In 2025, St. Louis Black Repertory Company Founder and Producing Director Ron Himes was ready to sit down with The St. Louis American to discuss the Season 48 finale, August Wilson’s Radio Golf. Before the interview started, he got word of the federal arts funding cuts that dealt a financial blow to the institution.
“One hundred thousand dollars. Gone. Just like that,” Himes said with a laugh. It wasn’t a laugh in response to anything funny. It was one of those “laugh to keep from crying” reactions that have carried Black people through from “can’t” to “must.”
And the cut wasn’t just $100,000 flat. It was annual.
“What are y’all gonna do?” this reporter asked — also an instinctive reaction to the news.
“The Black Rep is going to do what it has always done,” Himes said. “We will carry on.”
For arts organizations like The Black Rep, and so many others, losing $100,000 a year can be the difference between staying open and closing shop.
But they did exactly that – carried on.
Nearly eighteen months later, The Black Rep is celebrating a milestone with the opening of its 50th anniversary season. The company premiere of The Color Purple opens Friday, September 11, and continues through September 27 at Washington University’s Edison Theatre.
It’s a fitting venue — since Washington University St. Louis is where it all began.
The Black Rep started two years before Himes received his undergraduate degree from there in 1978. He was a business major who gravitated toward the Black creatives on campus.
He heard his drama student friends complain about not being able to get cast in the university productions.
“If you were Black, you couldn’t pay nobody to put you on stage back then,” poet, actress, educator and fellow Washington University alum Marsha Cann once said. “Imagine going to a school to learn how to act. Then have that same school turn around and not let you practice how to do what you were paying them to teach you.”
Himes helped Black drama students and actors meet that need when he launched the Phoenix Theatre Troupe in 1976.
“Most people thought it was deep, like a Phoenix rising,” Himes said. “I thought it sounded like we were from out of town and would make people want to book us while we were here.”
A few years later Phoenix became the St. Louis Black Repertory Company — even though plenty of people refer to it erroneously as the St. Louis Black Repertory Theater.
The “company” instead of “theater” is intentional. They’ve never just staged plays. In the early days of The Black Rep, the repertory also referred to their dance element — which trained young Black dancers and presented dance concerts.
It also applies to the workshops and educational programming that have brought authentic Black theatre to classrooms across the region as a learning experience, and into community settings to create cultural connection.
Friday night is evidence of Himes’ determination and the support of countless supporters.
The milestone season opener will be bittersweet for The Black Rep. Cann, who was part of The Black Rep family from the very beginning, died Wednesday night.
“I’m glad she’s no longer suffering,” Himes said of Cann, who faced a series of health issues over the past few years. She was 72.
“We lost our third ‘Colored Girl,’” said Tracy D. Holliway-Wiggins. A former actress and The Black Rep’s stage manager for more than 30 years, Holliway-Wiggins shook her head as she shared the news and headed back to the boards to run the show.
Cann shared the stage with Holliway-Wiggins as part of the cast of St. Louis native Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf in the 1980s.
Linda Kennedy and Jennifer Beavers-Wright were the other two “Colored Girls” who preceded Cann in death.
Beavers-Wright had a catchphrase when she served as Audience Services Director for The Black Rep in the early 2000s.
“I used to be on stage when I was fresh and young and twenty too,” Beavers-Wright said. “Now I’m 42 and it’s ‘Jennifer who?’”
The Black Rep will turn 50 without her. She passed away fifteen years ago. She was 54.
Kennedy was deemed by many, including Himes, to be “The Black Rep’s Leading Lady.”
“Her first season with The Black Rep was in 1981,” Himes said at the time of her death in 2019 at 67 from breast cancer. “I honestly don’t know where the company would have been or what we would have achieved without her.”
Kennedy had been in so many productions over the years that for one show — Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel — she played the damsel in one staging and the wise woman of a certain age in another years later.
In plenty of those shows, she played opposite Himes as the dramatic female lead. Their last performance together was as Rose and Troy Maxson in The Black Rep’s 2018 production of August Wilson’s Fences.
“She was my right hand, my left hand… my everything,” Himes said. “She was the heart and soul of The Black Rep.”
The same year Kennedy joined the company, they made the former sanctuary of the Greely Presbyterian Church in north St. Louis City their home. They renamed it the 23rd Street Theatre — with the endearing tag line “the miracle on 23rd street.”
They relocated to Grand Center in 1992 and called The Grandel Theatre home until 2013.
The Black Rep has carried on — and come full circle.
The stage that Black Washington University students couldn’t buy their way onto has been a staple venue for The Black Rep for more than 20 years. Himes is part of the WashU faculty, where he teaches Black theater and is the Henry E. Hampton Artist-In-Residence.
For this milestone season, they will return to their former home, The Grandel Theatre, for two productions — one of them a 50th anniversary staging of For Colored Girls.
In the meantime, the heart and soul that Beavers-Wright, Cann and Kennedy poured into The Black Rep is apparent through its latest production.
Olajuwon Davis, a member of the ensemble for The Color Purple, was still in high school when Cann discovered his talent through her 40 Corners street theater initiative.
Tyler White, who plays Squeak, was a tween when Linda Kennedy oversaw The Black Rep’s summer camp.
And the standards set by Beavers‑Wright — along with countless artists whose talent was shaped and stamped with the company’s signature level of excellence — carry on.
The Black Rep’s 50th anniversary season opens with ‘The Color Purple,’ Which continues through September 27 at Washington University’s Edison Theatre. For more information, visit www.theblackrep.org or call 314.534.3807.