115TH STREET LIBRARY THEATRE (115TH STREET PEOPLE’S THEATRE). This theater was founded by librarian Regina Andrews and Loften Mitchell at the 115th Street Library in New York City around 1945. They produced a variety of plays on a somewhat erratic basis, two of which were by Mitchell, in 1947. Among them were The Cellar and The Bancroft Dynasty. The last known production was The Shame of a Nation, also written by Mitchell in 1952. The theater then moved to 290 Lenox Avenue in Harlem and changed its name to the Harlem Showcase Theater. The theater closed its doors forever in 1956.
AAKHU, SHEPSU (REGINALD LAWRENCE). Born Reginald Lawrence in Illinois, the playwright, musician, and producer changed his name to Shepsu Aakhu. He holds a B.S. in kinesiology and an M.S. in physiology from the University of Illinois. It was there in the late 1980s that he became involved with a group of students clamoring for a more African-based curriculum. What began then at the university was realized in 1991, when they formed the Ma’at Production Association of Afrikan-Centered Theatre (MPAACT), a multidisciplinary theater dedicated to original concepts in addressing the contemporary African American scene. At this point, several events took place. Lawrence was elected executive director, he became the first resident playwright, and he changed his name to Shepsu Aakhu. Though it is a collective, Aakhu emerged as the spokesperson for the group.
Aakhu has been successful as a playwright. In 1999, he won the esteemed Theodore Ward Prize for African American playwriting for Kiwi Black, a story about a father and son on a train ride of discovery. His plays have been produced at the Body Politic Theatre, the Storefront Theatre, Victory Gardens, Plowshares Theatre Company, and other venues, including several universities. A list of some of his plays include SOST, about three Ethiopian female travelers on a journey to America; The Abesha Conspiracy; The Glow of Reflected Light; Relevant Hearsay . . . Stories from 57 (2001); Softly Blue, a romantic comedy (2003); Kosi Dasa; Beneath a Dark Sky; Gabriel’s Threshold; and A Kwanzaa Caro. Aakhu is the 1999 recipient of the Ira Aldridge Award.
ACADEMY AWARDS (OSCARS). Founded in May 1927 as a nonprofit corporation, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is an honorary organization of motion picture professionals that gives out annual awards, “Oscars.” Its original 36 members included production executives and film luminaries of the era. In time, membership grew to over 2,000. The stated mission of the academy is to advance the arts and sciences of motion pictures; foster cooperation among creative leaders for cultural, educational, and technological progress; recognize outstanding achievements; cooperate on technical research and improvement of methods and equipment; provide a common forum and meeting ground for various film-related crafts; represent the viewpoints of actual creators of motion pictures; and foster educational activities between the professional community and the public.
The first African American to receive an Oscar was Hattie McDaniel in the best supporting actress category for Gone with the Wind (1939). The second winner of this category was Whoopi Goldberg for Ghosts (1990), and the third was Jennifer Hudson for Dreamgirls (2007). Halle Berry became the first African American woman to win the best actress award for Monster’s Ball (2001) and Sidney Poitier the first African American male to garner the best actor award for Lilies of the Field (1963), followed by Denzel Washington for Training Day (2001), Jamie Foxx for Ray (2004), and Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland (2007). In the best supporting actor category, Louis Gossett Jr. became the first African American male performer to win this honor for An Officer and a Gentlemen (1982), succeeded by Denzel Washington for Glory (1989), Cuba Gooding Jr., for Jerry McGuire (1996), and Morgan Freeman for Million Dollar Baby (2003).
ADKINS, KEITH JOSEF. Playwright and screenwriter, Adkins was born in Cincinnati, OH. He is a graduate of Wright State University and the University of Iowa, from which he graduated with an M.F.A. in 1996. He divided his time writing for the stage and screen while living and working in Los Angeles, where he spent three years writing for the television series Girlfriends. His work for theater has been impressive. He received commissions from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Louisville Actors Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, and the NYSF/Public Theatre. This enabled him to develop over 10 plays. His works have been performed at the Cleveland Public Theatre, the Black Dahlia, the Hartford Stage, and others. Among them are On the Hills of Black America, The Patron Saint of Peanuts, Farewell Miss Cotton, Cobra Neck, Crossing America, Sketches of Yucca, Grey Haired Smoochie with Rufus, Wilberforce, Hollis Mugley’s Only Wish, and Salt on Sugar Hill. During his brief career, Adkins has been honored with a Van Lier fellowship, EST/Sloan Science Foundation playwriting grant, Sherwood Distinguished Emerging Artist Award, and the first August Wilson Memorial Commission.
AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA COMPANY (AADC). Based in San Francisco, the AADC is among the oldest black theater–producing entities in the United States. Founded in 1977, it is the only known theater dedicated to telling the story of African American history from Africa to the present. The administrators are two highly acclaimed practitioners in black theater. Dr. Ethel Pitts Walker and her husband, Phillip E. Walker, function as executive director and artistic director, respectively. Dr. Walker is a full professor of television, radio, film, and theater at San Jose State University, a position held since 1989. Philip Walker holds an M.A. from the University of Illinois and an M.F.A. from the University of California at Davis. A working actor, director, and playwright, he has also taught at the American Conservatory Theatre, San Jose State University, Lincoln University, and Santa Clara University and has chaired the Dramatics and Speech Department at Fisk University.
