For the actor Paulette Dawn, there is absolutely positively nothing better than being on stage.
“It is a fire I have in me,” she says. “I don’t want to put it out.”
It took her a while to make her childhood dream of singing and acting come true, and now that it has, she has no intention of letting it go.
Dawn plays Ida B. Wells in the Westport Center for the Arts’ production of “Only the Wounds and Weapons” have changed. The play, co-written by interracial playwright team Jacqueline Gafford and Scott Myers, features many lesser-known people who have played key roles in Black history. It centers around the struggle to liberate people who were captured and shipped from Africa to America to be sold as slaves. Characters include Kansas City historical figures Leon Jordan, a politician and Lucille Bluford, journalist with the Kansas City Call. It also includes several nationally known personalities such as James Baldwin, Marian Anderson and Fannie Lou Hamer.
Dawn plays Ida B. Wells, an investigative journalist, educator and early civil rights leader. Dawn found it inspiring to play Wells, and also found it easy to understand the type of energy Wells brought to her work.
“She talked about lynching to the point where she had to leave town before she was lynched,” Dawn says, referring to the fact that a white mob destroyed Wells’ newspaper office and printing presses after she wrote a pamphlet exposing the horrors of slavery. In other words, Wells put her all into her work.
“That’s me, in essence,” Dawn says.
The Kansas City actor does not come to the stage from a typical background. Her love of the theater, and her desire to disappear into a role, started when she was young. When she was 17, she saw a production of “The Sound of Music” at the New Dinner Theater, and immediately told her parents, “I want to sing and dance on stage.”
But Dawn had begun suffering abuse almost a decade earlier and had to work through a lot of issues before she could bask in the spotlight. She remembers herself as a shy child who walked with her head down. In college, she wrote poems, and “it got pretty dark for a while.” She was in her 30s when a friend invited her to join the cast of a production about addictions at the Gem Theater. With no experience, Dawn stepped out on that stage and immediately felt like being up there was what she was meant to do.
She never feels more confident or free as when she is acting.
“Now I do whatever I can do to get on stage. It’s an exciting pastime for me. I am a wife, a mother, I work fulltime, but I take every opportunity I can to pull myself away from real life.”
Since that first experience, Dawn’s theatrical roles have included Jackie Dubois from “Reflections 1,2 & 3,” The Woman from “Blues in The Night,” Aunt Em from “the Wiz,” and Polk”from Gods • Sib Tale Folk Opera. She was also cast in the Westport Center for the Arts’ “Bottle of Fire” as Reverend Carmenita Turner and has read poetry as part of WCA’s Dancing Word series.
She counts her family as her biggest support system. Dawn says her husband is always in her corner, and her daughter helps her with her scripts.
The actor has developed a unique method of getting herself ready to perform. For one thing, she practices reading her lines in front of a mirror, so she can see what emotions she’s expressing. She also has a ritual she follows right before she goes on stage – shadowboxing. “That’s how I get myself hyped up. If I have any nerves, I shawdowbox right backstage, off in the corner. Then when I get on stage all the nerves are gone.”
The pandemic took a toll on Dawn and the local theater community as things shut down for a few years. But now, she finds, not only are actors thrilled to get back on stage, but audiences are also thrilled to have them back.
The actor who started acting in her 30s now wants to continue getting on stage every chance she gets. She dreams of being on Broadway. If not on Broadway herself, at least at a Broadway show. She wants to study other actors and throw herself into new roles. She wants to continue to stretch herself and act and sing for the public.
“When I’m up there, everything else melts away,” Dawn says.