7 Stages founder takes on new role

When the Ku Klux Klan gathered to oppose a production at 7 Stages, co-founder Del Hamilton found unexpected allies.

In 1986, Hamilton and co-founder Faye Allen chose to program “Bang Bang Uber Alles” for the playhouse in Little Five Points. The world premiere of the play, a musical that a former speechwriter for Malcolm X wrote to address the rise of Klan activity in the mid-1980s, drew attention from both the media and white supremacists.

“The Klan began leaving threatening phone messages,” Hamilton said. The police told him: “Don’t worry about it. The Klan hasn’t marched in Atlanta in years.”

But the Saturday following the premiere, hooded figures gathered in the Little Five Points Package Store a few doors down Moreland Avenue from 7 Stages’ original storefront space. “They were piled up in their trucks in their hoods and regalia, with kids but no weapons. They stood in the parking lot yelling, ‘Where’s that guy in the tux?’ That would be me,” a laughing Hamilton said.

Despite the presence of more than 20 Klansmen in the bohemian neighborhood, 7 Stages’ performers and patrons were in little physical danger.

“The city of Atlanta police showed up within a few minutes and had them completely surrounded in the parking lot,” Hamilton said. “There was a lot of skinhead activity (in Little Five Points) at the time, and we thought they might stand with the Klan. But they stood with us and the police, shouting, ‘This isn’t your home, it’s ours!’ I guess they were softhearted skinheads or knew us from the neighborhood. The Klan eventually got back in their vehicles and left.”

For more than 30 years, Hamilton has used 7 Stages to build communities, whether with his Little Five Points neighbors or with world-renowned avant-garde theater artists. The playhouse he helped found in 1979 has developed a global reputation for bold productions.

At 70, Hamilton has recently stepped down as the artistic director, but he doesn’t use the word “retirement” as he transitions to his new title as 7 Stages’ director of special projects. Hamilton’s new role nevertheless invites a look back at his significant influence on Atlanta theater.

“It would be hard to overstate Del Hamilton’s importance to the theater scene,” said playwright and novelist Jim Grimsley, a longtime collaborator at 7 Stages. “He founded both Theatrical Outfit and 7 Stages, launched the careers of many actors, directors and playwrights. He forged important artistic relationships on an international level that brought amazing artists to our doorstep.

“His vision of theater was always fiercely his own,” Grimsley said, “and he never wavered in his commitment to the art.”

A steelworker’s son, Hamilton grew up in Pennsylvania and can’t remember the name of the high school play that launched his theatrical career. “It was about Kentucky hillbillies,” he said. “I played the father, and my first line was, ‘Rain’s coming in through the kitchen roof again, Ma. The chickens are getting’ wet!’ ”

Once he got the laugh, Hamilton was hooked.

He took a roundabout route to running his own theater. He taught at a high school in Louisville, Ky., before studying as a graduate student at the University of Georgia. Then he started teaching at Valdosta State College, where he and his friends decided to stop studying famous artists and start creating their own art.

“The next year, I was making theater in Atlanta,” he said.

Hamilton helped establish Theatrical Outfit in 1976 but soon parted ways with the company’s other founders. He met Allen in 1978 when her company, Open City Theater, was on the verge of closing, and the pair quickly formed both a professional partnership and a romantic one. (They married earlier this year.)

They named their new company “7 Stages” from an assertion by the I Ching that people go through seven stages to change their consciousness. “We wanted to make theater that’s spiritual in nature,” Hamilton said. “What makes people radically change their perspective? Not just ‘Oh, I’d rather wear pink than blue today,’ but change their view on racism or other important matters of life?”

Hamilton has directed more than 80 productions at 7 Stages, and he formed collaborations that took him to such cities as New York, London, Paris and Amsterdam, Netherlands, as an actor and director. In collaboration with DAH Theater of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Hamilton and Allen performed in a trans-Atlantic production of a play about immigration and ethnic cleansing called “Maps of Forbidden Remembrance.”

One of the scenes required Allen and Serbian actress Maja Miti to put out loaves of bread that represented massacred children in Srebenica during the Balkan war.

During a performance in Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the site of a lengthy siege during the war, “when they put out the bread, they said the names of the children and put out photographs,” Hamilton said. “Then something started happening in the audience, and onstage we couldn’t tell what was going on. We realized that everyone in the audience was sobbing because they’d never heard Serbian actors saying the names of their families before.”

Closer to home, 7 Stages furthered the careers of artists ranging from transgender performer Scott Turner Schofield to the members of the Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble of Atlanta. Hamilton cites as one of his professional highlights the company’s 10-year relationship with Joseph Chaikin, the founder of New York’s cutting-edge The Open Theater. In 2000, Chaikin directed Hamilton in an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s theatrical monologue “Texts for Nothing.” That happened to be one of the first 7 Stages productions of recent college graduate Heidi S. Howard, whom Hamilton recently named as his successor, following her 12-year stint as the company’s education director.

For “Texts for Nothing,” Hamilton stood on a giant boulder while delivering the lengthy monologue, and Howard positioned herself inside the boulder with a copy of the script to prompt him when necessary. “When he needed a line, he’d put his hand behind his back and wiggle his fingers, and I’d give it to him,” Howard said.

She laughs when considering that their positions have reversed now that she’s artistic director. “Back then, he was signaling to me, ‘Here I am, tell me what I need,’ ” Howard said. “Now, I’m the one signaling him ‘Here I am, tell me what I need!’ ”

For the final show of the theater’s 2012-2013 season, Howard is directing Hamilton as none other than Bob Dylan in “Lady Lay.”

“That wasn’t my choice,” Hamilton said. “It was Heidi and playwright Lydia Stryck’s choice. I can’t do impressions like stand-up comics and like so many talented actors can. I have a better voice than Bob Dylan, but I can’t sing as well as he can. So I must resort to acting.”

The play unfolds from the perspective of a West Berlin office worker whose life changes through encounters with Dylan and his music, beginning in the 1980s. Hamilton sounds guardedly optimistic about the production, which reflects the main character’s psyche rather than offering a realistic portrayal of Dylan. “We sing arrangements of Dylan songs, and every time I sing with the group, it’s strangely inspirational,” he said. “If we can capture that energy, the audience will be really amazed. We’re already amazed in rehearsal.”

Despite having passed the torch to Howard, Hamilton plans to stay involved at 7 Stages. “I have many ideas for plays and projects, mostly international projects. Even though I’m 70 years old, I don’t feel like I feared I would when I was in my 40s imagining this age. My father had Parkinson’s disease, so it’s a relief that I still have my wits about me.”