the first place you look. It's where I got my start, that jumping off place when no one else would pay attention to you or see you," says Elam.

The actor points out that M Ensemble's fare is for diverse audiences and that these stories from the Black experience and perspective have a universal power.

"Shirley and Pat are movin' and shakin'. The work they've done is beyond impressive," says Elam. "And they get diverse crowds. Some might think, 'That's not for me.' But the plays speak to everyone. Our stories are American stories."

Chasity Hart (no relation to Carey Brianna Hart) plays Coby Rae in The Girls of Summer. A New World School of the Arts graduate who teaches middle school drama, she has worked behind the scenes in multiple ways with M Ensemble since 2019. She calls Richardson and Williams "my girls."

"They have such a commitment to honoring our voices. I've watched them be so tired [and] stay up late to get grant writing done. They have such pride in our stories. But so many kids don't know who they are — and who we are as a people," says Hart. "M Ensemble is important. It exposes Black people to work they would probably never see otherwise."
Today, having gone from (literally) peanuts to a budget of $278,000 for their 53rd season, Williams and Richardson are necessarily looking ahead. They remember with gratitude every home M Ensemble has ever had, and every politician, government entity, and foundation that has helped the company.

If Williams and Richardson ever move on from the company they created — though they have no plans to do so — that will be a challenge for M Ensemble. It's always tough when an arts organization's founders seem irreplaceable.

"Pat and Shirley are pioneers. They have high standards for the quality of their productions, and they're the epitome of teamwork. It's wonderful to see them working together the way they do," says Carey Brianna Hart. "That type of perseverance is so important to legacy building."

Richardson and Williams remain mindful of that legacy.

"We consider M Ensemble to be an institution. You can't walk away and leave it in just anybody's hands…You have to get people who won't abandon it," Richardson says, and given the Pat-and-Shirley track record, it seems likely that they'll handle a future handoff as well as they've coped with every other challenge in their company's history.

In that spirit: Did you ever wonder what the "M" in M Ensemble signifies? Richardson explains that it stood for Maria, the name of the Coopers' daughter. When the founding couple moved away, she says, "We decided that the M would stand for magical, which always happens when we're confronted with the many challenges of putting a show up; mystery, which was we were never quite sure what we'd be doing in the earlier years; and movement — we were always moving."

– Christine Dolen, ArtburstMiami.com

M Ensemble's The Girls of Summer. Through Sunday, February 25, at the Sandrell Rivers Theater, 6103 NW Seventh Ave., Miami; 305-705-3218; themensemble.com. Tickets cost $36 to $41. Performances Friday through Saturday 8 p.m. and Sunday 3 p.m.