McKay helps connect diverse students, faculty

Chris DuPré

To see her, one would be hard-pressed to identify Nellie McKay as a force of nature.

But this diminutive woman — a professor with standing in three departments: Afro-American studies, English and women’s studies — is a catalyst of the first order.

She has been one of the motivators behind and contributors to the Lorraine Hansberry Visiting Professorship, which recently brought artist-in-residence Tim Bond on campus to teach and direct the acclaimed production of Hansberry’s final play, “Les Blancs,” for University Theatre. She was key in securing the Ford Foundation grant that made “Les Blancs” possible. And she helped organize and present the well-received Nov. 8 symposium “Unfolding Plays by African-American Women.”

It’s not exactly what McKay expected when she came to the university from the East Coast in 1978.

“What we think about as education has changed over the 26 years I’ve been out of graduate school,” she says. “I envisioned that I would be a professor who taught American literature, African-American literature. I’d have this nice little box that you could put me into. I’d do research, I’d teach students and they’d end up doing the same things I was doing.”

But with a push toward diversity and synergy among departments, McKay found herself branching further afield.

“That has been part of my own development, and the university very much encourages this diversifying of the product, to cross these boundaries and to bring faculty and students in different areas closer together, being much more enriched than they would have if they had stayed in their own narrow spaces,” she says.

The notion of bringing a multitude of perspectives to campus gave rise to the Hansberry Visiting Professorship.

“The idea was floated: What if we had multicultural theater, in which the emphasis would be on theater by non-mainstream people, done by non-mainstream people whenever possible, and speaking to the mainstream but also to the minority cultures on campus?” she says.

A stumbling block was the funding to turn the dream into reality.

“It’s great to have great ideas; it’s another thing to make them work,” McKay says. “One thing they never told me about in graduate school was that when you have ideas that are running against the grain, you’d better know that you have to find the money to make it happen.

“The university just doesn’t have those kinds of resources,” she says.

Eventually, the UW Foundation helped to set up the mechanism for an endowed chair to be housed within the theater department and to be affiliated with Afro-American studies, English and women’s studies. Naming the chair for Hansberry, who attended UW–Madison, was a logical choice.

In fall 2000, the first Hansberry-fellowship-related activity brought Clinton Turner Davis to teach and direct the playwright’s best-known work, “A Raisin in the Sun.” The production was a resounding success.

This year’s “Les Blancs” wove a provocative tapestry encompassing matters of race, identity, family and imperialism in the twilight of colonial Africa. The drama played to standing ovations, and the Wisconsin State Journal called it “truly exceptional theatre that engages the mind and the heart equally well.”

“The product is something that everybody can see,” McKay says. “It’s not like somebody writing a book, and 10 people read it and so what? What difference does it make? Theater is a perfect vehicle for making a public statement, for attracting the public to something they can enjoy and for educating our students in a way in which everyone can participate.”

And the project, part of Create the Future: The Wisconsin Campaign, is having the desired effect.

At the symposium, “the students spoke to how transformed their lives were” by “Les Blancs,” she says. “It’s not like they didn’t know that there were African-Americans and Africans before, but having this experience of the class that Tim Bond taught in African-American drama and the play made an incredible impact on their lives.

“They’ll never be the same again. That’s priceless. They’ll take it with them for the rest of their lives,” she says.