AMERICAN THEATRE | How ‘Coconut Cake’ Is Being Served at 5 Black Theatres

Chicagoan and English professor Melda Beaty started writing plays in 2011 and sent them out to readings, festivals, and theatres, with limited response. Then she submitted to a contest—and won. Her life changed when the International Black Theatre Festival (IBTF) awarded her play Coconut Cake the Sylvia Sprinkle-Hamlin Rolling Premiere (SSHRP) Award, presented at the IBTF July 29-Aug. 3 in Winston-Salem, N.C. Named after the co-founder of the IBTF, the SSHRP award includes “rolling premieres” at several Black theatres. For Beaty, the second SSHRP recipient, this meant having Coconut Cake produced in five theatres over the course of two years, starting in 2024, including North Carolina Black Repertory Company, which is also the sponsor of the IBTF.

The idea for the award came from IBTF artistic director Jackie Alexander, also North Carolina Black Rep’s producing artistic director. Recalling his experiences in New York seeing great plays that disappeared after a single run, Alexander wanted to try another model. As he put it to us, “We have these great Black theatre companies in major cities, and if we work together on a worthy play, we don’t need critics, we don’t need funding—we can create a hit of our own.”

He’d been talking for a number of years with various artistic directors on how to collaborate, including at a dinner with the founder/executive director of Memphis’s Hattiloo Theatre, Ekundayo Bandele, and with the artistic director of Houston’s Ensemble Theatre, Eileen J. Morris, who recalled discussions about what their theatres could do to create art in the most efficient and economical way. When Alexander called and asked Morris if her theatre could be one stop for the rolling premiere of a new play about Maya Angelou called Phenomenal Woman, while its writer, Angelica Chéri, was still writing it, Morris noted, “For me, that was cool because I believed in the play. I believed in the experience. I believed in the opportunity. Despite not seeing the final script yet, I trusted in the process. The fact the first play was about Dr. Maya Angelou—that was a great selling point.”

Their goal for the first project was to share resources: designers, director, costumes. Though they wanted a female director, Morris was already booked to helm several plays in her own season, so Alexander stepped in and directed productions in both North Carolina and Houston; each theatre came up with its own funding. With Ensemble, some money came from an award bestowed on Morris awarded through the Helen Gurley Brown Foundation’s BOLD Women’s Theater Leadership Circle, designed to help female artistic directors in whatever way recipients see fit. These funds enabled Morris to bring on director of operations Rachel Dickson, who views the SSHRP as “a way to elevate playwrights and sustain our industry.”

Phenomenal Woman played first in North Carolina, and by the time it opened in Houston it was selling out already because of the buzz from press in Winston-Salem. That success led to Phenomenal Woman to be picked up by producers with an eye on New York.

Chéri’s play was initially also scheduled to open at Hattiloo, but the theatre had to pull out due to the financial lift of the shared concept and resources. Said Bandele, “The requirements for Phenomenal Woman would have pushed our budget out of whack.” Which is part of why Alexander put together a larger, more flexible group of theatres for the second SSHRP award. Hattiloo was recently able to produce Beaty’s Coconut Cake, is a play about five senior men (four Black, one white), who meet every morning at the same McDonald’s to talk about marriages, health, and ambitions, while playing chess and learning important life lessons. This time around, each rolling premiere production of Coconut Cake is being produced on its own, without sharing designers or directors—a structure that allows both bigger-budget theatres like Houston’s Ensemble and theatres with fewer resources to each have their own vision.

As Bandele put it, “We each have our audiences, which are different in Memphis than in Sarasota or Houston, and we each have our missions. For some theatres, it’s about the actors or the playwright. For us at Hattiloo, it’s about accessibility to all socioeconomic groups.”

Coconut Cake has been in the oven for a while; it first appeared at IBTF in a reading in 2017. This was followed by a 2020 virtual reading through Houston’s Ensemble Theatre, in collaboration with St. Louis Black Rep. Ron Himes, St. Louis Black Rep’s producing artistic director, was initially skeptical. “I was one of those adamantly opposed to streaming theatre,” he said, “and I had told everyone, no, we’re not doing it. Then Eileen called, and I was in. And you know, it worked. It was great!” Himes read one of the roles, joining Ted Lange in Los Angeles and three other actors in Houston. Himes reprised his role in this summer’s in-person IBTF production, directed by Nathan Ross Freeman, co-founder and artistic director of Authoring Action, which works with communities to develop original works for film and stage. Also mentored by IBTF co-founder Sprinkler-Hamlin, Freeman was made the resident playwright at North Carolina Black Rep Company from 1985 to ’89, and directed Coconut Cake earlier in a run there earlier this year.

Another Coconut Cake cast member was the indomitable Count Stovall, who had been in the original 2017 festival reading. An avid chess player, he had inspired Beaty with some moves she uses, particularly at the end of the play, when the audience sees that the king only can move a couple spaces at a time, while “the queen is everything.” Stovall also told us even though memory loss was not explicitly written into the play, the fact that all actors were in their 60s and 70s meant, “It was there—you just didn’t see it.”

Also joining for the Coconut Cake rolling premiere program was the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe (WCBTT) of Sarasota, Fla. Founder/artistic director Nate Jacobs had been mentored for years by Sprinkle-Hamlin and her husband, Larry Leon Hamlin, the Festival’s co-founder and also the director of Jacobs’s first production at the IBTF. As Jacobs continued attending the festival, bringing other artists, he remembered what Sprinkle-Hamlin had told him about the festival: “We Black artists are competing with each other. But we ain’t got anything—no money. We need to unify and become stronger, because no other people are obligated to tell our stories.”

So when Alexander asked if Westcoast would join the rolling world premiere program, Jacobs immediately agreed. “The show was a hit,” he said of Westcoast’s production of Coconut Cake in June. “It popped. I was happy, again, to propel another artist.” Beaty came and took notes, making changes as the show progressed through the various productions. “She’s a phenomenal writer,” Jacobs told us. “And we need quality. Predominantly white audiences, such as ours, love Black culture, but they don’t want mediocrity, which means we have to be better than the best.”

With two more theatres set to serve up Coconut Cake (St. Louis Black Repertory Company in February 2025 and Houston’s Ensemble Theatre in May 2025), can we say that Jackie Alexander’s idea for the Sylvia Sprinkle-Hamlin Award has been a success? Beaty thinks so. As she told us, “This award has reinvigorated my writing career and opened doors for me. Before, no one would even answer my submissions. I am really grateful for the new opportunities, and I am going to keep writing, because I have a lot of ideas.”

Dorothy Marcic, Ph.D., is a Columbia University professor, Fulbright Scholar, and playwright of Respect: The Musical and Sistas: The Musical. She’s the writer of 21 bestselling books and award-winning screenplays and is co-creator of the Wondery podcast “Man-Slaughter.”

Kimberley LaMarque Orman, a professor at Fordham University and executive producer of the video series Fordham Road, has produced, acted, and directed in a variety of productions across the U.S., including Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Jar the Floor, Macbeth, In the Blood, Blues for an Alabama Sky, Romeo & Juliet, Three Sisters, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and The Old Settler.