(gentle music) - [Becky Magura] Sometimes life gives you an opportunity to reflect on what you would do with a clean slate.

Our guest on this episode is Mac Pirkle, an award-winning 50 year veteran of theater, film, and video.

♪ I'm throwing away the compass, done with the chart ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around ♪ ♪ Looking for direction, Northern Star ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around ♪ ♪ Now just step out, throw my doubt into the sea ♪ ♪ Oh what's meant to be will be ♪ - [Becky Magura] Mac Pirkle is a Nashville native who has had a multi-decade career as an actor, director, producer, and communication specialist.

Founder and CEO of Creative Communications, located in Nashville, he is well known for the lasting impact he has had on Nashville's theater community.

Mac founded three theaters in Tennessee, The Playgroup, Southern Stage Productions, and with Martha Ingram, Tennessee's largest and most successful regional theater company, The Nashville Repertory Theater.

During his time at the Rep, Mac produced and or directed over 65 major theater productions.

In 2012, he produced the world premiere of "The Nutty Professor Musical" at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center.

- "The Nutty Professor" is a brand new musical, based on the 1963 movie by Jerry Lewis.

Jerry's directing the show, and Marvin Hamlisch is doing the music, and Rupert Holmes is doing the book and the lyrics, and it's a pre-Broadway world premier production.

- [Becky Magura] Prior to establishing his own communications firm, Mac brought the same creative drive and energy he developed in the theater into the world of film and video.

His company, Earnhardt Pirkle, produced award-winning film, video, and events.

Mac, thank you so much for welcoming us into your home here in Nashville.

You are a 50 year veteran of theater.

You've had this incredible career in film, television, many awards.

Thank you, thank you for everything you've done for Nashville, for our arts community, and for being here with us on "Clean Slate."

- (laughs) Well, thank you for being here.

I appreciate what you just said.

- Well, you know, I wanna ask you, 'cause you're a Nashville native, and you really have had such a tremendous career.

What got you into theater?

- Well, when I was young, let's say early high school, Nashville had combos all over the place, little bands.

And so I had a little band called The Centuries, and, you know, I wanted to be a rock star.

That was kind of what I wanted to be.

That didn't work out.

(Becky chuckles) But I think it exposed me to my own desire to perform, really, was kind of where all that started.

So in high school, I tried out for a play and got a role in the play.

And then, I guess when I was a junior, maybe in high school, a new teacher came to NBA to teach English, but also to do theater.

His name was Terry Holcomb.

He had a very, very young face.

He was right out of Vanderbilt.

So he almost looked like one of the upper class students in the high school, but he was eaten alive with theater, and he saw something in me at the time that I don't think I did.

And I can remember doing a cutting, just a kind of clip, if you will, of "Taming of the Shrew" with one of the girls from Harpeth Hall.

I went to NBA, and it was wild.

I gotta throw fruit at her and toss her around, and she did the same to me.

And, you know, somehow it kind of ignited me into an interest in that.

And when I went to college at UT, they had a robust theater department, and I tried out for a play there, and then met a mentor of mine, Tom Cook, who was a professor there, and really my life never quit.

Although I wasn't in the theater department, I got a degree in marketing.

(laughs) So I was across the street in the business building and spent all my time over in the theater department.

- Wow, I mean really, that's fascinating, 'cause I knew that you got your degree in marketing, which certainly, you're the CEO of your own communications company, Creative Communications here.

So I'm sure your marketing background has not been a bad thing to have, right?

- No, it wasn't.

When we started the theater movement here that I was involved in, I had skills that most of the other folks didn't have.

So I really stopped pursuing acting and really moved into the entrepreneurial side of it, trying to figure out, okay, how do we make all this work?

What does this mean?

There was no path, there was no, "Oh, we'll do it like so and so did it."

You know, so we were out there and inventing it ourselves.

So certainly the business background helped a little bit there.

- Let's talk about that, 'cause this is the 40th anniversary of the Nashville Repertory Theater.

You were a founding member of that, you and Martha Ingram and others.

We owe all of you a debt of gratitude for such a tremendous performing company.

What were those early days like and why did you... You didn't just start the Rep, you started three different theater companies in Nashville.

- Right, well, two in Nashville.

We had a company in Knoxville, called The Playgroup, which was an outgrowth of the theater department at UT.

And we kind of occupied and shared an old church space right off of the strip off of Cumberland on 17th Avenue.

And we were a big part of the experimental alternative theater world across the country at the time.

But over time, I was ready to go, so I moved back to Nashville.

The Performing Arts Center had already opened, and we had actually performed the opening weekend of TPAC, The Play Group, which was the name of that company.

And we were one of the better known ensembles, if you will, across the state in that format.

