Parson's project

“Feel the chill from this stupid motherfucker,” director Ron OJ Parson tells his actors. “Let’s have a moment of reacting to this ignorant shit he’s saying.”

While rehearsing Pearl Cleage’s Flyin’ West, in previews at Court Theatre, Parson doesn’t sit for long. He stands, approaches the actors, circles and sits among them in the Hyde Park rehearsal hall. It’s precisely that vigilant intimacy—between actor and character, audience and actor—that distinguishes Parson’s direction. After rehearsal, Parson describes his style slightly differently: “I have what I call a motherfucker technique,” he explains. “A lot of actors who work with me, they know what it is. It’s just the essence of that character.”

Last year, Parson’s MF technique reached a pinnacle with his exemplary production of August Wilson’s Fences. It was the classics-based Court Theatre’s first work by an African-American playwright in its 51-year history. After its resounding success, Court hired Parson as a resident artist and this season is mounting two African-American plays, including Cleage’s drama about black homesteaders heading West.

It’s Friday evening, the end of a long day of rehearsal, and Parson wraps things up only to realize his car has been towed. The grumpy director perfunctorily provides the obligatory background information: Parson (OJ is a childhood nickname) was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of a postman–truck-driver dad and an office-worker mom (both now deceased) who divorced when Parson was 12. Yet when we talk technique, Parson perks up. “I like to get inside the characters in a raw fashion. The term blocking, people use that term. I don’t like to use that term. I use the term crafting, which I got from a friend of mine. He always said, ‘I don’t want to block anybody because that’s going to block their creativity.’ That’s what that does: I’m blocking you now.” Punctuation is misleading here; Parson relates all this while hardly stopping for any.

The same year his parents split up, Parson received an affirmative-action scholarship to Buffalo’s Studio Arena Theatre School, a watershed experience, he says. While at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Parson and David Alan Grier (of In Living Color fame) formed the literally named Back Alley Players. “We would do plays in the street.” It took Parson eight off-and-on years to finish his degree in 1978: “I was smoking a lot of pot. So for three years I was like, Man, school, fuck it. Let’s just get high, read and write. Sex, drugs and rock & roll, man, so that was it.”

After dropping out of Rutgers’ grad school, Parson spent more than a decade struggling as a New York actor, then returned to Buffalo; he and theater were done. But a friend, Alfred Wilson, persuaded him to move to Chicago to cofound the African-American troupe Onyx Theatre Ensemble, which lasted from 1994 to 1998. At the same time, Parson set his sights on two other theaters: Steppenwolf and Goodman. “I told myself I was going to direct at those two major theaters within five years, and that happened.”

In 2000, when he helmed Congo Square’s inaugural production,  August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, in the 77-seat Chicago Dramatists theater, the playwright himself was in attendance. “I was a little nervous,” Parson says. Later, Parson heard Wilson’s verdict: “He said it was one of the best two [productions of his work] he’s ever seen. His daughter, who’s a friend of mine, said he told her that; that’s why I felt it was real.”

For those who saw Fences, Wilson’s assessment holds little surprise. Both Parson and Court’s executive director, Dawn Helsing, speak of that production as a turning point. “Fences really opened their eyes to a new audience,” Parson says. “I just hope we can open up a new vision of what a classic means.” When Fences’ director and cast members acted as unofficial ambassadors to the African-American community, Court learned from that, Helsing says. “We certainly saw a huge influx of African-American audiences that were new to Court. We want to build relationships with these new communities that we haven’t before.”

“I was a little busy before Fences,” Parson says. “After Fences, it got real busy.” So busy, in fact, that his high-powered New York agent is coming to see his work. “I’ve been with them for five years,” the director says. “First time they’re seeing something.”

Flyin’ West heads south for Court Theatre.