Ava Brewster-Turner has witnessed a few close calls from stage right over the years.
That’s where she stands, out of sight from the 50-seat audience at 1713 Wooddale Blvd., home of UpStage Theatre. Turner opened it 23 years ago, not only as Baton Rouge’s first Black theater company but as “the small theater with a big heart.”
While the space is small, when the stage lights up, it doesn’t matter. Audiences suddenly find themselves in other people’s stories playing out in other places.
Sometimes those make-believe stories can be as unpredictable as real life.
“We’ve had a couple of malfunctions,” Turner said. “And it’s funny that we’re talking about this, because I often share a story with my actors from a time I was visiting Los Angeles.”
In 2010, the company was invited to join actresses Loretta Devine and Taraji P. Henson in the Los Angeles stage production of “A Tribute to Ruby Dee” in front of an audience that included the legendary actress. While there, Turner attended a play by a local theater company and noticed a glaring mistake that could have resulted in disaster.
“The scene was in a church, and I think the lady had a crush on the pastor,” Turner said. “She was talking to the pastor, and she had some wine. The scene was in the church’s little cafeteria, and she turned to get some glasses from the cabinet.”
But there were no glasses.
“So, she opened the wine, and they just passed the bottle to one another,” Turner said. “It was a great recovery. They just played it off and kept going.”
When actors in her own company later found themselves with only one cup in a coffee scene, they simply passed the cup around during the dialogue.
“That’s when I knew they were listening to me,” Turner said. “They were listening to the things I told them. We laughed about it, but they were really listening, and that meant so much to me.”
Passing theater knowledge to her actors has always been the most important part of the process for Turner. And when they apply that knowledge to their craft, they become better actors. Or directors. Or playwrights. Or producers.
Or even founders of their own theater companies.
Turner’s students and UpStage actors are doing all of these things, and there’s nothing that fulfills her more than witnessing their success.
From Grambling to Chicago and back again
Looking back, there’s always been a stage in Turner’s life, from childhood church productions in her hometown of Augusta, Arkansas, to her college days at Grambling University to her first teaching job in Wheatley, Arkansas.
Turner retired in 2016 after a career of teaching speech and drama in Arkansas, Alexandria, Memphis, Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, the East Baton Rouge Parish School system, Baton Rouge Community College and Southern University.
As for her own college training, Turner chose Grambling over her family tradition of University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, because she wanted to go to some place different.
“I graduated high school in 1973, and we just weren’t too far out of segregation,” Turner said. “But one Sunday afternoon, we were watching a football game on television, and at halftime, we saw this Black band. I’m like, ‘A Black band?’ We didn’t see Black people on TV that much, you know?”
The band was Grambling University’s Tiger Marching Band.
After watching the performance and coach Eddie Robinson, she went to school on Monday and asked her guidance counselor for information on the university. As a student at Grambling in the ’70s, Turner roomed with late television writer Judi Ann Mason. She earned her bachelor’s degree in speech and drama from Grambling in 1976, returned to Arkansas to teach, then enrolled in the University of Illinois at Chicago to earn her master’s degree.
But Chicago wasn’t for her.
“I looked outside my window one morning, and I could only see the top of my car,” she said. “I called my mom and said, ‘This is not for me.'”
Turner returned to Grambling, where she worked in housing while volunteering in the theater department. That is, until a friend of the theater department head came looking for a speech teacher. The friend ended up being the principal of Peabody Magnet High School in Alexandria.
“That’s how I got my job in Alexandria,” Turner said. “And Alexandria is where I met my husband, Lloyd. He worked for GM. We got married; then we moved to Memphis.”
Dreams come true
The General Motors job eventually landed the Turners in Baton Rouge. They’d become parents to son, Terrance, now founder, content creator and director of Maddgame Entertainment.
Through it all, Turner’s goal was to start her own theater company, a dream that grew organically in 1998, when she began working as the summer youth director and drama director for Baton Rouge’s 4th District Baptist Association.
Her all-kids casts rehearsed in her home, then brought their plays to New Orleans, Hammond, Alexandria, Grambling and Shreveport.
A life in theater
Turner was working in East Baton Rouge Parish schools when she and her husband accepted temporary teaching positions at Wiley College, where she also earned her doctorate’s degree.
She began teaching at Southern University in 2005, left the university in 2011 and returned to the parish school system.
Through everything, Turner was pulling double duty by staging plays at schools and at UpStage with many of her students becoming regular UpStage cast members. In 2015, UpStage’s production of “Indigo Blues” won first place in the Association of Community Theatre’s State of Louisiana 2015 AACTFest, then represented the state in the national competition in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The company didn’t win the national competition, but it did draw big crowds in a theater that was much bigger than its home base. And for a while, Turner was able to provide a bigger space for her company with a second theater in Cortana Mall.
“Even then, Wooddale Boulevard was our home base,” Turner said. “It will always be our home.”
The space at Wooddale Boulevard is where Turner not only tells stories through directing but also teaching, and her casts and crews listen — closely. And they take what she teaches both on stage and in life.
“Seeing my students and actors at UpStage do well warms my heart,” Turner said. “That’s the biggest reward of all.”