Interview by Sarad Davenport for Vinegar Hill Magazine
Vinegar Hill Magazine sat down with Nathaniel Shaw, the producing artistic director of the Firehouse Theater, and J. Dontrese Brown of BROWN BAYLOR™, a key collaborator, to discuss an ambitious new project. This initiative aims to bring to life the lesser-known stories of Virginia’s rich and complex history, focusing on the life of John Mitchell Jr. Through a partnership with the Mitchell family and the Richmond Planet Foundation, this project seeks to dramatize these stories for a wider audience. Here is the full conversation, capturing the essence of their vision and the journey ahead.
Vinegar Hill Magazine: So, Nathaniel and Dontrese. What are you all up to?
Nathaniel Shaw: The Firehouse Theater, where I’m the producing artistic director, has a robust new play initiative. We like to walk that journey alongside a playwright from inception, through development, to world premiere production, and try to build bridges for new plays and new voices even beyond that world premiere. As I was contemplating specific initiatives in relation to creating new plays, one of the wonderful ways to look at today and this moment we’re living in is to examine our history, especially missing anthologies of that history, missing volumes of the anthology of that history. I found myself in a conversation with the Virginia Museum of History and Culture about the potential in partnering in that effort. Could we find specific missing or lesser-told stories from Virginia’s incredibly rich, complicated, and horrific history? Being so emblematic of American history, the goal is to find those missing stories and dramatize them for larger audiences. Around that time, Dontrese and his partner Hezekiyah introduced the Mitchells to me and the story of John Mitchell, Jr. From my perspective, it felt like the ideal way to launch the initiative, telling the lesser-known stories of these heroic acts, of these amazing individuals who fought against oppression and bigotry throughout Virginia’s history.
And so that’s what we’ve been up to. We’ve been partnering closely with the Mitchell family, the descendants of John Mitchell Jr., and their foundation, the Richmond Planet Foundation. It was a no-brainer to bring on BROWN BAYLOR™ to do all of the brand design and elevation and to help us build relationships in the community. We’re working closely with the Virginia Museum of History and Culture from a research perspective, and we’ve just commissioned what I would consider to be a nationally emergent playwright. I think we’ve caught a real star on the rise in a woman named Kristen Adele Calhoun, who we will bring to Richmond from March 18th through 25th to start her research journey, building a relationship with the Mitchell family and our network of partners to bring this story to life. We hope to develop this play over the course of a couple of years and premiere it. Our ideal time to premiere it would be in the spring of 2027.
Vinegar Hill Magazine: Great, great. Give me a little context. I’m already interested. My questions are bubbling up. Without giving away any of the artistic direction, give a little context on the Richmond Planet and the Mitchell family. Either of you can tackle that or both of you can tackle that.
J. Dontrese Brown: Hezekiyah Baylor of BROWN BAYLOR™, I don’t know if you know, he’s got lineage to the John Mitchell Jr. family. So this is something that has always been important to us. We did feature a huge part of Hidden in Plain Sight Richmond, dedicated to John Mitchell Jr. We had insights from the John Mitchell family. He’s from Richmond, and he did more than just a newspaper. He was the voice of Black Americans. He was the fighter. He had the resiliency and determination to do what is right. He hurled the thunderbolt of truth, which is one of my favorite statements from him. He showed how important it was to give more of yourself to the betterment of everyone else. And really being able to fight in a time frame where someone like him, it was a lot. Some of the narratives and the stories that I’m sure will come to light through Kristen are hard to believe. During that time, he had the audacity to step in and fight for what was right. That’s what he was doing. He was giving voice to the voiceless. He was really showing us, from a Black American standpoint and from an American standpoint, let me just say it that way.
