Imoru wants a local flavor at Interplayers

Nikè Imoru brings worldwide credentials to her new job as artistic director of the Interplayers Ensemble, Spokane’s resident professional theater.

She has taught at three universities in the United Kingdom (Leeds, Hull and Loughborough), as well as in Bologna, Italy; Bellingham; and Moscow, Idaho.

She has performed in Delphi, Greece; Eritrea, in East Africa; at the Royal National Theatre in London; and on BBC Radio 4.

Clearly, this actress-director-scholar of Nigerian descent knows how to think globally. But for Interplayers, she also believes in acting locally.

“I see Interplayers growing out toward the community,” said Imoru, sitting in the office once occupied by the theater’s founders, Robert and Joan Welch.

“The Christmas play (‘Inspecting Carol’) I plan on being a co-production with the community. I’m going to enlist as many institutions as possible in the region, let’s say an 80-mile radius, to help us build this show. It has 12 actors, and I will try to cast it all from the community. Each design section will be done by interns from the surrounding universities.”

So she believes in using the resources in the spot where she has, rather improbably, landed.

South Howard Street is a long way, geographically and culturally, from both of the places where Imoru grew up. She was born in London, then went back to Nigeria with her parents for three years as a child. When she returned to London at about age 7 or 8, she had an experience that determined her path.

“There was a progressive teacher from an inner-city school in London who was herself an actress,” said Imoru. “She took us to see ‘Peter Pan.’ I remember being enchanted and entranced, and it was actually because of the audience participation. I remember that moment of having to clap.”

It was the moment when the children in the audience are asked to clap to express their belief in Tinker Bell, to bring her back to life.

“The emotions of that still stay with me,” said Imoru.

Soon after that, she saw that same teacher act in another production. The combination of the magic of Tinker Bell and the magic of seeing her teacher turn into a completely different person was enough to hook Imoru on theater.

She went on to get a bachelor’s degree in theater and English literature from University College in Northhampton, and a master’s in theater and feminist theory and a Ph.D. in theater, history and contemporary critical theory at the University of Warwick.

Before long she found herself teaching at various universities. Meanwhile, she continued to act, including jobs at two of the biggest repertory theaters in the U.K., the Royal National Theatre and the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

She continued to look outward and in 1996 was asked to join a team to take theater education into the east African country of Eritrea. She was part of an academic team aiming to help restore that war-torn country “through recourse to theater, literally.”

“We were bringing forms of truth and reconciliation through storytelling and through performance,” said Imoru. “We also took theater education into those schools and trained those teachers to teach it. Because, of course, they had been at war for 30 years, so there was no infrastructure.”

One day, back at the University of Hull, she was offered an exchange teaching position at Western Washington University in Bellingham. She was not inclined to accept.

“I said, ‘I’m more about Europe. I really have no interest in America, politically or culturally,’ ” she said. “And I really had a great social sense, which you’re given in England, which is the imperative to try to be in places where there is a need for your skills. So having been in Eritrea and having a West African background, I didn’t think I really had anything to offer.”

But she was talked into it by the higher-ups, and she came to Bellingham in 1999. It didn’t take long for her to change her mind about being in America.

“It was just irresistible,” she said. “I was just seduced by the warmth and the landscape and the environment and by the people I now call family.”

She headed a project developing a play by Howard Barker called “The Possibilities,” which she later took on tour with a group of WWU students.

“The work they did was unlike anything I had done back home, and I still can’t understand why,” she said. “They were impassioned, they were hungry and they engaged in the process in a way that I had not expected them to.”

David Lee Painter of the University of Idaho saw the play and asked Imoru what she was going to do next.

“I said, ‘I suppose I should go back to my job in England. What do you want me to do?’ ”

He wanted her to direct “Romeo and Juliet” at the University of Idaho. So she did, and was hired on at the theater faculty there in 2001.

Her Interplayers connection did not begin until this year, after she left the University of Idaho. She was hired to direct “Music From a Sparkling Planet” early this year, at about the time that Robin Stanton left as artistic director. Then Imoru was asked back to direct “Side by Side by Sondheim,” which ends Saturday.

The Interplayers board obviously liked what it saw. Two weeks ago, it asked her accept the position of artistic director.

Imoru said she had been going through a period of “intense introspection and reflection” spawned by the death of a beloved aunt in England. She had moved to Seattle and had started a company called The Possibilities, consisting of her former WWU students.

She saw the Interplayers job as impossible to pass up.

“As a theater historian, it really is important to carry on a particular legacy,” she said. “Seeing as how theater has been intermittently banned throughout history, to find a building that is still standing, I think that’s a gift.”