William Earl Ray & ‘God’s Favorite’

The veteran actor and director talks with Dmae Lo Roberts on her newest Stage & Studio podcast about race in the theater, his fondness for Neil Simon, and the Simon comedy he's directing for PassinArt.

September 4, 2024

Dmae Lo Roberts

Culture, Stage & Studio, Theater

William Earl (Bill) Ray, director of "God's Favorite." — William Earl (Bill) Ray, director of “God’s Favorite.”

For more than 46 years, William Earl Ray has been an actor and director of countless productions. He’s directed productions of numerous August Wilson plays such as Seven Guitars, Two Trains Running, and The Piano Lesson. He’s also directed other playwrights’ work, such as Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys and Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play.

As a steadfast director at PassinArt: A Theatre Company over the last couple of decades, Bill Ray directs at least one show per season. He most recently worked with Dmae, who directed him in Yohen at PassinArt. Now he’s about to open an unsual offereing at the theater, Neil Simon’s God’s Favorite, a situation comedy based on the biblical story of Job. He reveals why he’s drawn to this play and muses on decades of working in theater as well as the waves of equity and multiculturalism he’s seen through the years. He also reveals that he loves classical music, and especially one song you’ll hear in this podcast.

Subscribe and listen to Stage & Studio on: Apple, Google, Spotify, Android and Sticher. Hear past shows on Stage & Studio website. Theme music by Clark Salisbury. Music provided by Tunetank. Free Download: https://bit.ly/3PUMAnU Listen on Spotify: https://bit.ly/46nxy15 Video Link: • Clair De Lune (Copyright Free

In this interview with William Earl Ray you’ll hear…

[00:10:15] “I love Neil Simon, and what I do, what I try to do … as an actor or as a director is not try to live in a box that I can only do this. I feel very capable of doing a lot of different things. I read a lot of different things. And when I had the company, the African American company … that I was a part of in Tacoma, Back in the ’80s, I read this particular play and I just laughed.”

[00:21:09] “I think that if you understand the cultural background, yes you can, if you truly understand it and respect it. If you do not respect it, And you try to, in most cases, particularly with Black plays, particularly with white directors trying to direct August Wilson, for instance, which they stopped doing, they tend to want to whitewash it, you know, and stuff, so that’s not good. You know, if you’re going to tell the truth, tell the truth. And are you capable of telling the truth? And that means you have to really dig down and do your homework.”

Donovan Mahannah, Sami Yacob-Andrus and James Dixon in rehearsal for Neil Simon's "God's Country." Photo: William Earl Ray — Donovan Mahannah, Sami Yacob-Andrus and James Dixon in rehearsal for Neil Simon’s “God’s Favorite.” Photo: William Earl Ray

Sponsor

God’s Favorite

Previews Wednesday-Thursday Sept. 4-5
Performances 7:30 pm Thursdays-Fridays
2:00 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays
Sept. 6 – Sept. 29, 2024
Written by Neil Simon, directed by William Earl Ray
For tickets visit: PassinArt.org

A comedy of Biblical proportions, written by one of the most beloved playwrights in history, opens this week with PassinArt Theatre Company’s Fall production of God’s Favorite. Written by Neil Simon, it’s the story of a wealthy man suddenly visited by a messenger from God, who sends a series of trials against the man to test his faith; it’s loosely based on the Biblical story of Job.

God’s Favorite is the first show of PassinArt’s 2024-2025 performance season, which includes: Black Nativity, the beloved holiday musical production written by Langston Hughes (Nov. 29-Dec. 15, 2024); and DOT, a dramatic comedy by actor/writer/director Coleman Domingo about one family’s attempt to care for an elderly mother who is losing her memory (March 19-April 13, 2025).

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William (Bill) Earl Ray is celebrating his 46th year as an actor/director as a theatrical artist. Acting Stage credits include Seven Guitars, The Piano Lesson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, The Gospel at Colonus, Miss Evers’ Boys, Cobb, Master Harold and the Boys, Home, The Amen Corner, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, A Soldier’s Play, The Whipping Man, Blues for an Alabama Sky and others.

His directing credits include Seven Guitars; A Song for Coretta; Neat; No Niggers, No Jews, No Dogs (The No Play); Two Trains Running; Skeleton Crew; Lonely Planet; King Liz; Ain’t Misbehavin’ A Raisin in the Sun and Having Our Say (Starring Ms. Irma P. Hall – Big Mama of Soul Food Fame); Agnes of God; The Heiress; Working: A Musical; The Gifts of the Magi; The Gospel at Colonus and others.

TV and film credits include The Tuskegee Airmen; The Gas Café; Cadillac Ranch; The Temp; Dr. Giggles; Terror in the Towers; Better Off Dead; Walker Texas Ranger; Con Alma; See Mee; Big Foot; Lesson, Honey, and Metal admitted to the Austin Film Festival, the Portland Film Festival, and the Miami Black Film Festival. Ray is a member of Actors Equity, Screen Actors Guild, and a graduate of The Evergreen State College with a BA in Liberal arts.

Sponsor

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PassinArt: A Theatre Company, celebrating its 41st season, is Oregon’s longest continually producing African American theater company, whose mission is to entertain, educate, and inspire artists and audiences while addressing critical issues facing our community.

Dmae Lo Roberts

Dmae Roberts is a two-time Peabody winning radio producer, writer and theatre artist. Her work is often autobiographical and cross-cultural and informed by her biracial identity. Her Peabody award-winning documentary Mei Mei, a Daughter’s Song is a harrowing account of her mother’s childhood in Taiwan during WWII. She adapted this radio documentary into a film. She won a second Peabody-award for her eight-hour Crossing East documentary, the first Asian American history series on public radio. She received the Dr. Suzanne Ahn Civil Rights and Social Justice award from the Asian American Journalists Association and was selected as a United States Artists (USA) Fellow. Her stage plays and essays have been published in numerous publications. She published her memoir The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family in 2016. As a theatre artist, she has won two Drammys, one for her acting and one for her play Picasso In The Back Seat which also won the Oregon Book Award. Her plays have been produced in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, NYC and Florida. Roberts is the executive producer of MediaRites, a nonprofit multicultural production organization and co-founder of Theatre Diaspora, an Asian American/Pacific Islander non-profit theatre that started as a project of MediaRites. She created the Crossing East Archive of more than 200 hours of broadcast-quality, pan-AAPI interviews and oral histories. For 23 years, Roberts volunteered to host and produce Stage & Studio live on KBOO radio. In 2009, she started the podcast on StagenStudio.com, which continues at ArtsWatch.