What can be done when you believe in something that is right and you have the will and power to do that? The why is because of how he gave a perspective from the Black people and the Black voices here in our city, the capital of the Confederacy at the time. We need to own that and appreciate that. There’s so much more about him, just hearing the stories of scenarios of riding horses across Virginia to support a young Black man accused of addressing a white woman out of character and his fight to get on horseback and ride across the state. We had a conversation the other day, and we were all, you know, with the new playwright and everybody, we were just all chatting and, John Mitchell and Ida were on the phone and Hezekiyah was there and they were like, so, give us some things about like, what did he do? How did he do it? How did he walk through the city? How did he do this? They were just giving some things. Hezekiyah said, yeah. And he had a.38 on his hip. Like the dude was strapped and ready to go. Don’t come at me the wrong way. I’m fighting in the right of justice, and I’m going to do it by whatever means necessary, to quote the late, great Malcolm X as well.
So it was the inspiration that he provided. Another question we asked was, as we develop our narratives and our story, is why this moment? Look at our world today. We’re still fighting the same battles. We’re still fighting the same conversations. Now, are we going to be the heroes that we seek in regard to standing up in the fight of justice and what’s right? Or are we going to step back in the shadows and let all of these things happen, right? The last thing we talk about is, why is this important to us, to me, to you, our communities? Because it uplifts everybody. It allows us to own who we are and have confidence in our voices to make positive change. The unique thing I like about this whole thing, as we talk about the partnership with Firehouse, and Nathaniel, Kristen, Katrina, and his whole team, and the Brown Baylor team, and everybody, is what experience can we make with this narrative that people walk away inspired to make impactful change, whatever that impactful change may be. But understanding how someone, just a local Richmonder, decided to make impactful change. So that’s how I would begin to answer that question. I’ll leave it to Nathaniel to see if he wants to add any other context.
Nathaniel Shaw: I think you got it. It’s that last piece that feels most critical to me when choosing to tell a story. It’s one thing to just do a bio play of somebody from history. But why? What do we hope for? What do we hope the outcome or impact is? I think to tell the story of a man who, in those circumstances at that time, facing the threats and the danger that he faced to do the bold things that he did through the Richmond Planet and of his own accord, I think it can inspire us today to stand up against the machinery and the difficulties that we feel when we see injustices in the world. So I think leaning into that as a why is a wonderful thing.
J. Dontrese Brown: Yeah. And just rolling off of the Super Bowl (and Kendrick Lamar’s performance), I’m sure, Nathaniel, from an artistic standpoint, your mind had to be like, holy cow. For someone that’s like us, that looks like us on a stage to fight against the conversation of empowerment, the criminal justice system, the disrespect of women, artistic voices and empowerment, the society and how it’s divided. Racism. When you look at it from that standpoint and you’re on that platform, we want people to walk away with that feeling like, Holy cow! Look at all these symbolisms and metaphors and things that are important, but also who he was. What he ate and when he ate and how he slept and his family relations. What was the city of Richmond like when he was here, and what was he doing? Who did he hang out with? Who did he go grab a beer with? We’re excited for that too. Coming off of Sunday and having a platform of someone who is leveraging their voice to stand up in the face of justice, however they decide to do it through whichever channel they use. This was hip hop. Artistic performance, all of that involved. It was pretty powerful.
Vinegar Hill Magazine: Yeah. I have a related question. Maybe Nathaniel, you can start off, the choice of application to have this conversation through theater. Why theatre? Why do you think that theatre is a methodology to address some of these issues, to give historical context, to tell stories? Why theatre?
Nathaniel Shaw: I’m a theatre person, so maybe my opinion is a little biased, but I have yet to experience a more powerful medium than theatre when you’re telling something of great import and you want to impact change. For a couple of reasons. One, especially in a smaller venue like the Firehouse Theatre, you are literally breathing the same air as the people going through the trials and tribulations that are being portrayed on the stage. You’re in that same space. There is an intimacy and immediacy in theater that I don’t think can be duplicated on a screen as powerful as filmmaking is. And I deeply admire filmmaking. So that’s certainly one aspect, that intimacy and immediacy. I also love the fact that with live theater, people have to gather together to hear the story. It’s one thing to sit in one’s living room by themselves, experiencing a story. It’s quite another thing to bring the rich and complicated diversity of our community into the same building, to share these transformational stories together. That communal sharing of an impactful story like this is something that can only be done in a live performing arts setting.
