Shawn Whitsell - The Triple Threat
by Jim Ridley
A few weeks ago at the Darkhorse Theater, Shawn Whitsell knew what was coming, every night, and he'd wait for it. He knew that in his play Never Been Home, an incendiary drama of bitterly divided family, he'd set a trap to spring at the end of tension-filled Act I. Every night, he could feel the audience getting anxious. Then boom!—right on cue, a devastating family secret would draw a collective gasp from the audience.
"I loved that!" says Whitsell, 29, tucking into his catfish plate at Monell's on Eighth Avenue after a word of grace. "I loved hearing that gasp every night, because I figured there was no way you could get up and leave after that."
Not only didn't people leave Never Been Home, they kept coming back—enough so that the play got a second staging earlier this month after its debut at last fall's Shades of Black Theatre festival. The festival is only one part of an ongoing show of strength by Nashville's African-American theater troupes, from productions by Michael L. Walker's Dream 7 and Mary McCallum's SistaStyle companies to stage/screen actor jeff obafemi carr's new Amun Ra playhouse on Clifton Avenue.
No one's had a busier year, though, than Whitsell, who's been active as actor, director and playwright, not to mention impresario of his own Destiny Theatre Experience company. Making rain in a dry climate comes naturally to the Kentucky native, the son of a Navy dad and a mother who worked in a nursing home. He wanted to act from an early age but had few chances in his hometown of Madisonville. So at age 17, he and his best friend wrote an original musical—nothing ambitious, just a historical survey of black music—and staged it themselves.
He made his Nashville debut in Walker's play Cultural Millennium in 2002, and through Destiny he realized a long-held dream—to play the role of Boone in Suzan-Lori Parks' Pulitzer-winning drama Topdog/Underdog, whose Nashville premiere he staged in 2007. He opens this weekend playing NAACP leader Roy Wilkins in SistaStyle's The Face of Emmett Till at the Darkhorse, and he's waiting to hear if Never Been Home has been invited to the prestigious National Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem.
Asked his favorite role to date, Whitsell ponders the question through lunch. Just before leaving, he smiles and withdraws his wallet. He hands across a picture of himself with a beaming 2-year-old girl.
"My favorite role is the role of father," he says, gently tucking away the photo. "I named my company after her." Her name is Destiny.
Photographed at the Darkhorse Theater by Eric England
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