Bringin' the Thunder,
Praisin' the Song

By Vincent F.A. Golphin

He was a bit actor with a good pedigree. During the 1980s, Keith Glover was the short-lived Kenny Hathaway on the soap opera, As the World Turns. That was not a bad start for a black teen who, at 15, studied under Lee Strasseberg, the legendary acting coach. By the end of the decade, he portrayed an unnamed soldier in the big screen, post-Vietnam War saga, Jacknife, opposite veterans Ed Harris, Kathy Bates and Robert De Niro. Keith Glover has even been on NBC's Emmy magnet, Law & Order. He played a reporter in the June 9, 1991 episode, "The Blue Wall." Then, he did a couple turns as easily forgettable characters on the Fox-created New York Undercover series.

Glover's resume has theater credits, too. He's been opposite John Amos, another veteran, in regional productions of August Wilson's play, Fences. He did Wilson's Two Trains Running in Hartford. Now, to Rochester, New York, he brings Thunder.

Thunder Knocking on the Door, Glover's third play, is a musical drama based on the blues and memories of his Alabama youth. Under the playwright's direction, the story of an Alabama family's life turned out by the blues and a mysterious muse, opened August 31 for a two-month engagement at the Geva Theatre in Rochester, New York. It closes on October 3. After a string of stagings that included appearances at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage theater, Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater, Baltimore's Center Stage, the Great Lakes Festival in Cleveland and San Diego's Old Globe Theatre, critics say the play could become a Broadway hit.

In the 1990s, Glover added writing to his other theatrical pursuits. "I was doing a lot of regional theater," he said. "You go places and you're by yourself. You're basically moving and you're staying some place like two months. In a lot of these cities, like Rochester, you're the entertainment, so at the end of the evening you go, 'Where's the party?' and people go, 'No, we have to work tomorrow.' You have a lot of free time on your hands, so I just started writing." His life has not been the same since.

His first play Dancing on Moonlight, a classic good-vs.-evil tale set in the Harlem underworld, premiered at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1995. That followed on the heels of a Denver Center Theatre Company production of Coming of the Hurricane, his second play, in 1994. His fourth play, In Walks Ed, a comedy honed from love, revenge, poetry, a million bucks and guns, won him the 1997 Lois and Richard Rosenthal New Play Prize and the nomination for a Pulitzer.

"My thing was I just wanted to tell stories," said the playwright and director. The small-town Alabama native traces the impulse and talent to his roots. Glover said he comes from a family of storytellers. "In Alabama, the spoken word is something that is paramount. Being able to tell stories to explain your experiences or the experiences of others was something that was taught, but also held in high esteem."

The playwright said Thunder, which casts the music and legends of his boyhood with classic dramatic themes, stretches the boundaries of current black theater. "Thunder has a very heavy Egyptian vibe," he said. "I put that there purposely to open up people's minds as to what they think the blues is. The blues did not develop here in America. It's something that can stretch all the way back to Africa."

The 32-year-old Glover revels in his quest for a new theatrical vision. He said the plays he writes are about the culture, for the culture and their goal is to enrich the culture. He said the goal is not to preach to white America or highlight black suffering. He calls those plays social-political realism, and admits his Coming of the Hurricane fits neatly into the category. At the same time, Glover said he strives to move beyond narrow cultural images.

"A lot of times when you see black shows in regional theater, they are sometimes directed to bring in white people to either feel very angry at themselves, what they've done, or to see what we do to each other," he said. "I'm not into victimization! That's a trap."

Thunder glorifies the music more than the people. He said audiences will find a different rhythm in his work than in the plays of major black writers. Some dramatic experts are beginning to tie his name to August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry. Glover shrugs at the statement.

"August deserves where he is," the playwright said, "but in some ways he has so shaped our perceptions of this art form that we do not view the plays as what they are. We view them through the prism of August." Glover said his work is different.

"August is influenced by different things than I am. For instance, August is an older man, so he is one of the true people who knew the time before civil rights and afterwards. That shaped him to see both sides. I was born in Birmingham in 1966. I'm a child who had to be taught that rather than to know it first-hand. My life is shaped by different things. If you try to put the rhythms of August or Hansberry on my stuff, it doesn't work."

Glover said the "rhythm" of his work leans more toward classic Greek drama, highlighting values and themes more than historical experience. Yet, he admits that he has dealt with history.

Coming of the Hurricane, a play set during Reconstruction, where an ex-slave-turned- bareknuckle boxer seeks his place in the new nation, is social-political realism. Dancing on Moonlight, where a roving gambler is forced to face the consequences that result when the son he abandoned is raised by an enemy, is more Greek drama. "You have to see beyond the stereotype," Glover said. The characters and settings are not nearly as important as the lessons they teach.

Thunder is Greek drama, too, woven from the strands of the playwright's life. The action takes place in 1966. That was the year Keith was born to then-19-year-old Ernestine Glover and Jimmy Aikins at Birmingham's University Hospital.

Marvell Thunder, a strange figure who turns out to be Satan came to Bessemer, Alabama, a small town outside Birmingham. The playwright's grandparents lived there. He grew up there.

Thunder taps into the Robert Johnson legend as the Devil challenges the talented twin children of the only man who ever beat him playing the Delta blues. "This was the music of my father and mother, my grandfather, my grandmother," Glover said. His stepfather, Woody Phifer, a guitarist, advised on the musical score, written by Grammy-winner Keb' Mo', and even hand-crafted the guitars used in the Rochester production.

Glover loved the stories and the music of his childhood. He moved to New York City in 1980, and eventually got into acting, but writing plays soon became a way out of other traps. During the studies with Strasseberg, he said he was the lone black student. Glover learned early that the theater did not have much room for African Americans.

"When I got into acting school, and I was 15, they didn't have any black work," he said. Glover was cast as Jack Johnson, the first black world heavyweight boxing champion in a production of The Great White Hope. He laughed.

"I'm not ready to be Jack Johnson, so I started writing my own scenes," he recalled. "It wasn't like, 'Let me sit down and write this great epic,' it was, 'I want to write something that is more appropriate for me to act, something that I'm connecting to.'"

After graduating from Murray Bertraum High School on Pearl Street, under the Brooklyn Bridge in lower Manhattan, Glover took his interest in acting to college. The budding actor stopped writing plays. Glover focused on the stage until the tedium of road trips brought him back to telling stories, his first love.

"It's shared communication," he said. "There's something about once you really do your first play and how you're able to be a part of that storytelling experience. There's something that goes all the way back-that's uniquely African-if you look at the South and the art of storytelling."

Glover said most of what he learned about the art came from his grandfather and uncles. "They didn't stick you in front of the TV," he explained. "If you went out with your grandfather, he would tell you stories. He would talk to you and a lot of times you would get history relayed to you and it would take story form. It would connect you to a sense of tradition or to the past, but also would tell what you were connected to." One of them was how his grandmother gave birth to his aunt under a bridge.

"It would be about how she survived there, but it would be in story form," he said. "You would hear about your history and you would hear about time before you even got here. I heard about my great-grandfather, who was Indian, and how he came, and how he met my great-grandmother. A lot of kids don't know how their parents met, and how the parents were when they were their age. My family felt it was important for us to know who we are and who we came from and that's what kept us closer together."

Love of storytelling overshadows a lot of what goes on in Glover's life. He talks about the importance of the right tale connecting with audiences much more than prize-winning or favorable reviews. The bit actor turned playwright and found a forum to grow.