Art House Cares Grant will help Kent Jackman get ‘A Long Way from Homely’ off ground

In between working on shows like “Law & Order” and being a regular on the “Apollo Comedy Hour,” Kent Jackman has made a life well-served by the theater and found a way to make the skills he’s honed serve others.

The longtime Jersey City resident is one of 10 recipients of the Art House Cares Grant from local arts organization Art House Productions. The purpose was to help artists from marginalized communities affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jackman, who grew up in the Boston, Mass. area, is an alum of Howard University and executive director of KJ Aquarius Productions, which along with facilitating theater showcases and arts education residencies continues to build on his work using theater to help people develop what he broadly refers to as life skills.

“It relates to, well everyone quite frankly,” Jackman said last week. “It’s always been about working on communication skills, using roleplaying as a way to feel more comfortable working with events that might at some point become real situations for them.

“There was a time with demographics across the board that I was doing HIV prevention workshops,” Jackman said. “A very challenging scene but the use of roleplay within those workshops was to put people in a situation where they could explore what it might be like to negotiate a safe-sex relationship or safe relationships within an environment where it wasn’t the actual environment.”

Over the years, in concert with organizations addressing situations including “creative aging,” mental health issues, and domestic violence, Jackman has facilitated programming that uses theater skills and exercises to help people meet the challenges of these situations.

“We had one workshop series called housing readiness for people who were trying to come out of shelters and negotiate going into living spaces of their own,” he said. “Or, it would be just for the craft of exploring theater as a fun, socialization outlet.”

With the Art House Cares Grant, Jackman will finally be able to collaborate with a musical director to help bring one of his unrealized stage musicals to life.

“I don’t play a musical instrument but I create the melodies when I’m writing the lyrics to songs, in this case, that are part of this story. This grant is being used to create a staged reading of a romantic comedy musical, ‘A Long Way from Homely,’ that I’ve had (developed) for some time. It’s just been a very good opportunity to finally be able to collaborate with a musician and have some level of funding to assist them with their time and creativity.”

Jackman said “A Long Way from Homely” speaks to “our need to appreciate one another. Both romantically and otherwise, but to appreciate one another and not take one another for granted are central themes in the show,” he added.

With the last two years having made it challenging to be with family and friends on a regular basis, Jackman thinks the musical’s themes are particularly significant right now.

As part of the grant, Jackman will present a public presentation of “A Long Way from Homely” on Nov. 12, via the Jersey City Theater, 165 Newark Ave.

“It is still an attempt for me to get a sense as writer, director and producer how the show works,” Jackman said. “If the feedback is as positive as I hope it will be, this grant becomes a good springboard for further development.”

As Jackman works on “A Long Way from Homely” in the final stretch to Nov. 12 , he was able to see a connection from his early days on stage.

“The seeds of my career as a theater artist go all the way back to high school,” Jackman said. “We started doing plays as part of our Black student union as a way to raise funds, so there’s always been an interest in using the arts for some social significance as well as for the craft and the entertainment and the fun we had doing it. The connection is, I’ve kind of come full circle in just being able to maintain some of those same objectives.”

With a substantial pitstop over in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Jackman moved to Jersey City in the late ‘90s — when his native Boston-area was undergoing the “Boston Miracle,” aka Operation Ceasefire, a program that saw a 63% reduction in the youth homicide rate. With a change in police personnel, the effect wavered over the subsequent years.

Jackman hadn’t yet been familiar with the operation earlier this week, but hearing about the end result sounded familiar to him.

“Unfortunately whether, we’re talking about Boston, Jersey City or any other urban city, what happens is, if we don’t deal with the root of the problem, for a moment you may have these glimmers of success,” Jackman said. “But it’s very easy to fall back to old habits, and the root of the problem … There isn’t sufficient training and opportunities and the kind of things that make people make choices other than selling drugs and being involved in gangs to sustain whatever life they’ve created for themselves. If there’s not a real solution presented that can be sustained, in terms of creating jobs, opportunities that are going to stand the test of the time, it’s almost like putting a Band-Aid where you needed to amputate.”

Jackman’s own teenage years in Boston were during a time of civil unrest, post-the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., during riots around the country protesting civil rights issues and inequities. “… The answer to that was a lot of programs that became my first jobs. I’m talking about (when I was) 13 to 15 years old.

“People (also) get in gangs because they’re trying to find some way to bond that is not necessarily the healthiest way – the socialization part of it and the fast money is another part of it,” Jackman said. “If you’re going to solve that problem, I don’t care what city you’re in, there has to be a commitment to create programs that put food on the table and roofs over heads. Otherwise we’re talking Band-Aids.”

Jackman sees theater as a more than a Band-Aid. “It’s an artform where no matter what your differences are, you come together for the good of the production, you put your ego and all your differences aside and you come together with your particular skills doing the best you can” for a common good, he said.

“And that’s a discipline that can be created in other aspects of our society, but if the interest is always about profits and not genuine human development, once again you still get that Band-Aid where you need an amputation.”

Learn more about Jackman at kentcjackman.com and follow updated programming schedule for JCTC at jctcenter.org for ticketing information for “A Long Way from Homely.”

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