And so I just knew that it would drive me crazy if somebody had called somebody from New York and said, "Come down here and start a theater with us."

I mean, that would've just driven me up the wall.

Because what what we really needed was opportunities in the state, opportunities at Nashville for artists to be able to stay and make a living, and have dreams that could come true, and ultimately, that's what we did.

There were a lot of people who were in the theater program with me at UT, and we were already kind of a team, and we had people there, and there were others who were here.

And really, our farm team was from Opryland, you know, because Opryland did auditions all across the country, brought an incredible singer, dancers, actors into the community, and they came here, and fell in love with Nashville.

So there was a real sense of desire to figure out how to do this.

And so we put a little experience together in Fairview, Tennessee, at a camp, called Marymount, Camp Marymount, it's a Catholic church camp out in Fairview.

And really, that's where it all started.

There were probably 20 or 30 people at that particular thing, and we did that for a full week, cooked our food, slept in, you know, old cabins, and concentrated on what we were doing and what we wanted to do.

We eventually even wrote out something that everybody was to sign.

- Really?

- Yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, it kind of started from the ground up with an artistic surge from the people who were here, and wanting to do something different, and knowing that nothing was there.

So this was the moment, because if we didn't get it done, somebody else was gonna do it.

- Yeah.

- And luckily, I had made a relationship with Martha, who really wanted that to happen.

And, you know, we kind of proved ourselves that we wanted to do it, we were worthy of it, and that's when the HOT, Humanities Outreach Tennessee Program started.

And that's really how the relationship started between this theater we were starting at the time, called Southern States Productions, we partnered with TPAC, the state of Tennessee and Martha to create HOT, and that was really the financial basis for us to have some success.

They contracted with us to do the shows for that HOT, and then outta that, Tennessee Rep was born.

- And then did it go from Tennessee Rep to being the Nashville Rep?

- At some point, after I'd already left Tennessee Rep, they decided to change the name to Nashville Rep. - So how long were you with the Rep then?

- Let's see, probably, I think the official forming of the company was in February of '85, which is 40 years ago.

And then I left right around the turn of the century.

So it was 1999, 2000.

- Wow.

And during that time, I think you either directed, produced, you had over 60 plays, 60 different works.

- [Mac Pirkle] Right.

- Do you have some really unique moments that you remember during your tenure, that you just say, "Okay, well that's a special memory."

- Yes, I have some that are really special and some that you wish, oh boy, that was interesting.

Well, you know, first of all, we were a bit like pioneers in the sense that we had to make a choice every year about what we wanted to do, and musicals were very important to me, and to most everybody else in the company as well.

So that was one of our targets, trying to do new musicals, as well as other ones, and we knew that they would draw an audience.

And we also had a huge traditional theater aspect too, doing a lot of Shakespeare, and a lot of classics that kids would see because we were performing to 10, 15,000 children every show we did for HOT.

They literally would bus in from across the state, downtown full of all these yellow school buses that parked and brought those kids in.

It was really quite remarkable.

So, you know, there are a couple of things that really stick out for me.

One of them would've been our production of "Jesus Christ Superstar," which was really remarkable.

And it had ups and downs.

'Cause I talked Gary Morris into doing the role of Jesus, and Pam Tillis to do Mary, so we were like rocking.

But in the contract with Gary Morris, the only out he wanted was if he had an opportunity to go to Broadway.

So he calls me and says, "Well..." this is when he got the role in "Les Mis" on Broadway.

- Wow.

- So we had to replace him, and all the press was out there.

It was something else.

But the show was really special.

And I contacted Bobby Jones, and we got the Bobby Jones choir to be on stage with us and really back up the whole show.

So when you looked at the set, in the back, there was Bobby Jones choir, and it was rocking.

It was an unbelievable show.

It really was.

- Was that captured on tape anywhere?

- I think we may have an audio of it somewhere, and there's some still photographs as well.

I don't think we've got the video.

- Yeah.

- I'd have to look back.

You know, back in those days, it was hard to capture that anyway, you know, kind of a home video camera in the back of the room.

- Right.

- Yeah.

That's a special one, I think.

We did an original production of "Frankenstein" that Don Jones, the associate artistic director, had written, and I had just been to New York and seen the Blue Man Group down in the village.

And if you know the Blue Man group, you know, they've got the drums and the colored water, and all that, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, we've gotta do that."

So when we created the show for "Frankenstein," we used drummers that were in scaffolding up high for most of the show, with drums, and then at the very end, when Frankenstein dies, we had this huge tower, and the drummers were on that tower, beating the drums, and the drums are red, and the water's red, as he is descending into his death.

It was a really wonderful, wonderful show that was also for HOT.

Kids went bananas.

- I bet.

