By Williamena Kwapo | OBSERVER Staff Writer

There’s a briefcase and glasses filled with water on the table. Justice Thurgood Marshall, played by James Ellison, sits at the table and rehearses his lines, speaking to the court.

“All of these cases were bundled together and we called it Brown v. the Board of Education.”

James Wheatley sits in a house seat and attentively watches Ellison’s performance, preparing to give feedback. This is Wheatley’s last time directing a play at Celebration Arts, the company he founded more than 35 years ago.

Wheatley, 83, was born and raised in Los Angeles and like many others in the city, the arts was his passion. In his formative years, he trained as a professional dancer but by no means did his talents end there. Throughout his career, he said “yes” to everything related to the arts. He learned how to play the piano and harmonica, and built sets and lights for his performances, sometimes by himself. Wheatley trained his voice to become a singer at the University of Southern California’s school of music. Though he couldn’t stay away from the stage, he always kept a full-time job with some sort of government entity. One of those jobs brought him to Sacramento in the early 1980s. And unquestionably, he brought the arts with him.

“The longer I stayed here and got to see what’s going on, I saw that there was not much,” he says. “There are people in a community that are interested in the arts. But there’s really not that many places that cater to the arts.”

From that thought, Celebration Arts was born as a way to provide training and performance opportunities in a city where those opportunities were scarce. Wheatley gathered some peers who were interested in the arts and convinced them of the need to provide this resource to the community. Together they began teaching dance classes each Saturday. They started small but quickly outgrew their space.

Continuing as a dance company, Celebration Arts started to gain so much traction that it was selected for a goodwill tour of the Philippines. But as word grew about Celebration Arts, so did the need to expand into other areas of the arts.

“Because of my experience in Los Angeles and things I was doing, you find that people have a variety of interests, but they all fold into one another,” Wheatley says. “So if you wanted to dance, what makes you not do acting?”

So he did just that, again convincing his peers to join him.

Celebration Arts’ first play was “Home,” by Samm-Art Williams and directed by Michael Gates. The performance brought together students from Sacramento State’s theater department and non-student community residents. But sometime after that, Wheatley found himself needing to migrate from teaching dance and music to the director’s chair.

“I got into directing plays because we needed a director,” he says. “I had never directed before that.” 

As Wheatley puts it, this was an act of once again saying “yes”, accepting the opportunity, and learning as you go. He says the most important thing he learned as a director was how to work specifically with each individual in the play.

“Because everybody on the set is a different person,” he says. “Everybody on the set learns differently. They see or hear things differently. And so the primary thing with directing is learning how to communicate with each person in the cast and encouraging them so they keep making progress.”

By the early ’90s, Celebration Arts was a full-blown arts company that did dance, music, and theater. Since then, Celebration Arts performs six to seven plays a year, as well as various dance and music concerts. With Wheatley serving as the organization’s director, it attracted many people who have gone on to notable careers in theater and television.

The company is now known as Sacramento’s premier Black theater.

When asked why he gave the company its name, Wheatley had a simple answer.

“I didn’t want to name it after me,” he jokingly says. Then he added, “‘Life is a celebration’ was our motto. Dance, music and acting are forms of celebrating life.”

A Phone Call

One night, Wheatley’s phone rang at 2 a.m. On the other end was a young college student named James Ellison, who had expected to reach a voicemail line. He was working with another arts studio that told him about Celebration Arts. That night, he went on the website and called, reasonably expecting no one would pick up.

James Ellison grew up in Sacramento and knew from a young age that he wanted to go into the arts.

“When they would ask, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I would always say ‘I want to be a movie star. I want to be an actor,’” he says.

However, there was not much in the community that would allow him to act until he found out about his high school’s theater class. That propelled his focus in acting and created one connection after another, eventually leading him to that fateful call to Wheatley.

For the next 23 years, Ellison worked with Wheatley in many capacities. From being a stage manager, building sets, sharpening his acting and even playing alongside each other in a few roles.

Passing The Torch

With Wheatley retiring, incoming director Ellison has huge plans for the organization, with a goal of continuing the dream and legacy Wheatley built.

“My vision for the future of Celebration Arts is for us to be synonymous with theater, dance and music in the Sacramento region, sustaining a unified home for the Black experience and Black storytelling through the arts,” Ellison says.

In retirement, Wheatley plans to spend time with family, tend to his home and enjoy the outdoors while continuing to stay involved in the arts. He has no doubt Ellison will continue Celebration Arts’ mission of providing a unique artistic space and opportunity to Sacramento.

“I have no problem with him taking over. He has lots of energy and lots of ideas,” Wheatley says. “He’s capable of doing it.”

“Thurgood” plays through Sunday, Oct. 22. Tickets can be purchased on the Celebration Arts website.