Alex Simmons, as you may know, is the creator of the adventure series Blackjack. He’s also the one putting together the Kids Comic Con here in New York on the 28th. I recently had the opportunity to talk with this renaissance man about a number of things, which will take up the rest of the week. Today he talks about his early career as an actor and playwright.

Rich Watson: You started out in acting – in the 70’s right?

Alex Simmons: That would be about right, yeah. The early 70’s.

RW: So what was the theater experience right for you?

AS: That’s a broad question… I’d always, as a child, wanted to perform, so coming out of high school, some of the things that happened was, I was introduced to an agent at that time… There were people actually starting to introduce me to other actors, who were professionals in the business. I was starting to get sent out on auditions for theater work. A lot of what was happening in the 60’s and 70’s was the whole civil rights, black awareness, multiculturalism was starting to bloom, and so things like Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death and a number of [movies and plays] had certain themes dealing with the black experience. So you either go an August Wilson way, which would give you something deep and poignant and rooted in maybe the Southern experience coming to New York, or just life and the richness of blue-collar people – and then you go to militancy, y’know like “The Man” this and that. So in terms of black theater, that’s the realm we were in, discovering our blackness. In terms of theater in general, we were either servants in established plays, or again, militants, doing almost nothing in between.

So I was striving to get into film and theater, but the roles were not as varied as they are now. And so I started writing monologues and things for me to use as audition pieces, and that got me to a point where I started doing scenes with people. So I was trying to go to auditions for black productions, but I also have an attitude about [how] if it doesn’t say the character has to be black, then I’m going. So I would sometimes be the only black person at an open audition. 300, 400 people and I’m the only dark face in the room. And what’s funny is, among the actors, a lot of actors would [be like], “Oh, I’m another actor,” and you get in the room with the directors and the agents and they flinch. Or some of them start to look at the call sheet to see like, did somebody do a typo and call for a black actor? And I would get through the audition and someone would say, “Oh, that was a really good audition, but there’s no black characters in the play,” and I’d say, “Well, some of the characters in the play don’t have to be a particular nationality.” “Oh, well, that’s true, but we don’t want to draw attention to or from” and you get that excuse.

But I started to, here and there, get into pieces where the director or producer went “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. This might be interesting; this might change the dynamics.” So doing that, I started to meet more people. It wasn’t just the Frank Silvera Workshop and the Negro Ensemble, which was producing things like A Soldier’s Play and Home and a number of really well-received pieces – again, [the] predominantly black experience. But I was also doing shows out of town, going to Ohio and areas in the Midwest, so that to me was exciting. It was exciting to be put into a situation where people were forced to question their stereotypes, where I’m out someplace and people who’ve only known black folks from television or the news, suddenly going, “Dag, I always thought…” So I guess in some ways I didn’t see myself as another actor, but I enjoyed getting out there and shaking things up a bit – not in a negative way, but in a “I’m gonna learn something, you’re gonna learn something” kind of way.

RW: Challenging expectations.

AS: Exactly. So the theater experience enabled me to travel around a bit, and because I enjoyed creating characters and I was writing some of the things I was doing, it worked in a way of beginning to hone and develop my writing skills. At that point in my life I hadn’t determined I was gonna be a writer. As far as I was concerned I was an actor who was writing, periodically. I did some articles around that time period, freelance, I was working for a music magazine, so periodically I would interview recording artists, jazz artists, things like that. So I was meeting again, meeting a lot of different types of people from different surroundings, and that would sometimes translate through my acting. Because again, an actor is a reflection of life, so the more you know about it, the more you’re exposed to it, the more you have to filter through you in whatever performances you’re doing. So that was exciting. And I also worked as a writer. So I would say my theater experience helped stimulate and feed my writing at that time. It began to force me to develop, or at least recognize, my writing style as the things I was interested in writing about.