- It was a lot of fun.

And then this one right here is one of the ones that everybody remembers, "The Taming of the Shrew," from Shakespeare, obviously.

We set it in 1969.

- Oh, that's perfect.

- Right.

So the soundtrack was all pop music from 1969, and it was really memorable.

I mean, I run into people all the time who say, "Oh my gosh, that production of "Taming of the Shrew..." It was a lot of fun, a lot of fun.

- Well, those are amazing memories.

Now you also write.

So you co-wrote a show that was historical in nature, but really pretty dramatic.

- "If I Live to See Next Fall."

- "If I Live to See Next Fall."

- Right.

- Yeah, tell me about that show, was that with the Rep?

- That show actually goes back to the playgroup days in Knoxville, a collaboration with a musician named Si Kahn, who's kind of a Woody Guthrie of our generation, and really sings about and carries forth the issues that exist in coal mining, and in the textile mills, and things like that.

It's a story that's set in Arkansas in the 1930s.

It was the first time that African American and White tenant farmers and sharecroppers ever bound together to confront plantation owners about the price that they were paid for picking cotton.

They were paid like, I don't know, 30 or 40 cents for 100 pounds of cotton.

They had these big sacks that they wore over their shoulders, and as they picked the cotton, they'd put 'em in those sacks, and the sack would be around 100 pounds of cotton.

And they struck for a dollar.

They were at 40, struck for a dollar.

And they didn't let anybody know about it.

It happened in secret.

So the particular night before the strike, those who had automobiles went out in cars, and they had a little flyer, and they put it on the doorstep of all the sharecroppers, and all the tenant farmers all around that Delta river area in Arkansas.

And it was a successful strike.

They won.

But it was costly.

Anyway, it's a very dramatic story that involves a kind of a Klan aspect, and obviously a labor aspect, but it's really about the human story, what that was like for those people, and the price they had to pay.

- Yeah, I think, you know, many people in our region, in our state, made their living as tenant farmers, Blacks, Whites, so what a powerful story, and have you thought about reviving that?

- You know, we've revisited a time or two, but I think it's time has come and gone for me, and I don't know, the play would have to be rewritten, I think.

A friend of mine, Will Akerson, and I had put a movie script together for it, but the world has changed now.

It's not appropriate for this time, I don't think, especially for a White guy who's in his seventies to be writing about that, or to be presenting that, you know, but it's a really strong story and it's worth revisiting in a lot of different ways.

Anyway.

- Well, listen, the name of this show, as you know, is "Clean Slate."

So I always wanna ask, what would you do?

What would you do with a clean slate?

Personally, professionally, for your community, what would you do?

- Yeah.

Well, since we had talked and I knew that this was coming, it did make me think about that.

And, you know, the first thing that came to my mind was, where my mind went was not about regret, "Oh, I wish I had."

Because we are all where we are based on all the choices that we've made.

And if you literally could go back and alter one, 'cause you regret, you may be sidestepping one of the most important lessons you've ever learned.

So, but in thinking about that, one of the first things that came to mind, I mentioned that I wanted to be a rock star.

Down in Hillsborough Village, there was a place called the Cotton Music Center, The Cottons, they taught music, and sold guitars, and things like that, and I took lessons, but I quit taking them.

And I kind of wish that I knew how to play piano, knew how to read music.

I didn't do that.

So the the musical side of my life, which has continued in other ways, I think would be a lot richer if I knew how to read music and play the piano, and I never did learn that.

So that was one of them.

- I love it.

That's a great one.

Do you have a second one?

- You know, I think that my next thing that went through my mind was much more personal, which is, it would've been nice if I had earlier understood what my fears were.

How do we deal with our insecurities?

How do we work through life, trying to figure that out, you know, to the benefit of your future, and to the benefit of other folks, my children.

So I think that's another one.

I think I would've started therapy earlier in life, maybe.

(pair laughs) - Well, aren't you wise to share that?

And thank you for sharing that, 'cause I think that's something we can all really benefit from.

- Well, you know, we're all broken and the deeper we have an understanding of what that is for ourselves, I think is really important.

And, you know, in the creative world, the human condition is the source of all these stories, and I think it's important that you know that inside yourself so that you can explore that.

- That's important, Mac, thank you.

You know, Nashville is changing.

You've seen it probably more than anybody, being a native.

You're in the arts world.

We've got people moving here from LA and from New York, and what do you think about that bridge?

How can we all be a better bridge for old Nashville and New Nashville?

- Well, you're asking me a question that I've consider deeply over the last year or so.

I think our city needs a vision.

Our city needs a sense of not just, oh, look where we're going.

That's in response to stuff that nobody seems to be, you know, the caretaker of.

And I think that's probably part of the issue.

