For Pulse Theatre, the art of drama is a family affair

It was another Friday night for Pulse Theatre Company, and the cast of the three-hour play "Beneath the Willow Tree" was prepared to walk onstage at The Den Theatre in Wicker Park. Only something was off: Two understudies were swapping in for lead actors out with COVID.

Missing, too, was the show’s director, and the company’s artistic director, Aaron Reese Boseman. He also had COVID.

Still, the show went on, and at curtain call, an intimate audience breathed a collective sigh of relief, before giving the cast a warm and well-earned standing ovation. The world-premiere play, by first-time playwright Isis Elizabeth, weaved together a story about three generations of Black women living deep in the Louisiana Bayou.

Challenges like COVID, or even financial setbacks, are continual threats for storefront companies like Pulse. Audiences may never grasp how thin the margins are to keep the company going. But for Boseman, who co-founded Pulse in 2014 with business partner Chris Jackson and seed money from an unlikely source, the constant grind is worth it to build a Black-founded, Black-run non-equity theater company that stages shows that challenge the conventions of American theater.

Not only does Pulse tackle issues of race head on through the stories it chooses to stage, but it also does so through diverse castings.

“The question of what race could be in theater, and how we can transcend those things, is what our company is about,” said Boseman, “[by] opening up the pool for castings and breaking the conventions of American theater like who we normally see.”

Boseman grew up on Chicago’s South Side, in the West Pullman area, and grew serious about theater while in high school at Seton Academy.

He recalls a chance meeting with actor Bryan Cranston on the set of "Malcolm in the Middle" when Boseman was 12. Cranston told the young hopeful that if he wanted to be an actor he needed to join a drama club, stay in it and study acting in college.

But after high school, Boseman doubted what to do next. Another chance occurrence set him on his current path.

“I didn’t know my father,” Boseman said, recalling his high school graduation. “I'm thinking, I'm growing up without a dad, so most people grew up without a dad. That's my ideology. But when I got to that graduation, everybody had their dad there.”

After graduation, he went on Facebook to search for his father. He found his biological sister, who shared the last name of their father, “Boseman,” and she gave him insights on the rest of the Boseman family he had never met.

It turns out, his father had brothers — Boseman’s uncles — in the entertainment industry. Kevin Boseman, a principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, had toured in the companies of productions like "The Lion King" and "The Color Purple."

He learned that another uncle, his father’s youngest brother, was Chadwick Boseman, who, at the time, was gearing up for one of his first movie roles, in 2008’s "The Express."

“Shortly after that, I came home for Christmas, for the first time, on my Boseman family side in South Carolina,” said Aaron Boseman. “I got there, and there was Uncle Chad and Uncle Kevin. These two people who were doing the thing that I love. And since then, they have been mentors to me.”

Kevin gave his nephew a lot of early advice about Broadway and theater — which is where he wanted to be. But it was Chadwick who wrote the first check to fund Pulse Theatre. And even after Chadwick’s passing, Boseman says he is still supported by the actor's estate.

“It wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough to get us going,” said Aaron Boseman.

From there Pulse mounted its first production, "A Streetcar Named Desire." Boseman cast multiple Black actors in the production, but it was the company’s third show, "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," that made a big splash.

In the spring of 2017, a theater in Portland, Ore. made headlines when it cast a Black man in a lead role in "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," but then had a rights request denied by the estate of playwright Edward Albee. The character is described in the script as blond-haired and blue-eyed, and the casting, according to a statement from an estate spokesperson at the time, would have created an interracial couple and changed the playwright’s intent of the show, which is set in 1962 on a small college campus in New England. (The spokesperson said the Albee estate had approved diverse casting requests for other plays.)

That same year, Pulse staged the drama, directed by Jackson, with Black actors in the cast, but Boseman said the Albee estate did not object to the show. Boseman said the Pulse production had “non-professional” rights, due to the company’s status as a non-equity theater, which had more lenient terms and only prohibited changes to gender of characters and words in the script. Boseman says the Pulse production was not a direct response to the canceled show in Portland.

“It's just part of our DNA,” said Boseman. “We already had the intention to cast Black actors in certain roles. And people loved it. It may have pulled out more craziness in the play. And I think sometimes when Black people are in certain roles, or people of color are in certain roles, it just brings out a different aesthetic. It brings up different cultural things, and lines might be said a little bit differently because we understand life differently.”

Over time, the small company has had to endure some of the same struggles as its peers. The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily shuttered the operation in 2020 and 2021. Daily struggles have forced Boseman to occasionally dip into his own pockets to keep the company afloat.

But not only has Pulse survived, it has thrived.

Earlier this year, Pulse won its first Jeff Award for the musical "Once on This Island." And Boseman gave one of the actors in that show, Isis Elizabeth, her first big break as a playwright, staging her first play, "Beneath the Willow Tree," this fall as its season opener.

“I know some writers that I know are like, three works in, and they're like, ‘OK, finally, we're on the stage,’ ” said Elizabeth. “I think I'm just blessed and honored that someone saw this story and thought it was just as important as I did to be heard.”

Elizabeth said she started writing the script in 2020 during the pandemic when her therapist suggested that she write a love letter to the women in her family.

That exercise sparked the idea of flipping her letters into a play. She recognized the poetry of the words and the generational trauma that manifested in cycles. Realizing these themes would be relatable to more people, she started to craft a play around the letters. The story follows Willow, a college student coming home for the summer who is grappling with her sexual identity and how to express it to herself and her family. Willow’s mother and grandmother live together in the house built by Willow’s late grandfather. Secrets seep through the walls, and trauma bubbles and boils throughout the show.

Following an award-winning musical with a three-hour family drama may seem like a heel turn, but for Boseman, staging Elizabeth’s play was a no-brainer. For him, the story was reminiscent of his own relationship with his mother.

“My mother was also a queer person, so I grew up in a queer household. I understood a little bit of that life and what she may have been going through growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” he said.

But there were other reasons for the choice. The show is bold and unpacks heavy themes. It highlights a young, new playwright and features a cast of mostly female-identifying actors. And it hit close to home for Boseman.

“I usually like to pick things that just speak to my heart,” said Boseman.