I did theater, and voice-overs. I did theater for about three, four years, steadily going in and out of non-paying as well as a few paying things – and then the writing sorta began to take over. I was doing children’s theater at that time, so I would do children’s theater up in Westchester and upper New York State, and when I had downtime I would be writing, working on some project. And to sort of pull all this into final focus, while I was doing that – and again, meeting actors and different types of people – I met an actor who was, right at that time, doing A Soldier’s Play with the Negro Ensemble, and he had a biography on Ira Aldrich, who was a black actor from the 1800’s. Born and raised in New York City, was a member of the African Theater, which was here in New York City, early 1800’s. I’d say it was probably around 1819 when Edmund Keane, the British actor, coming through New York and getting ready to head back to Europe – [the biography] doesn’t say clearly how that relationship started, but somehow [Aldrich] met Keane, and Keane got to know his work, and he convinced Keene to take him back with him to Europe to travel with the troupe.

So he went over to Europe in like, 1821, and is travelling with Edmund Keane’s Shakespearean troupe, and slowly but surely, over a period of years, began to perform different roles in the productions, and then [he] eventually became a noted actor in his own right, a celebrity. He performed in various parts of Europe and Russia and England and Paris. There’s a chair in Stratford-on-Avon, [where] they have the names of different notable actors who’ve portrayed Shakespearean characters throughout the century, and Ira Aldrich’s name is one the back of one of those chairs. But he died in 1861 in Lodz, Poland, and he was buried there, and there’s a statue to him there.

His family – he was married twice, both to white British women. The first one, if I remember correctly, passed on. The second one was stepmother to about four of his children. She passed away [and] the children began to either die or became afflicted with things that ruined their lives. Amanda, the youngest daughter, had a career as a vocalist for a number of years, and then she was struck with some sort of respiratorial attack and she wasn’t able to sing professionally anymore. So she became a teacher, a vocal coach, and she lived through the early 1940’s, and one of the people that she coached, while he was over there working in British film, was Paul Robeson. [laughs]

So this actor introduced me to Ira Aldrich in this biography, and I began to read this and really get into it. I’ve always loved Sherlock Holmes plays and stories and films, and I’d always wanted to do a Sherlock Holmes piece of some sort. And slowly I began to see, just from the things that happened to Aldrich and his family, I began to see the elements of something that could be written as a Sherlock Holmes mystery. So I began to write that. Aldrich was known for portraying Othello. That was one of the fine characters that people knew and loved. So the play is called Sherlock Holmes and the Hands of Othello, and it takes place with Amanda being terrorized and assassinated. [There’s] a black American actor who’s over there with a small travelling troupe of black actors, and his Machiavellian involvement with Amanda, and Sherlock Holmes coming into the middle of all this.

The play was about two years in the making from the writing of it, and then a lot of reading, and eventually it got produced and it’s been published. So I’d say that probably my theater experiences came into its apex with the actor-writer creating this piece, which originally I had created so I could perform in it, but I never did. The more I worked on it, the more I saw it in readings, the more I felt I had to stay the playwright, to try and get it right, and to be able to focus on that as the writer only. So the piece has been done in readings, it’s been produced in a few colleges, it had an off-off-Broadway production, we had some nice reviews, but I’ve never done it. [laughs] Pretty much after that, I focused more on writing than performing…

RW: You said earlier how black roles in the 70’s were one extreme or another, either militancy or servitude. When you started writing stuff for yourself, did you have one specific goal in mind, or did you just want to try a lot of different things?

AS: I wanted to open it up. I can’t say that I started with a mission to create more white-collar pieces or anything like that. I have friends and family of different nationalities. I’ve traveled through Harlem – black, Harlem, Spanish Harlem – as well as the Upper West Side, Chinatown, Little Italy, and the world was bigger than the stereotypes. And in particular for black people, the world was bigger. I remember meeting a gentleman who was working for a firm of certified public accountants, the type that got pulled in when a company was gonna go Chapter 11. This brother was tight with his analytical mind and his mathematics, and he wore a suit and tie and he was just squeaky clean in front of everybody. But when he was surrounded by or only with black office workers, he would change his demeanor. He would get more “down,” be more like a homeboy, that kind of thing.

