
Photograph courtesy of The Adeboyé Brothers
The Adeboyé brothers didn’t know exactly which subject they’d pursue for their next film project, but they wanted it to involve Pearl Cleage. Matthew and David Adeboyé, cocreators of the production company the Palette Group, had just worked with Cleage, the award-winning playwright and author, on Sit-in, an animated short written by Cleage and produced by the Alliance Theatre in 2021 and 2022.
Inspired by Cleage’s fascinating life and family lineage, the Adeboyé brothers thought she would make an ideal subject for a documentary about Atlanta’s creative scene. After several ideas fizzled out, Alliance Theatre’s coartistic director Christopher Moses proposed a new one: Had David and Matthew ever heard of Cleage’s old floating speakeasy show, Club Zebra?

Photograph by D’angelo Dixon
“We were like, What the hell is Club Zebra?” recalls Matthew. “We googled it and nothing came up.” To share the history, Cleage and her husband, the writer Zaron Burnett Jr., who cocreated the show, invited the brothers over for dinner, along with some friends who were involved with Club Zebra back in the day.
“We were just blown away hearing all these stories,” says David. “We realized all we were missing was our cameras.”
From that dinner party emerged the feature documentary, Live at Club Zebra. The show, dreamed up by Cleage and Burnett under the auspices of the radical theater company Just Us Theater, was both a live performance and a nightlife event that ran from 1985 to 1995. A pop-up before pop-ups were cool, Club Zebra featured live readings, music performances, poetry, dance, and everything in between. The audience watched from small cabaret tables and sipped beer and wine purchased via donations since the show had no alcohol license; it was a speakeasy, after all.
“I liked the idea of a speakeasy because every single person in there is breaking the same law,” says Burnett. “So nobody is above or below anybody, and they can relax and be themselves.”
It was a fertile time for artists in Atlanta, especially Black artists, Cleage notes. As mayor, Maynard Jackson had ushered in more municipal support for the arts, and with it more funding for small independent arts companies. “If you were a theater artist, a visual artist, a musician, you could apply for money,” Cleage says. “We went berserk. We hired our friends, we started shows, we wrote our own material.” Shirley Franklin, who had previously served as Jackson’s commissioner of cultural affairs and was an ardent supporter of the arts, helped Cleage and Burnett secure space at Atlanta Civic Center.
Word of mouth boosted Club Zebra’s popularity, and soon the couple was hosting five or so shows a year, at venues such as the West End Performing Arts Center and 14th Street Playhouse, as well as at the annual National Black Arts Festival. Atlanta jazz titan Joe Jennings helmed the show’s music while Burnett, dressed in a rakish tuxedo, served as emcee, offering spontaneous, charismatic musings on Black life in America.

Photograph by D’angelo Dixon
“It saved Just Us Theater and generated a huge audience for new artistic expression in Atlanta,” Burnett says of Club Zebra. “People were looking for something less old-fashioned but not so avant-garde that they didn’t understand it.”
Cleage and Burnett drew on their sprawling creative networks to invite high-profile performers, including actor and director Ossie Davis and poet Haki Madhubuti. The documentary includes footage of many such performers, thanks to filmmaker D’Angelo Dixon, who shot nearly every performance. The Adeboyé brothers were delighted to find the footage had been faithfully archived at Emory University’s Rose Library, so they could bring Club Zebra to life for a new audience.
“[Dixon’s] work really aligned with our sensibility as storytellers,” says David. “It really feels like a coming-home story for us.” The Adeboyé family has deep connections to the Atlanta art scene: David and Matthew’s grandmother Lee Lowe was a well-known painter who was involved in the Neighborhood Arts Center—another piece of Atlanta’s creative history they hope to tell. They’re planning more screenings of Live at Club Zebra in 2025, with details to come.
“Our mission is to put these stories about Atlanta out there,” says Matthew. “There are many stories people don’t know. But now we have the opportunity to dig into the archive and show that there was a Harlem Renaissance, but there was also an Atlanta Renaissance.”
This article appears in our January 2025 issue.
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