Vinegar Hill Magazine: I’m a fan.
J. Dontrese Brown: I couldn’t have said it better myself. That’s why the partnership with Nathaniel and leveraging the theater is so tremendous. For me, art is art for art’s sake. But it’s also important because art, theater, and creativity give you a platform to express a lot of different things in a lot of different ways because it allows people to take it in the way that they feel is appropriate for them, and then walk away with something. The exciting thing is, as we talked about, Nathaniel and our teams together collectively, what is that experience like? The immersiveness of it, bringing people together in that one space to breathe and feel what’s going on and exclude all the outside noise and be able to focus on this, but not only be a participant as a viewer, but be a participant in the narrative that’s being told.
Vinegar Hill Magazine: I can feel you speaking from your heart, and I’m going to I want to get a little bit more to the tactical, what you can share at this point about the ideas of how the Richmond Planet might manifest itself in the final product. If there’s anything you can share. And then if you know, Mr. Mitchell’s family dynamic. So that’s interesting to me, around press and how that might manifest itself in the work of some of the ideation that you all might be having at this point? And also family.
Nathaniel Shaw: Dontrese might be able to speak to this better. If I miss anything, let me know. It’s hard to anticipate today exactly how it’s going to manifest in the play. John Mitchell, the living John Mitchell, who’s a part of this project and a part of the Richmond Planet Foundation, he often says you can drop a needle on the record of John Mitchell Jr.’s life anywhere on his life, and you’re going to find a dramatic story. So it’s hard to know exactly what the playwright is going to be most inspired to talk about from John Mitchell Jr.’s incredible life. We have made it an important part of the piece that the legacy and impact of the Richmond Planet be a part of this play. The importance of journalism has come up in many conversations. Especially the kind of journalism necessary then that actually stood up and stopped or fought against, most specifically, the lynchings that were happening across the South post-Reconstruction, in this period of American history where things kind of drop off a little bit and most Americans don’t know, kind of from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement, we don’t really know that story and that chapter. That’s a significant period that I’m talking about, that we don’t have a deep enough understanding of.
So thank God some people like John Mitchell and the Richmond Planet and other Black newspapers across America were speaking up and fighting back. Exactly how it’s going to play into the story, I don’t yet know. To your other question. Dontrese, if you want to elaborate, please do. I think the Mitchell family may be the most important ingredient of this research period. It’s one thing for Kristen to sit in a library and read a few books about John Mitchell Jr., or go to the Virginia Library and pore over the microfiche or whatever form it’s in today of the Richmond Planet record, which she will do and which will be very valuable to the work. But to be able to sit with the Mitchell family and their extended network of people who have ties and relationships and connections to those ancestors, and to be able to commune with them and talk about, and get a feel for what the man might have been like through his ancestors, through his descendants, I think will bring a level of personalization and intimacy to the work that you don’t often get when you’re doing a biographical play or film.
J. Dontrese Brown: I think you’re absolutely right. Nathaniel, you hit it on the head. I think our golden nugget is the John Mitchell family. Our week of research with Christine here is going to be extremely powerful. The family is going to collect members of the family for her to sit with and hear these narratives. It’s going to be unbelievable. The way the newspaper will tie in, of course, it’s the anchor. It’s what everyone knows about John Mitchell Jr. from a high level standpoint. But he also had a clothing shop. He was also in love with map making. There are some things that we don’t know about in as much detail. The reason why I say that is because it humanizes him a little bit more, it shows some of the other things that he loved to do. So, when Kristen gets here and she’s able to, I mean, we have access to the complete digital database of all the Richmond Planets right at our fingertips. But when she gets here and she’s able to put her fingers on the original newspapers, that’s one thing that’s really going to be powerful.
