Broadway veteran André De Shields has built an impressively long performing career as a multitalented actor-singer-dancer-director-choreographer.
De Shields was twice nominated for Tony Awards for starring in the musicals Play On! and The Full Monty, while his turns in the 1978 Fats Waller revue Ain't Misbehavin' and as the title role in The Wiz in 1975 are both the stuff of Broadway legend.
But now De Shields is stretching his creative muscles even further by writing and performing in Confessions of a P.I.M.P. ( Positive Individual Making Progress ). It's a developing semi-autobiographical piece that theatricalizes De Shields' journey from inner city impoverishment in Baltimore to New York's glitzy Great White Way.
P.I.M.P. previously played the 2015 IGNITION Festival of New Plays at Victory Gardens Theater thanks in part to a Fox Foundation grant from Theatre Communications Group. But De Shields has tightened and refined the show even more for a brief three-performance run in the same venue.
"I've been in the industry 47 years telling other people's stories, and now I have an opportunity to make a contribution to the beautiful chaos that's going on in the world now and say, 'Guess what?! It isn't so unique to you. We've experienced similar things,'" De Shields said. "With this show, I feel as if I've graduated from being a performing artist and now I am a creative activist because the stories being told ( in 'confessions,' if you will ) are building bridges between—dare I say the catchphrases?—the millennials and the baby boomers."
One of those critical moments in P.I.M.P. is the terrifying emergence of HIV/AIDS and how it was particularly deadly for the gay and African-American communities from the late 1970s through to the '90s.
"I was there, obviously," said De Shields, highlighting his show's full title as an out survivor of the era. "People were panic-stricken and didn't know what was happening. We didn't have an understanding of the plague, we didn't have words for it."
Though life-extending drugs eventually made it so HIV/AIDS wasn't the death sentence it used to be, De Shields says that it is still important to stress that the disease itself has not gone away politically, emotionally or psychologically.
"One of the major segments in the show is called 'Dating in Armageddon' and I hope the intended gravitas plays there," De Shields said. "I tell the story of helping friends, hundreds really, who died during that time, and almost to a person the question was before the friend died, 'Why me?' I made a covenant to my friends that as a performing artist who has now become a creative activist, I would continue to ask that question until we find an answer."
For the return of P.I.M.P., De Shields was keen to get back most of the creative team and performers from 2015 since they would all have an artistic shorthand with the material. So once again De Shields will be backed by the actresses Kimberly Lawson ( WOZ: A Rock Cabaret ) and Donica Lynn ( Porchlight Music Theatre's Dreamgirls ). Doug Peck is musical director, while the directing duties are shared between Samuel G. Roberson and former Victory Gardens artistic director Dennis Zacek.
"I'm in Chicago working out the problems with P.I.M.P. because Chicago is my artistic home," De Shields said. "And when one is creating and when one needs a bit of rehabilitation, one goes home."
Indeed, De Shields' remarked on the neat symmetry that tied his first professional credit to the next show that may take him back to Broadway in 2017. De Shields starred in both the Chicago-dedicated production of the "American Tribal Love Rock Musical" Hair in 1969 and the performing seniors musical Gotta Dance ( now renamed Half Time ) for its 2015 Chicago tryout. Both productions played the same venue of the Shubert Theatre ( now corporately renamed The PrivateBank Theatre ).
De Shields also found a very welcoming home in Chicago as a former ensemble member of the Organic Theatre Company. He's also won Jeff Awards as a director for Victory Gardens' 1987 production of George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum and as a performer starring in Goodman Theatre productions of Play On! in 1998 and The Jungle Book in 2013.
"I feel as if I tried this in any other venue or in any other city, I would have invited in the evil of confusion," said De Shields about his need to work on P.I.M.P. in Chicago. "Here I'm clear about what I'm attempting to do and here I find fellow warriors who are doing the hard work with me."
De Shields also hopes that this most recent revision of P.I.M.P. will be the one that finds a future life and will live on to inspire others.
"The performing artist has a three-fold responsibility to his own generation, to the generation that precedes and to the generation that comes after him, and that responsibility is to explain how we got from there to here and we do that by telling stories," De Shields said. "Effective storytelling has the power to transform lives, the power to alter governments and the power to change to world into the place we all want it to be."
Dennis Zacek and Grippo Stage Co., Inc. present Confessions of a P.I.M.P. for three performances only at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Aug. 26 and 27, and 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 28, at Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. Tickets are $25; call 773-871-3000 or visit VictoryGardens.org .
