Professor Cockrell comes full circle in theatre journey

Published Oct. 12, 2023 in Troy University's student newspaper, The Tropolitan (by Hermes Media)

4-minute interview audio: JRN- 4400 - "Professor Cockrell comes full circle in theatre journey"

Troy University Department of Theatre and Dance’s professor, Quinton Cockrell, has experienced many life-changing moments through his career and journey delving into theatre.

Going back to his elementary school years, Cockrell’s journey in theatre began with him reciting the “I Have A Dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr. for a black history month program in the seventh grade.

“Working on it was a pleasure, performing it was a double pleasure, and I really was appreciative of the audience reaction to it,” Cockrell said.

He would then take this experience and continue to participate in his school’s theater. Cockrell spent his four years in high school participating in the drama department, acting in many productions.

“Through that time, I started wondering if I could be an actor for a living, and I was encouraged by my teacher or my high school teacher that I could,” Cockrell said.? “I decided to major in theater in college, and it just went on from there.”

Furthering his education, Cockrell studied at Birmingham-Southern College and with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival under their Professional Actor Training Program.

With the ASF program, students worked with the festival and received a masters of fine arts through the University of Alabama. Cockrell was part of the very first run of this program and one of the first to receive the masters through ASF’s new program.

“It was a brand-new building in Montgomery – the landscaping hadn't been finished and we had to trudge through mud to get to the building,” Cockrell said. “We all had mud shoes that we had to put by the door.

“It was just really exciting to be a part of the very first master of fine arts class at the theater and to be there when the theater was opening.”

At the ASF, Cockrell states the majority of his learning was through watching and observing the actors at ASF, including deputy artistic director and education director Greta Lambert and actor Philip Pleasant.

After learning from fellow ASF actors who were hired out of New York City, Cockrell decided to take the next step in his career: Cockrell moved to New York in search of more acting work, working a “survival job” while attending auditions. However, the concrete jungle can be harder to survive than students assume.

“New York is a weird thing,” Cockrell said. “I tell this to my students all the time – ?it's like you think as soon as you get to New York, everything is going to be great, and then you're there, and it's not great. “Then you think, ‘well, as soon as I get my union card [or] my Actors Equity card, everything is going to be great.’ And then you get it, and then it's not. Now – ?‘once I get an agent, everything is going to be great.’ You get an agent, and it's still not. It's just difficult.”

Cockrell then delved into playwriting, writing shows for himself that would feature what he wanted to perform on stage – ?creating work for himself.

“I found myself playing the same roles over and over again, and I thought, ‘I’ll write something for myself,” Cockrell said. “‘I will write a one-person show that can show people what I’m capable of.’

“So, I wrote a one-man show called ‘Shot House’… I went from that to writing short 10-minute plays and entering contests because I got really good feedback from ‘Shot House’.”

From a suggestion from a friend, Cockrell applied for a fellowship with the Alabama State Council on the Arts for playwriting. After sending them samples and completing the application, Cockrell received a grant.

“That made me feel like ‘wow… I really am a writer,’” Cockrell said.

As he continued writing, Cockrell found he was no longer writing plays geared towards his strengths as an actor, or what he wanted to act out on stage. He was becoming a playwright for writing more than for his own acting.

Further along in his writing career, Cockrell was commissioned by the Red Mountain Theatre Company in Birmingham, Alabama to write two plays.

One of these plays discusses the racial violence of a specific time period in Jefferson County, Alabama.

“Just the research involved in looking at actual cases, reading about actual cases of people who were the victims of racial violence – those who were lynched, or burned alive, or all the horrible things that were done to people in Jefferson County, Alabama, between 1890 and 1933,” Cockrell said. “Just reading about that was a life-changing experience for me.”

The second play is about U.W Clemen, a civil rights activist who fought for school segregation during the civil rights movement.

“Here you have a man who comes what a lot of people would consider nothing,” Cockrell said.? “A man from very bleak circumstances, and he managed to graduate at the top of his class in high school, top of his class at college, went to Columbia Law School… he was able to accomplish this in the 50s and 60s.

“He [Clemen] is still alive. I got to meet with him frequently, and he told me the story of his life.”

Cockrell cites these plays as just two of many that have helped him improve as a playwright throughout the years. These experiences are what Cockrell describes as “life-changing.”

Currently, Cockrell is still writing while teaching classes here at Troy University, hoping to teach students from the many examples he strives to set.