Keep an Eye On: Reggie White by / Laura Brueckner

“I was born in San Jose; I lived there for about 20 minutes,” says actor Reggie White. After his parents divorced when he was three, he lived in Upland, California, with his grandparents until college, traveling to New Orleans several times a year to visit his mom’s extended family. “Having a very Southern family shaped a lot of my manners,” says White. “I claim dual citizenship from SoCal and Louisiana.”

Hurricane Katrina struck the Louisiana coast when White was 17, days before he was supposed to start college at Northeastern University. As his mom and grandparents scrambled to contact their New Orleans relatives, White decided to stay close to home. The Louisiana relatives came to live with them. Eight months later White found that, of the 12 universities that had accepted him the previous year (“I was like a super nerd,” he says), only one had a Katrina contingency program and agreed to honor its admission and financial aid offers despite the delay: Cal State Hayward. “Well,” White thought, “I guess I’m going to Hayward.”

White began acting at a very young age, his expressive face and contagious energy landing him work as an extra and in commercials. However, his first experience with live theatre almost soured him on it. When he was eight years old, a producer for the first Los Angeles production of “The Lion King,” who knew White’s mother, asked him to audition for the role of young Simba. He made it to the top three, but the role went to one of the other finalists. It was his first real rejection. “I was so bitter,” he says. “I was like, ‘I’m done with theatre.’”

Apparently, fate had other plans. White was a high school senior when his counselor notified him that he was missing a fine arts class. He thought, “I’m not going to take ceramics, which I can’t do, or choir, because those kids are weird. I guess I’ll take theatre.”

White dove in with both feet, devouring Shakespeare and “Hairspray”—then “had another ‘Lion King’ moment” when another actor was cast as the lead in the school play. White had “smashed” the audition, but the other actor had been in the drama class all four years. “I was like, ‘Okay, look, if this is what theatre is all about, I’m over it.’”

Once at Hayward, White decided to eliminate his arts requirement immediately. “I took a musical theatre class,” he says, “to get it out of the way.” White’s professor saw he had potential, though, “so he really, really pushed me to find truth.” He also pushed White to audition for “The Wiz” and cast him in the title role. This time it stuck; White changed his major to theatre from sociology and political science. He did his first professional show, “Spunk,” at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre while still a college freshman.

White’s grandparents voiced concern about future job prospects, but his commitment to acting won over his family as he accumulated production credits, as well as teaching gigs at theatres like Cal Shakes and Berkeley Rep.

One thing White hasn’t accumulated is formal training, but his attitude is relentlessly positive. “Working is how I’ve trained myself, learning what works best with different directors,” White says. “I know there’s a lot I don’t know, so just teach me. I’m here to just do the work and be open to the process.”

White is definitely doing the work. He just finished performing in Lauren Yee’s “Crevice” at Impact Theatre, followed by the Marriage Equality Plays and this summer’s SF Mime Troupe show, “The Last Election.” The Mime Troupe gig came with a surprise: “I got to touch their Tony,” White says. “I teach for Berkeley Rep, and their Tony is in a glass case with lights and security guards and Secret Service and shit. The Mime Troupe’s Tony is just sitting on the shelf. It’s dusty. I’m like, ‘It’s just sitting here? Can I touch it?’ They said, ‘Yeah.’ Oh my God!”

He’s also been cast in Erik Ehn’s “Dogsbody,” which premieres at Intersection for the Arts in September, then travels to La MaMa in New York. Next April, White will appear in “Verses,” a Jon Tracy musical premiering at Impact.

What fuels this indefatigable acting dynamo? A sense of legacy is one motivator. “Sometimes, after a six-show weekend, you are pretty close to losing it,” White laughs. “But those little kids with huge stars in their eyes—when that love of theatre gets put in kids from a very young age, it’s really something. A three-year-old is running around singing, ‘I’m the snail with the mail,’ because he saw me do a play. That’s amazing to me. That’s a feeling that you can’t buy.”

Ideally, White would love to be bicoastal, working in the Bay Area, at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and in New York. However, home is important to him: “They make great art here, and people appreciate the art here. There will always be a part of me that will come back to the Bay Area.”