CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — It’s a few days before the opening of a new play at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, and the student actors are rehearsing the opening scene. Director Tyrone Phillips is watching from the seats of the theater – a place familiar to him from his days as an acting student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Two boxers stand in a ring onstage facing the audience, raise their gloved hands and take swings. The actors stomp their feet to indicate when they land a punch. Phillips occasionally stops the rehearsal and walks onstage to talk with an actor. Sometimes he lets the action continue but makes suggestions from his seat. When he likes what he sees, he calls out, “Nice!”
Phillips is a 2012 graduate of the U. of I.’s theatre program and the artistic director of Chicago’s Definition Theatre, which creates stories with, for and inspired by people of color. He is back on campus to work with theatre students and direct “The Royale,” which is based on the story of Jack Johnson, the first Black man to become the world heavyweight boxing champion in 1910.
“Coming back and working with the students is always just exhilarating to me because I remember the curiosity, I remember the passion I had as a student,” he tells me later. “Returning to campus is always a full-circle experience. It’s exciting and a kind of renewing of passion for me.”
Phillips says the theatre program helped him learn about himself as an artist and how he could use his talents to respond to what’s happening in the world and make an impact.
“As an actor, I always felt myself having opinions about the world of the play we were setting and the experience the audience was having from the moment they entered. I found my passion for directing through acting,” he says.
While an acting student, he and some classmates formed a theater company at the U. of I. – in a way, it was the genesis of Definition Theatre, says Lisa Gaye Dixon, a theatre professor who is the chair of the acting program and the producer of Illinois Theatre, which stages shows involving student actors and technical crew at Krannert Center. She taught Phillips while he was a student and directed him in two plays.
Now, Dixon watches as Phillips directs the rehearsal for “The Royale.” Earlier, he spoke to students in her Shakespeare class.
“There is a light in his eyes that is sort of pure joy at being here, at seeing the students grow, at helping to allay their fears and helping them to be fierce competitors and workers and artists,” she says. “You can tell they begin to own the work themselves in a way that is more personal and therefore more powerful for them.”
During the rehearsal, one character, a former boxer, describes his first fight.
“The first time, I got knocked out in 10 seconds flat. I didn’t know where those punches were coming from. But my second Tuesday … ,” he says, then dances across stage with his fists up, throwing punches.
Phillips stops the action briefly to tell the actor he’s moved out of the spotlight.
“There wasn’t no purse at the Royale,” the boxer says, picking up where he left off. “But the prize was, if you happen to be the last one standing, they take that blindfold off you and you got about a minute to stuff your pockets.”
Phillips suggests the actor pantomime picking up coins and putting them in his pockets. “That action is helpful,” he says. “Keep it entertaining.”
Phillips tells me it’s important for students to hear from alumni and professionals who can assure them they are on the right track. He says it’s a privilege to talk with students about what moves them. Returning to see the people who helped him as a student and watched him grow into an artist benefits him as well.
“When guest directors or guest artists come here, they fall in love immediately with the students, with the university and with Krannert,” he says. “There is something palpable in this lobby, that art matters and that people know that the arts are just as important as any other sector in our lives.”
The theatre department’s connections with Chicago make it unique, he and Dixon tell me.
“Over the years, we have started building a stronger and stronger relationship between our department of theatre and the theater scene in Chicago, trying to build sort of a conduit up I-57,” Dixon says. “Most of our Illinois students end up going to Chicago as their first stop as they embark on their professional careers.”
“The Royale” is an example of the stories Phillips wants to tell with Definition Theatre.
“This play is an act of anti-racism in itself,” Phillips says. “Jack Johnson was a heavyweight champion, but we don’t really know him. We know Muhammad Ali. We know Joe Frazier. But Jack Johnson was the person who gave them the foundation to stand and be the kind of athletes that they were.”
Junior acting major Jaylon Muchison plays Jay, a character based on “the notorious yet glorious Jack Johnson,” Muchison tells me. For him, the main themes of the play are legacy and representation.
“Jack Johnson is someone who goes beyond a ring or beyond a playing field, beyond a sport,” he says. “I think that it’s really important for us to remember that the legacy that he established showed other Black people in America that we belong, that we have space to be ourselves.”
Phillips says artistic works such as “The Royale” help people to acknowledge and talk about the hard things in our country.
“I’m really appreciative that the university was bold enough to say, this is the play that we need to do at this time,” he says. “It is crucial, the timing of telling this story now. This is an example of our society struggling with ways to push the needle forward. For all these artists to have this clear example that what story you tell can have a major impact, it means everything to me. Just shedding light on it, acknowledging, is a very powerful tool.”