Close Up
All the world’s a stage for Henderson
Stephen Henderson balances his teaching duties at UB with roles in theater, television and film. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE
He has entranced theater audiences from Broadway to London as a major interpreter of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson’s work. He has been featured in a critically acclaimed HBO film and a short-lived—but cult-favorite—Fox TV series. And he has recurring roles in two “Law and Order” series.
But it’s his appearance in the classroom that Stephen M. Henderson particularly treasures.
A professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance for the past 22 years, the Kansas City, Kansas native first came to Buffalo in the early 1980s to appear in such productions as “Of Mice and Men” and “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Studio Arena Theatre, which was the area’s only professional equity theater. During that time, he learned of a position teaching acting at UB.
“It was just the best thing that happened to me because I had a professional equity theater in town where I could work and my son was just starting school and he was able to get into one of the magnet schools,” says Henderson. “I just started to take to the town. It seemed like a really wonderful place to live, a stimulating place. I think the theater community here is just fabulous.”
Starting at Harriman Hall on the South Campus, Henderson credits Saul Elkin and Anna Kay France with helping him get his teaching career off the ground during what he refers to as his early, awkward years.
“I was always going to school to be an actor and not to teach acting. Teaching was something that came with the territory. You were an apprentice, mentor, protégé. I’m very grateful to feel as at home in the classroom as I do on the stage,” he says.
The performing instinct bit Henderson early. At age two, after his mother found she was unable to care for both him and his older brother, who was deaf, Henderson was welcomed into the home of a couple that raised him; the woman had been a performer in black vaudeville.
“She would teach me all the old routines, which I was doing from 2 to 4 years old,” he recalls. “I saw Sophie Tucker, Jimmy Durante, Georgie Jessel, Peg Leg Bates and John Bubbles. It was kind of like (Buffalo’s) Colored Musicians Club in that regard. The white entertainers who came to town would come after hours and see the black entertainers. It was the early ‘50s and there was segregation, so (black) entertainers like Bates and Bubbles stayed with families, not in hotels. People would gather at the houses where they were staying to hear their stories. I was never afraid to go on stage because of that experience.”
Henderson’s first play was “The Miracle Worker” playing Helen Keller’s brother, a role for which he drew on the experience of communicating with his deaf brother.
His passion for acting grew with his studies at the Juilliard School with the legendary producer and actor John Houseman. “I went to New York in 1968 and I haven’t been the same since,” he says.
Henderson’s work in regional theaters across the country was increasingly recognized. He developed a working relationship with August Wilson that lasted eight years, until the playwright’s untimely passing. His Wilson appearances included “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” on Broadway with Charles S. Dutton and Whoopi Goldberg, and “Jitney,” which toured the country, ran off-Broadway and then played the National Theatre in London, where it won the Olivier Award for Best New Play.
Henderson feels fortunate to have been involved in some stellar projects. As a member of the Labyrinth Company, he portrayed Pontius Pilate in “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot,” directed by company co-founder Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Last spring, he directed an off-Broadway show, “Zooman and the Sign,” that was just nominated for six AUDELCO awards (top achievements in African-American theater), including Outstanding Direction, and he performed in a production of “Death of a Salesman” at the Yale Repertory Theatre with Dutton.
While he says that theater has shaped his taste, Henderson welcomes the quality opportunities film and television can offer. He is part of what he refers to as the “judge pool” in “Law and Order” and “Law and Order: SVU,” and he played a sexton who was murdered before the opening credits in “Law and Order: Criminal Intent.”
“It’s just a first-rate operation,” he says of the L&O productions. “Sam Waterston is such a great guy and Mariska Hargitay is wonderful. They take the time to do it right.”
He was a regular in the Fox series “New Amsterdam” last year as Omar, the jazz club owner who happened to be the 65-year-old son of an immortal 400-year-old detective hero who had remained age 35. Although well received, it was cancelled after eight episodes because of network development changes. “It was a joy to be a part of,” he says of the experience. “Those writers were really getting ready to go somewhere very special, going back in history talking about the State of New York, some philosophical and spiritual areas that were just interesting. I would have loved to have seen those scripts.”
“Everyday People” was an acclaimed HBO film in which he was featured as the owner of a long-established diner in a changing Brooklyn neighborhood who bows to economic pressures and decides to close and sell the location to an aggressive developer. “It was not something that would have been released commercially in movie houses,” he says.
Henderson relishes the stage and screen opportunities. “Any actor in the world will tell you there’s nothing like playing on Broadway and shooting on the streets of New York. For a kid from Kansas City, that’s alright.”
He balances those roles with his teaching duties. He is in class three to four days a week during the fall semester, leaving the spring more flexible for acting roles. He has risen dramatically in the department, serving as chair for a term and garnering a national reputation for his educator role, noted in the book “Acting Teachers of America,” among others.
He says his teaching career was immeasurably enhanced when he received a Fox Foundation fellowship to work with legendary American theater figure Lloyd Richards in 2002. “It gave me a rededication to teaching in the classroom,” he says. “I now teach a class to the seniors of Lloyd Richards’ technique.”
Henderson’s approach to teaching acting is summarized simply: Don’t get it right. Get it true. “It’s something that happens between you and another person,” he explains. “Getting it right is something you try to do in your head based on someone else’s standard. In order to get it true, you’ve got to listen, let the other person affect you, allow yourself to be touched and then reach back. That’s the canvas that we work on.”
He is directing an upcoming student production of “Scarcity,” a new play by Lucy Thurber, a young playwright from the Juilliard Playwriting Program. “It’s about people who have very little and, as they say in ‘Law and Order,’ ripped from the headlines, it’s also about a teacher who takes a very, very great interest in a young man’s future and his potential, and the question of why is she that interested.” The play runs Dec. 9-11 in the Katharine Cornell Theatre in the Ellicott Complex, North Campus.
Henderson lives in North Buffalo with wife, Pamela, a workplace consultant. Their son, Jamal, lives in New York City, and works in marketing for PepsiCo.
Henderson is a big fan of the area and the university. “Between the classroom of young people coming in with their idealism, and the intellect and stimulation you get from your colleagues, it’s a real nice home to come to,” he relates in true fashion.
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