The Royale at the American Players Theater: The Shoulders We Stand On
Jamal James (l) plays the central character Jay Jackson and Tyrone Phillips directs The Royale, a fictional account of the life of Jack Johnson, America’s first heavyweight fighter.
Part 1 of 2
By Jonathan Gramling
As I drove out to Spring Green and the American Players Theater, I couldn’t get the thought about “The Great White Hope” out of my head. It was the film released in 1970; a fictionalized account of the life of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight fighter to win the World Championship title. The racism was so fierce back then that Congress passed a law in 1912 that banned the shipping of boxing films across state lines in fear that race riots would break out when whites saw a Black man pummeling a white contender.
I was driving out to American Players Theater to interview Tyron Phillips, the director of The Royale, a fictionalized account of Johnson’s life during his heavyweight years, and Jamal James who plays Jay Johnson, the fictionalized Jack Johnson character. It almost seemed out of place to be talking about the play in such a rural setting. But Phillips and James actually enjoy the country setting so that they can focus on their craft.
“I went to the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign,” Phillips said. “They had a great classical program. It was like a contemporary and conservative program that did classical work. But it was in the cornfields. You got to be an artist, similar to here. You have to focus on the work and there weren’t a lot of distractions. I think it was good for me as a student not to be distracted by city life.”
“I went to Emory and Henry College in southern Virginia,” James added. “It has a working relationship with the Barter Theater there, which is the second oldest repertory theater in the United States. I loved the area and I loved the fact I could just be in seclusion and train. There are, of course, larger schools that I thought about going to, but I actually liked the idea of being remote and having just working on your training and that’s it. I loved it there.”
The Royale is an incredible play that has so many different levels of meaning. While it is about race, it’s also about life with race used as the vehicle for the larger story.
“What does beauty mean and who is allowed to be great,” Phillips asked. “What is greatness and how do you achieve it? I would also add, looking at it now, is family. After you reach a level of success, how do you then go back and forth in the community? We don’t want to forget them. How do you achieve this level that might take you out of what you know and how you grew up, but then also connect again? For me, the story, as an art piece, it’s an act of antiracism, which I think people are struggling with right now. How do I be proactive? By shining a light on this story, by people buying a ticket, it’s an action that says this story matters. What about the past? Have we changed? Hopefully the answer is yes. But if you come up against an
obstacle, we can clearly see, ‘What is BS? What is someone actually saying no for a reason that makes no sense? Achieving greatness, fighting the battles seen and unseen, is super important and this play captures that.”
“There are different layers to The Royale,” James emphasized. “It is a story about Jack Johnson or influenced by Jack Johnson’s life. But it is a fictionalized retelling about him becoming the first Black heavyweight champion of the U.S. In the story and the script, his name is Jay Jackson. And there are things that are put in the story that are from Jack Johnson’s life. But it’s also telling a completely different story to highlight some things that aren’t just about race during that time, but also about beauty and ower and humanity. It does deal with ace. But it is a story mostly about how we deal with our own sense of beauty and our own ownership of saying, ‘I am here and I matter.’ There is something about that, which is a human distinction of we all have to choose who we want to be and whether it is worth living for and dying for. It’s a play about boxing, but it tackles a real thing in our history where Jack Johnson won and our government went after him. People died that day and the day afterwards from lynchings just that issue. It talks about what it means to have beauty and power. Who is allowed to give that to you? Who’s allowed to take that away from you? That is what the play is tackling: our humanity.”
And it is Jack Johnson’s humanity that should appeal to everyone. “The way that I feel about Jack Johnson, the historical, actual man, is a huge amount of respect and reverence, but also sometimes confusion about how dynamic he was as an individual to walk out into the world, he had a lot of confidence about walking into the world where I feel Black men and women’s lives were not given as much weight as white people,” James said. “But he walked in and said, ‘You will respect me. I’m going to win. I am the best.’ That takes an immense amount of security in your spirit, in your soul. I am astounded
by the fact that he did that at that time.”
Next Issue: More on The Royale