The arts: L.A.’s Leimert Park has become a center of black creativity. Now actress Marla Gibbs dreams of a theater to anchor it.
March 27, 1990|EDWARD J. BOYER | TIMES STAFF WRITER
It began one day last summer with jazz drummer Al (Tootie) Heath’s “devotional” rhythms from an African drum. A friend soon joined in, playing a bamboo flute.
Once the impromptu sidewalk set was under way outside Brian Breye’s Museum in Black on Degnan Boulevard, a passing drummer from Dakar, Senegal, parked his station wagon, set up his drums and joined in.
He was quickly followed by a troupe of barefoot African dancers, who happened by en route to a rehearsal, and a full-blown dance and drum concert was under way.
“That was a very spiritual devotion on behalf of Brian’s museum,” Heath said. “We were celebrating him having that place there. We blessed the place with the drum, a very sacred instrument.”
The spontaneity was impressive, even to veterans along Degnan. But not altogether surprising. A stroll any day down the normally quiet block between 43rd Street and 43rd Place in Leimert Park could be accompanied by the faint jazz harmonies of world-class musicians rehearsing for weekend performances at the World Stage.
The area is dotted with wig boutiques, beauty supply shops, hair and nail salons, dry cleaners and optometrists. But this one block counts three other art galleries in addition to Breye’s among its residents.
This little-noticed stretch of Degnan is the understated heart of what is arguably the most intense concentration of black creativity in Los Angeles.
“The area has the potential to be a healing space, a space where we can come together to celebrate the brightness and the glory that is us . . . and celebrate life,” said Los Angeles poet Kamau Daaood, who co-founded the World Stage with jazz drummer Billy Higgins. “It is also a place to examine our wounds and to take inventory and to rub heads and hearts.”
On 43rd Place, filmmaker Ben Caldwell teaches youngsters how to manipulate electronic images at his video studio, Video 3333.
At the opposite end of Degnan on 43rd Street, the most raucous black comics in town hold forth at the Comedy Act Theater in the Regency West ballroom.
West of the comedy club sits the Wonderland Dance Studio, and half a block farther west on Crenshaw Boulevard, custom jeweler Imhotep Wellman runs Uranus–yet another gallery.
The theater is something that will open the eyes of a lot of children who never thought anything like that would ever come to the community,
Down the block sit the Pied Piper and Total Experience nightclubs, hard by the Crenshaw Cafe where headwaiter Michael Garrison calls the street Crenshow—not Crenshaw—”because this is a show out here.”
If actress Marla Gibbs has her way, the collection of galleries, studios, restaurants and nightclubs will gain a new 800-seat theater and concert hall–a creative anchor for Leimert Park.
“The theater will be one of the greatest additions to the area–not just as a nucleus for the arts in the black community but for the entire community,” said Deborah Byars, curator at Brockman Gallery, which opened on Degnan 23 years ago.
Gibbs’ Crossroads Arts Academy, now located a few blocks north on Crenshaw, is negotiating to buy the old Leimert Theater on 43rd Place from the Jehovah’s Witnesses for $3.2 million. More than $4 million will be needed to renovate and redesign the theater and an adjacent property with a much smaller, 99-seat theater, classrooms and a restaurant and banquet hall. It is a sum Gibbs, who stars on the NBC-TV sitcom “227,” vows to raise a dollar at a time, if necessary.
While a handful of supporters have come forward with five-figure contributions, the nearly $8 million Gibbs’ nonprofit academy needs is still a distant dream.
“Everybody is enthused, but that has to translate into dollars,” Gibbs said.
No contributions have moved her more than the $1,855 she received one Sunday, mostly in amounts less than $5, at St. Brigid Roman Catholic Church in South-Central Los Angeles.
“I went there to speak and outside, people were just passing me money–$2, $3,” she said.
Small wonder. She speaks of the theater with enough passion, hope, determination, faith and just plain missionary zeal to convert the least faithful.
The academy’s stage, as she puts it, will be a place to show young people “your history, your greatness–not just your struggle. We want to show them the triumph, their African forebears who ruled great civilizations. All the people they’ve never heard of.”
Her voice drops to an intense near whisper.
“And then we’ll talk about why we are at war with each other. We have to understand that they feel we have passed them a legacy and a heritage of despair.”
The theater would also be a place where area residents could “dress up and go out in their own community to hear Leontyne (Price), for example. Wynton Marsalis should come here too, as well as to Westwood. The point is that he can’t come here now because we don’t have any place to house him.”
Gibbs has been involved in community-based arts programs since the 1960s, getting her own early drama training in free classes at Mfundi, a Watts-based arts organization, where she had first gone to enroll her daughter, Angela, in acting classes.
“Mfundi made me aware of just how much talent there is in the community,” she said.
For more than eight years, she has owned Marla’s Memory Lane, a landmark jazz club and restaurant on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. And it has operated at a loss for as long as she has owned it.
“The Lord put me on television to do these things I want to do in the community,” she said. “And he knew I had a lot to learn. That’s why I’ve been on TV 16 years—not because I’m the greatest actress, but because I need the money.”
With the theater in Leimert Park, Gibbs said, she wants “to bring people to the area. Once they come out and they’re excited, they browse in and out of the galleries and shops. They buy things. They can go to Brian’s museum, Brockman Gallery, the Comedy Act Theater.”
Breye, whose museum stops first-time visitors in their tracks with its dazzling array of African masks, agrees that the “spillover from the theater will patronize others in the area. Marla is known, and her popularity will bring people in.”
Video artist and filmmaker Caldwell applauds Gibbs’ theater project, saying, “She could have bought a nightclub any place. She bought Memory Lane. Now she’s coming even farther south.”
Caldwell, who once hoped to buy the theater himself, has instead bought three storefronts at the corner of Leimert Boulevard and 43rd Street where he and a partner plan to open a “futuristic coffee shop.”
The Uranus gallery’s Wellman said Leimert Park’s arts community has “all the makings to become a very rich cultural center.” Gibbs, he said, has “clout, credibility and cash. I can see her opening the way for a lot of things.”
Daaood at the World Stage is just as optimistic, saying the Crossroads theater would bring “that much more energy to that area. While many of us are struggling to make this happen, the theater could be the thing that would cinch it.”
Next door to the World Stage at Birdland Framing, just a peek inside makes it clear that artist Kisasi Ramsess’ only religion is jazz, and legendary saxophonist Lester Young is his high priest.
Ramsess’ ads in jazz magazines attract customers from as far away as Germany and China in search of his stunning note cards and posters of jazz giants, he said.
But the theater, he believes, will attract the attention of an important group closer to home.
“The theater is something that will open the eyes of a lot of children who never thought anything like that would ever come to the community,” he said.
While Gibbs continues her relentless pursuit of financial support for the complex, she also has begun lining up talent to expand the arts academy’s program.
She also is pocketing promises from the likes of Marsalis, singers Bobby Brown, Stevie Wonder and Nancy Wilson, and actor Louis Gossett Jr. to headline benefits for the project.
Said Gibbs: “They’re saying to me, ‘You get it, and we’ll help you.’ ” ◼︎
The Vision Complex, Museum in Black, Gallery Plus, the Comedy Act Theater and so many other mainstays in the arts community on Degnan Boulevard no longer exist. The venerable Eso Won Books remains as a linchpin, and other shops continue to be attracted.
