Community and the arts go hand and hand for Eileen J. Morris, who has served as artistic director of the Ensemble Theatre in Midtown since 1990, following the death of its founder and her mentor, George Hawkins. She sees it as “a welding of the means and the minds.”

This theme crops up across her life. Morris grew up in Pembroke Township, Illinois, 60 miles outside of Chicago, and attended private Catholic schools where community care was part of daily life. To offset the cost of tuition for Morris and her six siblings, the tight-knit family cleaned the church on Saturdays, getting it ready for Sunday mass. She moved to Houston (where her parents were from, and where they’d met before moving to Chicago) in 1981 with her then-husband and their year-old son, and began her work with the company as Hawkins’s assistant.

Today, the Ensemble is one of the country’s most respected theaters centered on featuring Black producers, writers, actors, artists, and perspectives. When Hawkins started it in 1976, he traveled around the city with costumes, props, and set pieces in his trunk, performing anywhere there was a space.

For Morris, who had majored in theater at Northern Illinois University, the new city offered a chance to further practice her craft. Chicago’s theater scene was much more established at the time than the Bayou City’s, but Morris liked that Houston had a boldness to it; here, there was something new trying to happen.

“I realized from a very young age that I really love entertaining and telling stories and being engaged with people in a very theatrical, artistic way,” she says. “And here was a core group of artists that had been working together at the Ensemble, but it was really just beginning. So it was an opportunity for newbies to really have their voices be heard.”

Morris performed on the Ensemble stage and later became the director of the theater’s children’s program. Working with Hawkins gave her insight on his artistic vision, but it also gave her something else: a way to perceive herself as he did.

“George saw something in me I didn’t see in myself,” she says. “He saw my organizational skills, my ability to manage. And that allowed me to find out about different ways of how art is made.”

In taking over the Ensemble’s youth program, Morris was able to put those organizational skills to use creating shows and opportunities for young people. She also grew into herself as both a performer and a director. The more she did, the more she was able to tap into that reserve of talents Hawkins saw, bringing them forward in ways that showcased her collaborative style and independent thinking.

“There were times we disagreed on things,” she says about working with Hawkins. “But we knew our work was always about the art, and we always found ways to compromise.”

When Hawkins passed away in 1990, Morris took over as artistic director, shepherding three shows a year before also moving into a producer capacity. Some of her early directorial efforts included Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Pearl Cleage’s Alabama Sky.

She also spent time further honing her craft at the University of Pittsburgh’s Kuntu Repertory Theatre beginning in 1999, before coming back to the Ensemble in 2005—just in time to celebrate the company’s 30^th anniversary.

<figure class="c-media c-media–image c-align–center" data-entity-class="image" data-entity-id="84661" data-entity-method="embed" data-image-caption="Dominique Morisseau's award-winning play Detroit ’67 is one of over 80 shows that Eileen J. Morris has directed and/or produced during her career.” data-image-selection=”{“x1″:0,”y1″:0,”x2″:2400,”y2″:1602,”width”:2400,”height”:1602}” readability=”-19.884615384615″>

“I knew I was good at casting,” Morris says about her directorial work. “Another of my mentors, Claude Perdy, always said that casting was key. Building off that strong cast helped me not be nervous about directing. When you have a strong cast, you can talk about characterization and concentrate more on blocking and building the performances you need.”

To date, she has produced or directed more than 80 productions both at the Ensemble and in Pittsburgh. Among those she’s brought to the stage as director are nine of the 10 plays in August Wilson’s famed Pittsburgh Cycle, which includes Fences, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and The Piano Lesson. The only one she’s missing is Gem of the Ocean. When she directs it, she will be among a handful of people—and the only woman—to have directed all 10.

In fact, it’s almost impossible to talk about Morris without including Wilson; she jokes that the playwright and George Hawkins are the two most important men in her life outside her son and former husband.

“You know, I love August’s work so much,” she says. “I respect it and I love the stories, because those stories are generally about people that I know or that I was raised around. Or they were people I saw in my community or that I heard about. And the language is so rich.”

Among the twentieth century’s most important Black playwrights, Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, for Fences and The Piano Lesson. His stories focus on family, race, desire, and dreams both realized and shattered. Morris directed half of the Pittsburgh Cycle plays for the Ensemble and the others for Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company.

While she knows these are important Black stories, she sees an opportunity for wider connection in them.

“These stories are [everyone’s] stories, but they’re told from our perspective,” she says. “Many people look at Fences and they understand it. They maybe had a daddy, and that daddy might’ve been really straightforward and stern and said certain things, or he might’ve betrayed his mother.”

If connection is the thread that binds Morris to her art, it’s the storytelling that lifts her heart. Playing Mama in Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is a dream role, but continuing to make space for others who want to create is also important, especially as the Ensemble approaches its 50th anniversary.

“The Ensemble and theaters of our age group were born out of the Black Arts Movement,” she says. “Playwrights like Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson were writing because they wanted to be able to see themselves on stage and they wanted their voices to be heard. I think today there’s more diversity, more women writing, and more ways of finding out who these writers are and getting the rights to produce their work.”

Morris calls what she does “a collective journey,” bringing people together through her work. When she looks to the future, she sees herself doing more of what’s always been her guiding light.

And she knows, someday, she’ll direct that 10th August Wilson play, too.

“Things happen in divine order,” she says. “So obviously it’s going to be at a time right when it’s supposed to.”