Fifty years ago, George Hawkins carried his theatre company’s costumes and props in the trunk of his car and rehearsed his actors in a church basement. On Saturday night, the company he founded filled the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Americas-Houston, where the mayor of Houston stood on stage holding a framed city proclamation and a room full of supporters in black tie rose for the institution Hawkins built.
The Ensemble Theatre, the oldest and largest professional African American theatre in the Southwest and one of a handful of Black theatre companies in the country that own their building, marked its 50th anniversary on October 24 with a black-tie gala presented by H-E-B. The evening carried the anniversary theme “Fifty Years. One Vision. Endless Stories.” and honored a class of 2026 honorees that included Kym Whitley, the Daytime Emmy-nominated actress, comedian and author. Mayor John Whitmire served as honorary chair.
Whitmire had announced the role in a video message days before the gala. “I was asked and honored to serve as the honorary chair for this year’s gala,” he said, calling the theatre “certainly part of Houston’s legacy.” At the gala he presented the proclamation on stage, one of several formal tributes in a program built to look backward and forward at once. Honorees received glass awards shaped as the number 50. A green carpet styled as a Walk of Fame, titled “Honoring Our Shining Stars,” carried stars for longtime company figures including Patricia Allen McGill, Franklin Anderson, Phillip Artis, Mildred Bright and Robert Tucker.
The program mixed ceremony with the work itself. Two actors performed a scene at a small table on stage, the kind of intimate staging the company has traded in for five decades. An In Memoriam tribute played on the ballroom’s big screen, rolling the names of company members lost over the years, among them Jeffery St. Mary, Roger Stevens, Larry White and Patricia A. McGill. Dinner was spring mixed greens, braised short ribs with seared shrimp and grits, with a vegan option, and a choice of chocolate pecan tower or lemon meringue tart for dessert. In the room were actress Wendy Raquel Robinson, ABC13 anchors Samica Knight and Melanie Lawson, and FOX 26’s Isiah Carey.
The history the gala celebrated began in 1976, when Hawkins founded the company as the Black Ensemble Theatre with a stated mission: to preserve African American artistic expression and to enlighten, entertain and enrich a diverse community. The early company toured. In 1985 it moved into its permanent home at 3535 Main Street in Midtown, a 30,000-square-foot facility with three stages that the theatre owns and operates. The METRO rail station beside the building is named Ensemble/HCC.
Hawkins died in 1990. Eileen J. Morris, who had worked alongside him for eight years, succeeded him as artistic director and still holds the job 36 years later. “George was a driving force that kept us encouraged, understanding that we were Black and we were doing Black plays,” Morris told the Texas Observer this year. Under her tenure the company completed a $4.5 million renovation of the Main Street building in 1997, a capital campaign led by board president Audrey H. Lawson, and built a six-production mainstage season alongside its Young Performers Program for Houston youth.
The gala sits inside an anniversary season that opened this fall with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Purpose and continues with A Motown Christmas for the holidays and Kelundra Smith’s The Wash during Black History Month, before closing with Tazewell Thompson’s Jubilee, about the Fisk Jubilee Singers. This year the National Black Theatre Festival gave the company its Theatre Company Longevity Award. Fifty years in, the theatre that started in a church basement owns its home, has a rail stop named for it, and is still doing the thing Hawkins set out to do: putting Black stories on a Houston stage, year-round.
The Social Register’s event directory tracks the season’s galas, benefits, and society evenings. Plan your next evening there.
