Ellington

Late into the night, sociology student Valerie Curtis-Newton and her roommate made the hallways of their dormitory at the College of the Holy Cross come alive with their singing and guitar-playing. A neighboring sophomore overheard the two freshmen and insisted that they attend an audition for one of the school musicals.

After Curtis-Newton didn’t get cast, she was disheartened and insisted she would never go through the process again.

“[I thought], I’m never doing that again, that was awful.”

But her friend insisted she would try for another role. She won a small one as an elderly woman in “The Good Woman of Setzuan,” put on by the school’s theater department.

When she was 21, Curtis-Newton’s aunt signed her up for an audition with a theater ensemble supported by Operation Push, a coalition of social activists established by Jesse Jackson that fought for civil rights and social justice. The ensemble took Curtis-Newton under its wing and catalyzed her acting, directing, and teaching careers. Today, Curtis-Newton is an associate professor of acting and directing at the UW, head of directing and of the Professional Actor Training Program, and recipient of three fellowships and the UW’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2011.

Sarah Gates, executive director of the UW School of Drama and the one who recommended Curtis-Newton for the award, receives numerous emails and visits from students raving about Curtis-Newton’s classes and teaching style every quarter.

“I know from the conversations that I have with her, about what she’s teaching and how she’s teaching it and where we needed to change, that she has been so creative in how she changes her curriculum, and essentially her syllabuses, to meet the new demands that we have,” Gates said. She said she was also impressed with Curtis-Newton’s ability to both teach and do research beyond the classroom.

Aside from her teaching, Curtis-Newton still manages to find time to serve as the artistic director at the Hansberry Project, the African-American theater lab at the ACT Theatre that she founded in 2006. The idea for the Hansberry Project was formed when Kurt Beattie, artistic director of the ACT Theatre, called Curtis-Newton asking for help to find new ways to incorporate more diverse voices into theatre. She proposed the Hansberry Project — named after Lorraine Hansberry, author of the renowned Broadway production, “A Raisin in the Sun” — which made its debut in 1959.

“In the end, we settled on the Hansberry Project because Lorraine Hansberry was an activist artist,” Curtis-Newton said. “She was very outspoken about social change and very political, and we liked the idea of what it was to sort of empower a community through the arts — to privilege the point of view of that community in the world.”

Those involved in the Hansberry Project strive to create a place where African-American theater artists in Seattle could work on a professional level.

“I’m more interested in working with people who are interested in pushing the limits of their own talent, and professional theater allows us to do that,” Curtis-Newton said.

The Hansberry Project connects artists around the world through their productions of plays and readings to allow artists to talk about their work and network with each other. “Represent,” a festival featuring multicultural playwrights, is one of the project’s newer additions. The project also hosts “Telling Our Stories,” a program that initiates dialogue among the theatre community about Hansberry’s activism.

“I don’t know if it’s important to give African-Americans a voice [in particular],” Curtis-Newton said. “I think it’s important that the theater reflect the world, the real world, and that the conversation is made richer by including everybody who should be a part of it. We want to make an American theater that actually looks like America.”

Curtis-Newton’s job as artistic director at the Hansberry Project is to ensure the project is following its mission, which is to “celebrate, support and present” the work of African-Americans in theater. Curtis-Newton works to find creative ways to convey this mission to their audiences — this could mean choosing artists for readings, casting, creating new projects, meeting with donors, selecting locations for productions, and writing grant language.

“I’m hoping to see it attract a wider audience,” said Anita Montgomery, literary manager of the ACT Theatre and colleague of Curtis-Newton on the Hansberry Project. “I’m hoping that Val can really tap into that, and that the Hansberry Project really finds a good strong niche in Seattle that attracts a lot of different people.”

One of Curtis-Newton’s obstacles in establishing the project was changing people’s inaccurate vision of African-American theater.

“I think that for a lot of people, particularly white people here, the words ‘black play’ somehow means ‘angry’ or ‘accusing people of racism,’ and we’ve never actually produced that play,” Curtis-Newton said. “We almost always produce plays about the conversations going on in our community. But people don’t know that. They think, ‘black play, angry play.’”

Although Curtis-Newton’s name is now prominent in the thespian world, she was not always well-known within the theatre community. Only after coming to the UW from the East Coast did she begin to further develop her identity as an actor, a director, and a teacher.

After receiving her undergraduate degree in sociology, Curtis-Newton was working for an insurance company on the East Coast but decided that she’d rather be attending graduate school. After receiving acceptance letters from both Yale and the UW, Curtis-Newton had a big decision to make. Her undergraduate mentor was working at the UW at the time and encouraged her to go here.

“Going through the interview process, what became clear was that I could connect my work more to a community outside of the university here than I could at Yale,” Curtis-Newton said. “At that time, Yale was a little bit behind its ivory walls. It lived in the heart of the city but wasn’t really connected to the city. Here, the theater department and the university was struggling to make itself more a part of the Seattle community, and that was appealing to me.”

Curtis-Newton started graduate school at the UW in 1993 and was part of the faculty by 1998. While she now teaches acting and directing, Curtis-Newton said she also teaches her students important life skills.

“I think in the end, the students that I work with come to recognize that what I’m teaching them isn’t theatre,” Curtis-Newton said. “I teach responsibility, and I teach accountability, and I teach perseverance and drive and risk-taking and courage and vision. And I think that in the end, all of those things make students better artists, but it also makes them better people.”

Bobbin Ramsey, executive director of the Undergraduate Theater Society at the UW and one of Curtis-Newton’s students, spoke of this ability that Curtis-Newton has to teach not only important theater skills, but life skills as well.

“You can seek her out for instruction in your life and not just in her classes,” Ramsey said.

Although Curtis-Newton is known to be an excellent teacher, she is not known to give out easy A’s.

“She does an excellent job at challenging students to really do the best that they can, which in some ways is intimidating, but in the end is very rewarding, because she pushes you to do what you never thought you could do,” Ramsey said. “She’s always there to challenge us, and I think that’s what makes her such a great teacher.”

Reach reporter Lily Katz at features@dailyuw.com.