By Mary Giunca
Lafayette Baucum swung open the door to the Marriott Hotel yesterday, greeting visitors with a broad smile and a flourish that resembled a bow.
“We practiced this,” he said.
Baucum said he is under contract to the hotel this week for the biggest show in town, The National Black Theatre Festival.
He said that he and other staff attended a class in how to treat the many visitors and celebrities that will be headlining the festival, including John Amos, Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Maya Angelou.
“Say you go to a regular hotel and you feel like they’re there to take your money,” Baucum said. “We don’t want you to feel like that.”
The festival officially opens today, and runs through Saturday at venues throughout the city. There will be plays, musical theater, workshops, a film festival and other events.
With a $1.1 million budget, the festival is known for bringing in celebrities and for bringing Winston-Salem to life. In 2007 the festival generated $13.7 million in spending on hotels and meals by visitors as well as what the festival spends on performance spaces, food and beverages, according to figures provided by Visit Winston-Salem.
By Yesterday afternoon, vans, cars and limos were pulling up to the Marriott and the festival was looking more and more like the family reunion it is known among theater people.
Malaiki Scott and her mother, Mona Scott, the executive director of The Black Repertory Group in Berkeley, Calif., were attending the festival for the first time. Mona Scott’s mother, Norma Vaughn, founded the theater group in 1964.
The two women said they were attracted to the festival by all the good things they had heard from others.
The women have family in Louisiana and Mississippi, they said, but they were not sure they were prepared for August in North Carolina.
“When we were getting off the plane in Charlotte, I noticed the humidity,” Malaiki Scott said.
In the hotel lobby, Ella Joyce, an actress who is perhaps best known for playing Eleanor on the television show Roc, was performing a longtime role as an unofficial ambassador for the festival. She greeted old friends and said friendly hellos to arriving visitors, some of whom recognized her from her past roles.
Joyce said that she remembered sitting with the late Larry Leon Hamlin in New York City over 20 years ago, and listening to him talk about his dream of creating a theater festival in his hometown of Winston-Salem.
This year she will be performing “A Rose Among Thorns,” a one-person show that highlights the life of Rosa Parks. The show is part of the Larry Leon Hamlin Solo Performance Series, which will present the lives of black people who played pivotal roles in shaping the world.
Such shows are important, Joyce said, in nurturing the young talents and young theater-goers who will help the festival continue on after she and others have gone.
Though many people come to the festival to see the stars and enjoy good theater, she said, the audience sometimes fails to realize what their attendance and adulation means to black performers, who sometimes feel marginalized in the predominantly white theater world.
“The people show you so much love,” she said. “We don’t get love in Hollywood. We have to come down here and get filled up.”
Mary Giunca can be reached at 727-4089 or at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).