And there's not a forum for it, so I don't have a solution, but my desire would be that somehow people can talk to each other, and it's not necessarily about old Nashville and New Nashville, although that's part of it.

I think it has to do with the strata of economic differences that are in our community, the strata of racial things that divide us, the issues of education and crime.

I mean, there's so many things that if you live in one zip code, you are not that aware of what's going on in another zip code.

Do you talk with people there?

Do you know them?

'Cause we know that if you are in proximity of another person, and you know their story, you won't put them into a stereotype.

You'll put them into their own world that you've understood because you've had a conversation with them.

So I think that's what's changing.

I think rather than coming together, there's a lot of stratification now in our city that I think is unfortunate.

And we've got so much unbelievable energy here now.

On the creative side, it is stunning what's going on.

A lot of it's hidden because you've got people here who are moving here for lifestyle, and things like that, and they're bringing with 'em skills that are remarkable because they've made their way on Broadway, or in film, or whatever it might be.

I don't know that that answers the question you asked me, but I do have a lot of respect for what's happening in the city right now.

There are people who are wondering about, questioning it, just like I am, and they're in positions of more power than I am right now, and have, hopefully, ways to solve that, ways to bring people together.

So I'm an optimist.

I think our best days are ahead of us, I really do, but it doesn't mean that we won't have to struggle to get there.

You gotta kind of move against the water that's coming your way in order to build that bridge, and I think the, well, I don't think we're there yet, but we have decisions to make, some of which are existential and moral.

I mean, what kind of a community do we actually want?

What is it that we respect about communities, our own community?

How do you lift that up and make sure that's shared with others?

Because there are a lot of people that absolutely are not benefiting from the wealth that's occurring in our community.

It's just not happening.

And there are a lot of kids who need to be educated, and they need to be educated just as well as the people who have privilege and resources.

So I don't know the solution, but I know it's important, and I think somehow we're gonna make it through there.

- Well, I have hope with that.

Just in the few minutes we have left, we haven't gotten to your current work.

You went into film, you went into movies, I mean, you've just done so much, and now you have this incredible communications firm.

What's next for you?

What do you really want to delve into?

- Mmhmm.

Well, you know, I have found that my expressive life has expanded in writing.

And because I'm a person who lives by the verbal world, I kind of write the way I talk.

And so I write a lot now.

You could call it poetry, I guess, although that feels a little too lofty for me and what I can do, but I think that's where my world is now.

So I can express that.

What I just talked to you about in Nashville, I've expressed that in a poem, called "A City on the River."

And I've got other things that I deal with, even, you know, delving back into your own life, poetry helps you do that a lot.

I don't know if you know what Lectio Divina is, where you know, on the spiritual side of your life, you study scripture and there's four or five steps you go through.

And a theologian named Frederick Beuchner talked once about doing that in your own life.

You know, so when you look back on your life and examine the little moments as well as the big moments, what do you glean from that?

What does that look like for yourself?

And I've been trying to do a lot of that in this, you know, the sunset of your life.

I hope I'm here for another 20 years, but I find it interesting to go back and think about relationships I've had, moments I've had of ecstasy or tragedy, and what has that done to me and how do I express that?

How does that come out?

- Right.

- And so I'm following that muse more than I ever have.

I don't know what'll happen, but that's where I am.

Outside of continuing, I still do some video work with longtime clients, and I'm involved a little bit in the creative world.

I've kind of reached back out into that world to kind of see what's going on, and meet new people, and find out what's happening, and see what I might be able to add in conversation or relationship building.

So it's a nuance to change that's going on with me right now.

- I love that Mac.

That's just actually, that's inspirational.

So thank you.

We're unfortunately out of time.

- Yeah, we always are.

- I know.

But I hope we'll keep talking and then we'll keep seeing you making a difference in Nashville like you have for such a long time.

Thank you.

- Uh huh.

(gentle music) ♪ I'm throwing away the compass, done with the chart ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around in one direction ♪ - Mac, I know you have written a poem about the city.

Could you take just a minute, maybe, to share a little bit, and then maybe we can share the rest with our viewers online?

- Okay.

Yeah, maybe I could read the, it's got a refrain in it.

Bring it up here.

- And it's called?

- It's called "A City on the River."

A city on the river, a city that's a giver, a city on the rise, a city in disguise.

Tall glass and steel reflects the skies.

What do we see in the people's eyes where the tall shadows don't reach their lives?

Far from the lights on Broadway, folks dodging cars, bills to pay.

Looking down at the ground, not eye to eye.

Don't feel the trickle and wonder why.

A city on the river, a city that's a giver, a city on the rise, a city in disguise.

- Thank you.

That's Nashville.

(Mac laughs) (bright music)