Meet Jubilee Theatre's new artistic director

Settling into his office in the subterranean headquarters below the Burk Burnett Building in downtown Fort Worth, Tre Garrett, Jubilee Theatre's new artistic director, begins to discuss how living in the city just a short time already has inspired an idea for a new musical.

Doing something based on life in the Old West came to him when he recently attended his first Cowboys of Color Rodeo.

"After I got over the fact that they were hurting the baby cows," Garrett said, grinning, "I was on my feet."

"The goal is to revisit the past -- to reclaim it," said Garrett, a compact man with a big smile. "When you watch Westerns today, you don't see u s."

He's referring to African-Americans. It is the African-American experience that provides the focus for Jubilee, this year celebrating its 30th season. And although Garrett -- also 30 years old -- is bursting with new ideas, that mission won't change, he says.

Garrett's energy, the fact that he is as comfortable with drama as he is with musicals, and his embrace of new works, or at least plays new to Jubilee, sold the board on him when it was looking for a new director last year.

"I think it's going to be a great initiative," Benjamin Espino, Jubilee's managing director, said of Garrett's hire. "I think it's very exciting."

Garrett, in fact, is known for blazing trails in his relatively short career.

Prior to coming to Cowtown in mid-January, the Houston native and son of a construction worker was an assistant Broadway director, a fellow at the John F. Kennedy Center and a director of more than 150 productions for Walt Disney Entertainment.

He attended the High School for Performing Arts in Houston, earned an undergraduate directing degree from the North Carolina School of the Arts and moved back to Texas from California after finishing a graduate program at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where he won a pair of playwrighting awards.

"Since I've been in Fort Worth it's been nonstop," said Garrett, who, on this day, had just blown in from a fundraising luncheon. "It feels like L.A. Living in Fort Worth so far has exceeded my expectations. It totally surprised me."

Though he's not directing The African Company Presents Richard III, which is in previews this week until opening night Friday, he is already giving Jubilee fans something to celebrate.

Joy Thomas, Jubilee board president, said that while Garrett is charged with nurturing Jubilee founder Rudy Eastman's legacy, the theater won't thrive by simply trotting out its greatest hits every season under new direction.

Eastman's plays will remain in the rotation, Thomas said, but audiences won't necessarily see the name in lights every season.

Eastman, too, was strongly committed to producing original works such as Negroes in Space. Innovation, Thomas noted, is one of the things that has kept Jubilee growing and solvent when other companies were closing the doors.

"We have to create the canon," Garrett said, leaning forward across the desk wedged into his concrete underground office bunker. "My goal is not to create the perfect play. You have to take some risks. You have to step out. The goal is to create conversation, to inspire people and create thought-provoking entertainment. If you don't like one show, keep on coming."

New plans for Jubilee

In addition to applying for a National Endowment for the Arts grant to commission his Western-inspired musical, tentatively titled Black Spurs, Garrett plans to start a series of acting classes at Jubilee beginning in April. He has plans to bring a playwright-in-residence to the theater, put on a writing workshop and hold a new-works festival.

He is also mulling a production of Stephen Sondheim's 1970 musical Company.

"So Jubilee hasn't done a Sondheim before," Garrett said. "I want to give them what they want to see and also ask them to grow with me."

A Sondheim play with an all-black cast doesn't bother the board president.

"In the 21st century, why do we think it's crazy?" Thomas asked. "Why should we let race prevent us from doing anything?"

Garrett, who has four brothers and two stepbrothers, got bitten by the acting bug when he tried out for the lead role in The Tempest as a 10th-grader.

He said he really fell for theater when he saw August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at age 16. The play tackles race, religion and the white exploitation of black artists, such as blues singer Ma Rainey.

"That was the moment that changed everything. That was the moment I heard people who sounded like me," Garrett said. "That was something that was very special. August Wilson spoke to me. I immediately started writing to him."

He eventually met Wilson in person.

"The very moment I walked up, he said, 'Tre Garrett, I got your letters. I have a book for you,'" Garrett said, reaching out a finger across the desk. "It was like Genesis. It shaped everything.

"Isn't it amazing that the life you're living is based on the decisions of a 16- or 17-year-old?" he asked. "We're living these lives on decisions teenagers made."

From a framed photo, the faces of Wilson and a teenage Garrett peer into the office that is already filled with DVDs, books and Disney tchotchkes.

"I don't think I have ever been associated with anything that failed artistically. A try is not a fail. I believe that," Garrett said. "I don't do everything well. The one thing I am good at, I celebrate it. I'm great because people were great to me."

Still a newcomer, Garrett is busy meeting actors and supporters, and visiting other theaters to see who's doing what.

And of course, he's looking to the past, as well as the future.

"In general my intention is to embrace Rudy's legacy," Garrett said. "I'm sure if he could see into the future, he'd want us to have better production values, dream bigger.

"There are expectations for me," he said. "I said, 'We're gonna do it.' And we're gonna."

John Austin, 817-390-7874