Of all the things that shaped the career of longtime theater director Sheldon Epps, few rank as high as the time he spent as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University.
It was on the campus of the Pittsburgh-based school from 1969 to 1973 that Epps met three of the four actors with whom he would go on to start his first production company. While Epps says he was “lucky” to get accepted into Carnegie and ultimately form relationships that would lead to his first big break, getting through Carnegie itself was anything but simple.
“The main thing I remember about Carnegie is it was very, very hard and very stressful,” Epps said during a 40-minute video conference interview with Diverse. “Long, long days. Long, intense days.”
And things didn’t get any easier from one year to the next.
“You kind of knew from the time you got there that you had to be invited back every year,” Epps recalled. “So every year was like a continuous audition. In my class of forty, only seven of us graduated. So between the people that weren't invited back or the people that it was too much [for] or they changed their mind, my class got smaller and smaller and smaller.”
Epps tells the story of his forays into the world of acting and directing in a newly-released memoir titled My Own Directions: A Black Man's Journey in the American Theatre. The book comes as Epps is about to turn 70, which he will do in November.
