Augusta Mini Theatre: A Vision, a Dream, a Mission

(I first heard of the Augusta Mini Theatre when they subscribed to Black Masks in its 1984-1985 inaugural year. I recall being very excited that the word about the magazine had gotten as far as Georgia. Their subscription opened up my imagination to the possibility of making Black Masks a national, and not just a New York, publication. In a letter congratulating Black Masks on its 20th Anniversary, Tyrone Butler, the executive director of the theatre, said that he did not realize they had been a charter subscriber and thanked me for mentioning them as such in our anniversary issue. He also notified me that the Augusta Mini Theatre would be thirty years old on October 8, 2005 and that he would love to have an article in Black Masks. "It would be the highlight of our thirty years," he wrote. Below, at last, is the well-deserved and long-overdue article.)

Tyrone Butler, the founder and executive director of the Augusta Mini Theatre and Community Arts School in Georgia, rose from a humble background with a vision, a dream, and a mission he believes was delivered to him as a child at the house of his grandfather, who was a sharecropper. One day when he was about six or seven, he was walking out on his grandfather's porch when he says, "I looked out and I looked up and it was the most beautiful sight in the world. I can't describe it but it was like something shining back on me saying 'You're going to do something.' And I was a little kid. 'What in the world am I going to do?'" he wondered.

At that time Augusta (today a majority Black city of nearly 190,000 people, best known as the home of the world famous Masters Golf Tournament, the boyhood residence of Woodrow Wilson, the site of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and more recently as the home of James Brown and of Jessye Norman) was still a segregated city plagued by racial problems. Butler's difficult years in Augusta's segregated schools, provided no outlet for the fulfillment of the promise of his early vision. In frustration, he began to act out, becoming tagged as a "bad boy." He also suffered from stuttering, although no one dared tease him because he could beat up almost everyone in his class. But because of the stuttering, his first performance in a play in elementary school became an exceptionally daunting experience. "I was back there rehearsing my line and I was stuttering. I made up my mind. I said, 'If I go out there and I stutter and they laugh at me, I'm just going to start fighting. I'm going to whup everybody in the whole auditorium.'" Instead, he had a transformative moment. "I went out--and I'm sure I said it low [but] I didn't stutter. And I haven't stuttered since," he states.

Buoyed by the excitement of performance, Butler and some friends started a singing group, called The Bingos, in high school. When they were booed off of the stage at a rival high school, Butler swore off of singing. But performance was in his blood, so when he entered Albany State College, one of the first things he did was to get into the college's talent show--but as a dancer, not a singer. He recalls: "I loved to dance. I had a James Brown rhythm. No real training. I just had it--I got popular around campus." A dream began to grow...