Everyone comes to the crossroads sooner or later. When Robert Johnson did, it led to a deal with the devil and the greatest blues music ever played, or so the legend says. In the case of ProArts Collective and the Austin Community College Drama Department, it led to a deal with each other that has already produced one award-winning stage production, and now it stands poised to repeat that success – with a play about the mythic Mississippi bluesman, no less.
Robert Johnson: Trick the Devil is Bill Harris’ drama in which the man who sang “Hellhound on My Trail” is allowed to give his own account of that fateful midnight meeting, which he tells after being waylaid in a Deep South juke joint by a Shakespeare-spouting English professor. ProArts and ACC have teamed up for a co-production starring Austin Community College students Michelle Flanagan and Feliz McDonald, Austin veteran Billy Harden (Porgy and Bess, Crowns), and B. Iden Payne Award winner Aaron Alexander (As You Like It) as Johnson. The director is ACC Drama professor Marcus McQuirter, who also helmed the first ACC-ProArts co-production last year, Funnyhouse of a Negro, for which he won an Austin Critics Table Award.
“The collaboration is a great opportunity for ProArts and ACC to explore each other’s worlds,” notes the director, and that extends beyond the annual play. When ProArts hosts BAM!, its Black Artists Movement festival, it brings visiting artists to ACC for workshops and residency activities. In turn, ProArts gains a new audience from the college community. Both sides see their partnership helping them reach more Austinites than ever and magnifying their impact on the city’s cultural life. That stands to be even truer with Robert Johnson: Trick the Devil, since it’s being staged in the new Long Center. (All proceeds from the production – $10 per person, $8 for students – benefit the Boyd Vance Scholarship Fund, which awards $1,000 over two semesters to an African-American drama or dance major at ACC.)
ProArts and ACC will also be honoring Austin’s blues elders with a special concert and celebration. Blues Boy Hubbard, Donald “Duck” Jennings, and other musicians will jam and swap songs in a traditional song circle, with a special showcase by Matthew Robinson & the Central East Band. Beer, Barbecue, and the Blues takes place Saturday, April 19, 1-5pm, at Kenny Dorham’s Backyard, 1106 E. 11th. Admission is $5.
Robert Johnson: Trick the Devil runs April 17-27, Wednesday-Saturday, 8pm; Sunday, 3pm, in the Rollins Studio Theatre at the Long Center, 701 W. Riverside. For more information, call 474-LONG (5664) or visit www.thelongcenter.org.
This article appears in April 18 • 2008.