And then to sit with the family and talk about and hear all these other things is going to be critically important. So, I’m kind of like Nathaniel. It’s like we have some ideas. But until Kristen gets here, until all the minds get together, we’re thinking of some fundraising events and how we can tie some things into it based on whatever we start to uncover. To make these a bit more intentional about who he is and what he’s about. We don’t know that yet. We have ideas, and it just gets us when we sit in the room or on a Zoom and we start talking, it’s just like, oh, oh, oh and this, oh, and this and this and this. So until we’re able, the week that she’s here is going to be extremely important for us and for her to understand who Richmond is and who John Mitchell is and his family. Then she’ll take that and be able to begin to frame how she feels the best way to tell this narrative.
Vinegar Hill Magazine: What do you want the public to know now? What is the call to action? What do you want people to do at this juncture?
Nathaniel: I’ll start off. I think that these kinds of things. I’m going to be expansive in these kinds of things. A nonprofit theater that wants to tell these kinds of stories, to see these stories actually coming to life within a community and then having a life beyond that community. This only happens if enough people who care about that story being amplified and elevated get involved, participate, and invest, and that might be through a ticket purchase, or it may just be through attending a reading of the show, or it may be more. From a Firehouse perspective, anyone excited about learning more about the John Mitchell, Jr. Project, anyone who thinks that they might like to support the project, anyone who would like to attend an event associated with the John Mitchell, Jr. Project should reach out to us. That can be sent to info at Firehouse Theater or you can call us at (804) 355-2001. I’d be very happy to hear from anyone in the community, this community or beyond, who is excited about what we’re trying to do and is interested in participating and joining us in some way on this journey.
J. Dontrese Brown: I’ll just add, of course, Nathaniel is in the same mindset as I am. As a nonprofit, it takes support to get something like this off the ground. Any contribution, no matter how big or small, is important to us. Any contribution around the communication of this thing is important, no matter how big or how small. What I would suggest from a creative standpoint, adding on to what Nathaniel said, is watch us. Watch us look at this small spark of what we thought could be something that led to an introduction to Nathaniel that led to the idea of this play. That led to signing one of the most up-and-coming playwrights that galvanized a small organization of community members that believe in this thing as we walk through this and bring it to fruition. So just watch because a lot of times folks have these ideas in their mind and yeah, it sounds like a corny idea or no one’s going to believe in this idea or who’s going to want to support it until you put it out in the universe. And then you realize that this is something that Nathaniel is excited about. And then we have a connection to the John Mitchell family. And then things start to churn and it’s like, okay, then what’s the next and the next and the next. So just watch us and watch how we build the momentum and then participate. Don’t just sit back. Act, join and contribute as we go along this journey. You will see how powerful one little spark of an idea, just as John Mitchell did and led, could change the dynamics of our community that empowers other individuals to believe that they can do this thing too.
Vinegar Hill Magazine: Great. Well, I just want to thank you all for sharing this with me. I already feel empowered. I feel empowered, like when you said that he had a clothing shop, I was like, oh, even our publication has a merch component.
The conversation with Dontrese and Nathaniel reveals a passionate and collaborative effort to bring the story of John Mitchell Jr. to life through theater. This project not only aims to highlight the historical significance of Mitchell’s work but also seeks to inspire contemporary audiences to engage with issues of justice and empowerment. As the project unfolds, Vinegar Hill Magazine will continue to follow and support this journey, inviting the community to participate and witness the transformative power of storytelling.
Nathaniel Shaw is the Producing Artistic Director for the Firehouse Theatre. He was the Founding Artistic Director for The New Theatre, served as Artistic Director for Virginia Repertory Theatre, and was the founding Artistic Director for The Active Theater (NYC). He was the inaugural New Play Development Director for Glass Half Full Productions, Tony and Olivier Award Winning Producers of Betrayal and was an Associate Choreographer for Once, supervising both the Broadway production and the First National Tour.
J. Dontrese Brown is a passionate leader committed to empowering others, especially youth. With expertise in brand design, creative strategy, and leadership, he inspires excellence through respect, integrity, and empowerment. A sought-after speaker, he serves on numerous boards, including CRRHS, The O’Brien Foundation, and BridgePark RVA. His impressive background includes leadership roles at AIGA and degrees from Georgetown College, Morehead State University, and Savannah College of Art & Design.