A celebration of Kenneth Washington, an influential theater professor who shaped the University of Utah's Acting Training Program, will be held on Monday.
Washington, who was currently director of company development at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater, died of kidney disease on Wednesday, Nov. 26. He was 68.
Washington, who was raised in Louisiana, attended college in Alabama and New York before he came to the University of Utah seeking a graduate degree in dance. At the U., he discovered theater, earning an MFA degree in 1984.
He began teaching U. theater classes in 1976, and went on to direct the Actor Training Program, which he shaped over the course of more than 20 years. He was hired by the Guthrie Theatre in 2006, where he launched a summer training program and co-founded a joint bachelor of fine arts program at the Guthrie and the University of Minnesota. He also taught and directed shows at Julliard and New York University.
In 2011, he was lauded by the U. as a distinguished alumnus. "So many theatre artist and teachers across the nation began their serious study of acting with Ken," says Gage Williams, chair of the U. theater department.
"Everything he did was instinctual," says Anne Cullimore Decker, a longtime colleague and close friend. She laughs remembering the nightly phone calls from Washington to discuss ideas to inspire individual students. "He was just so terribly creative in his own way."
Over the years, Washington mentored hundreds of actors across the country, but it was at the U. where he began developing the distinctive teaching style that one student characterized as "one part Socrates, one part Yoda."
Washington had "mysterious Buddha-like qualities," agrees David Kranes, who first met Washington in his playwriting class. Washington went on to direct a handful of Kranes' new works at the U. and other Salt Lake City theaters. "I felt totally permitted to be the creative voice, the theatrical voice, with Kenneth involved," Kranes says.
For Kranes' 1979 play "Nevada," Washington drafted a music school colleague to write a haunting country-western score for the playwright's lyrics. For the 1981 play "Horay," about a brilliant high school football star, Washington enlisted a local cheerleading squad and pep band to play before the show, "like 'Our Town' in the Pac 12,' or something," Kranes recalls.
As a teacher, Washington's gift was to see "the beautiful potential in people," says Randy Reyes, a U. graduate who is the artistic director of Minneapolis' Mu Performing Arts, a pan-Asian company. "Everyone felt important when they were talking to Ken."
As a Southern black man teaching in Utah, Washington dealt with racial issues in a very human way, says Reyes, who is Filipino. At 17, Reyes was planning to attend a community college in California when — on the strength of his high school teacher's recommendation and a videotape audition — Washington offered him a scholarship to the U. "Any kind of talk about race was a talk about humanity."
Washington posed questions, and patiently waited for answers. He spoke in a memorable falsetto voice, and the rich cadence of his sentences would be filled, just as distinctively, with pauses. "Everyone who knows Kenneth will do his voice," says Robert Scott Smith, founder of Salt Lake City's Flying Bobcat Theatrical Laboratory, who studied with Washington at the U. in the late 1990s. "When people get together and talk about him, they will talk like him. It's beautiful."
Washington employed those pauses to compose his thoughts, as well as to confirm the speaker was finished. "Those pauses were pretty profound," Reyes says. "That's the maturity of your relationship with Ken, in your relationship with those pauses. You start to enjoy those pauses, because you realize he's processing."
In the last week, scores of Facebook posts have offered tributes to Washington's life-changing impact. "He basically changed the trajectory of my life," says former student Maria Elena Ramirez, a Utah native and U. graduate who made it to Broadway with "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson" in 2010, and recently toured in the national production of "War Horse."
She met Washington while she was at Judge Memorial High School auditioning for a theater scholarship. After graduating from the U., she went on to attend graduate school at New York University, where her former professor continued his mentoring.
"At lot of what he gave me was about details, and making the inner life of characters really rich," Ramirez says. "Through a series of questions, he allowed you to get to know yourself in order to inhabit other characters."
If he were alive, Washington would be rolling his eyes, embarrassed, by the tributes. "He never wanted the attention on him," Decker says. "When you'd try to praise him, he would just brush you off."
"He never would have wanted that," agrees Reyes, who says he has used examples from Washington in every professional talk he's ever given. "He wanted his students to be in the spotlight, and he loved watching them. He meant the world to me."
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