Ruben Santiago-Hudson Seeks A Higher Standard

Ruben Santiago-Hudson has a lot on his plate. And his mind.

Pandemic be damned, the acclaimed multihyphenate artist is continuing a hot streak of enviable projects, including, of late: a Tony-winning play (director), an Oscar-winning film (writer), and a one-man show that helped reopen Broadway this fall (actor, director, writer, and musician).

“Nobody works harder than me,” he insists over the phone. “I’m not going to allow it. You can work as hard, I can’t determine that. But I determine how hard I work.” He pauses to reflect. “Sometimes people tell me, ‘Ruben, rest. Please lay down. Just let it go.’”

And how does such advice sit with the workaholic?

“Sometimes I do have to lay my ass down,” he laughs. “Especially when it’s my wife telling me to.”

The exchange encapsulates much of what makes him such a compelling artist: his ferocious work ethic is tempered with sly self-aware humor, and he keeps constant focus on the people with (and for) whom he is doing it all.

At 65, he shows no sign of slowing. Well, not unless he’s forced to; he did injure his back preparing the one-man show, Lackawanna Blues. But even that couldn’t keep him down long. Despite several cancelled performances, Lackawanna finished its scheduled run, earned rave reviews, and played an important role in Broadway’s fitful reboot. Opening alongside titans like Wicked and Hamilton, it offered an alternative to theatergoers not yet ready to be engulfed in screaming crowds.

“Phantom [of the Opera] has extraordinary entertainment value,” he says of another long-running spectacle. “It fascinates me every time I see it. But with Lackawanna, I’m giving you access to another resource. It’s entertaining, but it’s also soul searching. It’s about witnessing grace.”

In it, he played dozens of characters as they circle the gravitational center that is Nanny, an adoptive mother figure and proprietor of the boarding house in which he spent much of his childhood. And it did feel different than a billion-dollar bonanza like Wicked – not necessarily better, but different. It was intimate, bereft of commercial cynicism, and funny as hell. He even snuck in a few numbers on his harmonica, the last of which was so gorgeously rendered that everyone in my row wept. It was a welcome return to communal sensation after eighteen months of isolation.

“Where else can you get that but the theatre?” he asks.

Now he’s back for more, directing a new play on the Rialto, one again well-suited to his knack for drawing dignity out of adversity. Skeleton Crew, by Tony nominee Dominique Morisseau, tells the story of workers in a Detroit auto shop in 2008 as they stave off economic peril and the erasure of spiritual sustenance.

“It’s prodding the depths of your heart, to a certain degree,” he says, “and also celebrating people that keep this country functioning and moving and working and the sacrifices they make as the laborers.”

It opened this week to raves, with many praising its lack of voyeuristic stereotypes, and Morisseau’s refusal to offer pablum in the face of intractable conflict. But getting it there was far from a smooth ride. The Omicron wave wreaked horrific damage on the theatre industry, shuttering half a dozen Broadway shows permanently and spooking audiences to record-low attendance. Skeleton Crew wasn’t immune: three of its cast members tested positive in December, one after another, delaying opening night by almost a month.

“I’ve been rehearsing for ten weeks now here,” Santiago-Hudson says, describing the process of training understudies back-to-back-to-back. “Every week I had to put another actor in, put them through the paces, start from scratch.”

While this might seem like a frightful iteration of ye olde “the show must go on” adage, he stops short of adding “at any cost.” The work is important, but not more than the worker. And that distinction is rooted in a word that surfaces again and again in multiple phone conversations.

“Respect,” he says in audible italics. “I have a tremendous amount of respect for understudies because I did that. I didn’t just come out of my mother’s womb a damn Tony winner. My first job in New York City was A Soldier’s Play. I covered three characters. So I always start with that: respect. They’re the greatest investment you can make and I try to tell theaters that. They are your insurance policy.”

The play’s focus on the integrity of laborers in a lopsided system feels all the more resonant in Omicron’s wake. Just as the characters operate under the looming fear of closure, of having their livelihoods erased by powers outside their control, so too do Broadway employees. Santiago-Hudson’s description of the play could apply equally to the characters as to the actors, designers, and artists bringing them to life onstage.

