OUT IN THE BADLANDS of east San Jo, at the colossal concrete intersection of Senter and Capitol Expressway, sits Andrew Hill High School, named after one of the all-time legends of local lore, Andrew Putnam Hill. Mr. Hill was the guy who saved the California Redwoods in what is now Big Basin National Park. To make a long story short, circa 1900, loggers were hell-bent on destroying the trees, and Hill led a statewide effort to preserve them. It’s safe to say there would be no redwoods in Big Basin today if not for Andrew Hill. The loggers would have cut them all down.
However, he was not the only Andrew Hill. Another chap with that same name, the legendary jazz pianist, composer and ensemble leader Andrew Hill, died just a few years ago. So when Michael Winsatt, the International Baccalaureate (IB) Advisor at Andrew Hill High School, decided to build his own black-box theater on campus, he dissed Mr. Putnam Hill and named the venue after Andrew Hill the pianist instead. It’s called Smokestack Theater, after Hill’s classic 1963 album of the same name.
To experience this masterpiece of opposition-defiant-disorder-as-creativity firsthand, I showed up at lunchtime on a Thursday afternoon. Located in portable building C-1, way out on the far side of the campus, the venue is painted entirely black on the inside. A dark curtain opens into the main room, which seats about 75 for stage shows and about 30–40 for Winsatt’s two drama classes. A makeshift sound room, built by a Girl Scout, contains a desk, a few bookshelves and an ETC Express 24/48 lighting console.
Winsatt himself has glasses and blond hair hanging just past his collar. He comes across as, well, a musician and theater guy who’s also a high school teacher. Fancy that. He tells me that before he created this room there was no equivalent on campus.
“We didn’t have a school theater,” he says. “We had a cafetorium. When we got this building, it was a classroom. It had white boards and everything. We wanted black empty negative space.” Winsatt was already a fan of Andrew Hill the pianist, so he decided to further immortalize the jazz legend by naming the theater after one of Hill’s albums. It was fitting.
“When he died, I was already contemplating how we were going to do this,” he explains, sitting down with an acoustic guitar while kids meandered in during the lunch break. “He was an educator, he was a teacher, he was a free-form jazz composer. Not as out there as Ornette [Coleman], but he had his moments. We wanted to claim him as our own. Smokestack was not his most famous work. But the name fit the amount of labor and work involved with putting on a theater show.”
During lunchtime, Winsatt hosts open-mic sessions for anyone who wants to show up. “Kids at 17 are coming in here and doing standup,” he tells me. “Where else can you do that? There really isn’t any place you can do that. Especially not in this town.” Thursday is open-mic night, and the next day is free-form Friday, where students can jump onstage and play whatever they want.
“We’ve had thrash metal,” Winsatt says. “We’ve had a lot of people with LINE 6 amps and their $100 Washburn guitars. Ultimately, we just want to create a performance space. I bought the tables at a restaurant pick-and-pull place off Almaden. We wanted to not just teach drama, but also have something that’s part of the community.”
And a community it is. Next month, the Smokestack Theater will perform Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but with the characters doing routines from the Three Stooges. Info can be found on the group’s Facebook page. “The purpose of this thing is that we’re not doing Bye Bye Birdie,” Winsatt said. “Or Grease. Or any other classic high school play.”