And he would talk about wearing the “uniform” – this whole mass that you saw in terms of him as a CPA was a uniform, and he hated this. And I’m thinking damn, what a way to live! I mean, ultimately, you shouldn’t have to straddle both worlds so uncomfortably. If you have to wear a suit and a tie and be a professional within your business, that doesn’t mean the human being you are has to change dramatically. Unless you really wanna be, y’know, hanging out, or you wanna do something more gritty and earthy and you get your hands dirty and that sort of thing. Then, okay, trade the suit for a different kind of job. But his attitude was that blacks had to be, in effect, two-faced.

RW: I’ve heard that theory before.

AS: I don’t see that. I see it as being bilingual – how you mix it up with your boys and girls when you’re hanging is not how you’re gonna talk when you’re trying to get a loan with Citibank! Okay, so you need to have a wide vocabulary. But just like when anybody goes home from a hard day at the office and they kick off their shoes and they get into some sloppy clothes, and maybe they got that beer-stained shirt or whatever – there’s a point where you relax. The relaxed you becomes more loose. That’s fine. But I don’t feel like I gotta pretend like I’m white. So what does that say about us? That we’re incapable of being professional as we pretend to be of another race? I don’t think so. So for me, it was, there’s so many levels to the black experience, there’s so many different kinds of people within that realm, that diaspora, as they love that word, that you just need to do stories. And put those people in those stories.

I was working at one point for what’s called a packaging firm. It doesn’t mean we did boxing; we were like the equivalent of producers for television. We were producers for the book industry. So we were producing children’s mystery books. We would get plots and writers and scripts; if it involved artwork we’d get artists to do that. I was in an editorial capacity but I was also writing some of the material. And I would notice that a lot of these mainstream books had no people of color in these stories. They’re taking place in Chicago, New York City, Atlanta, certain parts of Florida, these places where you know there are other nationalities. Unless the story specifically dealt with an Asian, there were no Asians in it. This is New York, I live here; you gotta work hard to find a totally all-white area in the major part of this city. You go to the downtown, business [part of] New York City, you’re gonna see everybody and his mother.

So I started to try and filter people [of color] into those stories. They didn’t have to have a starring role, they didn’t have to be about them, but that person needed to be there by name, or by action, or something in the way they spoke to add more color to that world. So that was my thrust – to do stories, and to put us and other people of color into those stories the way I knew them to be, and hopefully, by inclusion, to begin to show the world a different side of where it is we all live.

RW: Yeah, again, I can relate to what you’re saying about having to put on two different faces, because in the past, in growing up, especially in high school and later in college, I’ve dealt with some people who saw me as kind of “acting white” or whatever, and it always bothered the hell out of me.

AS: I’m with you. I was hit with that one with more times than I care to count. And at first, as you’re growing up, you thinking, what is wrong with me? My mother was very much the anchor, and I saw what this woman was going through just to be a decent human being, a good person. Every now and then – I was a typical teenage boy, [saying] “I can handle it, I’m a man” – I’d find myself in some sort of legitimate, sincere, open conversation with her about the kind of peer pressure that was coming at me. She didn’t have what you would call those immediate pearls-of-wisdom thoughts. She would tend to ask me stuff. I think what she was doing, in her own way, being insecure about what was the right thing to say, she was trying to get me to come to my own conclusions. What was important to me? Who did I think I was? What did I think was important when people met me, what did they need to see?

And a lot of those questions are what resonates through a lot of people, but when you’re what they call a minority, and when you’re of that group, and there’s media pressure and peer pressure to be a specific thing, the questions seem harder at times. And it usually takes some sort of epiphany to help you finally go, “Oh, no, this is what I am. Okay, now I got it. I’m clear.” Whatever that choice is, okay, I’m here now, I got it, deal with it. This is me. And mine was in high school, and I won’t go into the details, but we’ll simply say that I had that epiphany, and I realized, y’know what? I’m gonna be walking this line for the rest of my life, and somebody better adjust to it, ‘cause I ain’t changing. And that was it. Deal with it or go away.

[Next: Alex talks Blackjack and shares some con stories.]