“Even in the darkest moments, you come together in this place for a purpose: to do something. We are coming as souls, and reckoning with something that’s trying to defeat us that we won’t allow.”

The future remains murky. Audiences are still skittish, and nearly every anticipated show has pushed its opening date back at least a month. Many surviving productions have added additional covers, and trained new standbys, but a true systemic adjustment remains out of reach. Labor negotiations are frozen, even as more shows pull the plug and others go on unspecified hiatuses without guaranteeing contract renewals. More concerning, future variants and infection waves are inevitable. While there is reason to hope the next one will be comparatively mild, it’s just as likely to be worse, so long as billions of people (millions of them in America alone) remain unvaccinated. If theatre is to survive in any recognizable form, it needs to adapt, hard and fast, in a way it failed to do during initial shutdown period.

But one man can’t do all that work. Even as he advocates for better safeguards (“They’ll call me a troublemaker” he grumbles, not without pleasure), Santiago-Hudson is focused on a laundry list of his own projects. Next up is another directing gig: a new play about Black icon Sidney Poitier, who died in December.

That makes three Broadway shows by Black writers that he will have directed in the post-vaccine world. In any prior year, that number would be noteworthy for the professedly liberal yet overwhelmingly white industry. Now, they’re but pieces of a historic slate by writers of color.

The uplift of marginalized voices is heartening, yet Santiago-Hudson speaks of it with caution. His experience is informed not only by his life as a mixed-race artist (his father was Puerto Rican and his mother Black), but also by the work he’s brought to the stage this season. While Skeleton Crew concerns itself most actively with the value of labor, it is inseparable from the valuation of Black lives in America.

“It’s not smart on our behalf, for seven Black plays to say ‘yes’ at the same time,” he said of the offerings this past fall. “But we’re so desperate to be a part of the party that we take the deal that’s given. And none of them made money. Now how’s that going to affect what goes forward? Does Hollywood continue making the same movie over if it’s Black and it don’t make no money? No. But they’ll take a white star who’s had three flops and continue to give him movies. For people of color, everything is always predicated on what failed or what succeeded.” He sighs. “Look, I’m so happy to see these people getting a shot. But why all at once? They haven’t done seven gay plays at the same time before. They haven’t done seven Latin plays. They haven’t done seven Jewish plays. So are you going to do another seven Black plays at the same time? No. And you shouldn’t. But are you going to do a few? How many?”

While skeptical of a deep appetite for change, he points to the tangible takeaways, ones he hopes might carry weight with gatekeepers further up the ladder.

“These plays have been sustained by at least 50% people of color,” he said of the new shows. “There is a strong market of people of color that want to see plays at the quality, integrity and the level of Broadway. So are we going to learn that they are important, and can help us create longevity in this business? A wider, paying net audience? Are we going to take advantage of what just happened?”

The upshot should be that all theatre is struggling right now, not just the plays by untested Black writers. He bristles further at one notion that has made its way into open conversation among producers: that white buyers aren’t interested (and shouldn’t be pitched) plays by writers of color. Diversifying audiences, he thinks, doesn’t mean segregating them into different theaters.

By way of example, he recalls a last anecdote about an elderly white woman who saw Lackawanna Blues multiple times, and broke through the stage door Covid barriers to tell him how important the show was to her.

“This old white woman with a cane grabs my hand and says, ‘If Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s name’s there, I’m going to be there.’ And I’m like, ‘This person, we have nothing in common, other than we’re human beings.’ Producers have to know that artists of all colors mean something to people that don’t look like them.”

He pauses, as though seeking a thread to summarily link his chain of thoughts. Finally he settles on one, and it fits him: sage, shrewd, and suitability dramatic.

“Theater has taken on so many different responsibilities. It’s been sacred, and it’s been banned, but throughout all of history, it has had a purpose. And all people come to it to drink from that well.”