Arts: Stage Presence

Dwight Woods has the type of sonorous voice that commands attention, which is a good thing when you’re talking about someone who oversees up to thirty middle school and high school students a day in his role as program director of the Repertory Theatre Program at the Phillis Wheatley Center.

Woods has been involved with the center for twenty-five years. He’ll be the first to tell you that the mark of a job well done comes not so much in the form of awards—though he did receive one at the center’s ninetieth-anniversary celebration in December—but from the young people he works with. “At the core, it’s still those young people who need to be validated. They may not be getting it in the classroom. They might not be getting it at home, but they can come here and often discover that they have some gifts they didn’t think they could have, and it has a value to them,” he says.

Woods, who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, as second-youngest of eleven children, says his commitment to serving the community was founded in his youth (as a teen, he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr.) and explains that the Repertory Theatre is much more than just a performing arts program. “The performance is a byproduct of what we’re doing,” he says. “It is a program that is building character, developing leadership, keeping kids in school, keeping them away from drugs and alcohol.” It’s working, too: More than 95 percent of the kids who stay in the program go on to college—though through Woods’s dedication, 100 percent of the young people he’s worked with have had their lives positively affected.

And that is no song and dance.