Taylor made

JACKIE, OH! Taylor’s at home in her Black Ensemble digs.

Jackie Taylor doesn’t set her sights low. When asked why she founded Black Ensemble Theater in 1976, Taylor doesn’t hesitate to respond: “to eradicate racism.” Five minutes later, though, as she compares her theater’s output to McDonald’s products, it becomes clear that Taylor has a sense of humor to go along with her sense of social responsibility. Both will be on display this month (along with her singing, dancing and storytelling chops) in Taylor’s new solo show, All About Me.

That’s a title with chutzpah, but Taylor’s earned it. She’s taken Black Ensemble, as she puts it, “from a $1,200 loan…to what’s going to be a $4.3 million business,” known for the musical biographies of black recording artists that Taylor writes, directs and produces. Because she’s also continued acting in other projects, including the occasional film (most recently Barbershop 2), we’re thinking she just might have some stories worth telling.

It was Taylor’s early experiences as an actor that led her to take the reins with her own company. Her role in the Chicago-shot film Cooley High earned her what she calls a “cattle-call contract” with the film’s producers, but the promise of success quickly turned sour. “I thought it was going to be a very productive and positive experience, and it was just the opposite,” she says. The scripts she was offered to read “were in my opinion very anti–African-American, very proviolence, negative images and just antihuman. The messages were so degrading.”

Taylor decided she wanted to be able to control the messages. Financing her own films would have been prohibitively expensive, so “with my theater background, I decided the way to do it would be to build a theater,” she says. “I wanted the messages to be positive and uplifting, and most importantly I wanted them to cross cultural barriers [and] to bring people together of all colors and kinds.”

It would be several years before Black Ensemble hit this groove. The company had early success with The Other Cinderella, Taylor’s adaptation of the fairy tale, but struggled to find a formula that attracted the diverse audience Taylor desired. “We tried the classics, we tried African-American classics. We tried a lot of different combinations that did not work. We found out that nobody comes to the classics!”

In 1984, Taylor’s musical director Jimmy Tillman came to her with a script about legendary bluesman Muddy Waters. “Jimmy said the phenomenon with the blues was that it had a huge cross-cultural market, and that people might be interested in hearing the story of Muddy Waters. So, why not? And then, wham!” she exclaims. “Overnight the audience was everything: old, young, black, white, all kinds. They started talking to one another and they were very excited to be together and very accepting. I thought, This is interesting, let me try this again.” Taylor and Tillman decided to give it a try with Otis Redding, and “Boom! There it was again.” They’d found the formula that would fuel Black Ensemble for years to come.

Last month Black Ensemble announced a capital campaign for a new $20 million facility with two performance spaces. Taylor hopes the company can experiment with new kinds of shows alongside the upbeat “bio theater” for which they’ve come to be known. Hence the Mickey D’s analogy. “I look at theater as a business. If you go to McDonald’s, there’s no way in hell you’re not gonna [see] a Big Mac on the menu. It’s not gonna happen. You’re always able to buy a Big Mac and french fries. Now, sometimes you can get a McRib,” she says smiling wryly. “You can get a McSalad. And that’s why with our new facility I want two theaters, so you can get a McRib every once in a while, but when you come to the Black Ensemble, you know you can get the Black Ensemble product.”

Audiences can expect the same no-nonsense positivity in Taylor’s latest solo show as well. “It’s going to be my story, my own personal journey, but our own personal journey relates to everyone else’s journey,” she says. “People want to feel good about life. You can pick up the newspaper, you can turn on the TV, you can go to a movie, and you can feel like shit very quickly. What I like to do is give people a couple of hours of just feeling good, because we need that right now.”

All About Me promises to make you feel good starting December 14.