During its 30-year history, the AADC has visited each of the 50 states in the United States. The repertoire of produced plays is minimal, but the company is popular and slips in and of the repertory as needed. Some of the shows presented are Can I Sing for You, Brother? by Lewis G. Tucker; The Highland Avenue Trilogy by Arlene D. Washington; Love Machine, a 1970s rhythm-and-blues operetta by Travis D. Walker; History of Kwanzaa; Being Black Is Being Smart; Sister, Can We Speak for You; and The Black/Green Room. Philip Walker authored the latter four plays. As part of the touring program, the AADC has also put together a package aimed at children as well as one for students at the collegiate level. These consist not only of productions but also lectures and workshops that focus on African American history. The AADC was the second African American theater to perform at the prestigious National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, NC.
AFRICAN AMERICAN FOLKLORE. The continuum of African American folk traditions was retained in the South during the antebellum and postslavery era (see SLAVERY THEME). It thrived from that period to the present through the rich oral traditions of storytelling, music, dance, song, mythology, signifying, rituals, trickster tales, ancestor worship, and the dozens. During the Black Power Movement of the 1960s, some black playwrights drew from this subject matter for their plays. A few adapted Paul Carter Harrison’s notion of Kuntu drama that called upon these traditions to seek ultimate truths about African American history and traditions. It provided these writers the freedom to break from linear forms, to juxtapose images and ideas relating to their own culture, and to convey greater meaning.
Harrison’s Obie Award–winning play The Great MacDaddy (1973) is a ritualized, episodic, imagistic African American event in two acts. It is based on African storyteller Amos Tutuola’s mythic novel The Palm Wine Drinkard. The play is set at the wake of the elder MacDaddy in Los Angeles. The son is heir to his father’s lucrative bootlegging operation, however Wine, the protector of the race, is the only one who knows the formula for the home brew—and he disappears into the spirit world. The son, with his African juju stick as protection, begins a journey eastward toward the motherland, Africa, in pursuit of Wine. Along the way, he encounters an array of emblematic folk characters in various disguises, such as Scag, Spirit of Woe, Shine, and Signifying Baby. When the son finally finds Wine, whom he was unaware had guided him throughout his journey, the son is rewarded with something much greater than what he had set out to find—the essence of life. The play is a spiritual odyssey through African American folk traditions in which the son gains force by encountering manifestations of the oppression and spiritual resistance of blacks throughout American history before he can become the Great MacDaddy and savior of his people.
In William Wells Brown’s The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom (1856), the black heroine successfully wards off the plantation owner after she threatens to “fix” or put a curse on him if he rapes her. In Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (1930), African American folk traditions drive the central action in the play. The story depicts black rural life as experienced by Hurston as a child growing up in the all-black town of Eatonville, FL, at the turn of the 20th century. She and Hughes capture the rich, vibrant, ridiculously funny, and amusing folkways of black people without sensationalizing stereotypical behavior that was prevalent in the literature of mainstream American writers.
In Adrienne Kennedy’s Obie-winning play Funnyhouse of a Negro (1963), Sara, the central character, is in denial of her African past and folkways. This episodic, abstract, and surrealistic drama utilizes Harrison’s Kuntu theory of drama. Props in the play represent ideas. Sara transforms into various personalities, sometimes simultaneously, creating the effect of a nightmare. She is a biracial woman torn between the paradoxes of her African and Anglo ancestry, past and present, flesh and spirit. In her surrealistic rooming house, she is visited by various historical figures that represent facets of her divided self. Repulsed by her blackness, she is attracted to her whiteness, whose culture rejects her. Unable to rectify her black–white psychological conflict, Sara descends into insanity. By refusing to acknowledge her African past and folkways, Sara does not embrace important truths about her ancestry and cultural traditions that could provide spiritual sustenance.
AFRICAN AMERICAN SHAKESPEARE COMPANY (AASC). This San Francisco theater company was created in 1994 to provide an opportunity for blacks to study classical theater and to embrace their cultural identity and aesthetic. Sherri Young, a four-year graduate of American Conservatory Theatre’s Training Program, found that after graduation, she was all dressed up for the ball with no place to dance because most American theaters still had major problems with color-blind casting. In response to her desire for classical roles, she funded AASC with an initial investment of $1,500. It took two years, but AASC debuted in 1996 with a production of Oedipus the King by Sophocles.
Since then AASC, has been performing in the bay area, presenting classics like Much Ado about Nothing and Lysistrata. To give these classics more relevancies to African American culture, Young set The Importance of Being Earnest, for example, in Harlem against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance, with music by Duke Ellington. Julius Caesar was set in the tumultuous 1960s in the Unites States. The factions vying for power were the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers. Romeo and Juliet was set in Cuba during its carnival. Purists railed, but Young defended the idea of incorporating an African American aesthetic into the play as long as no lines are changed. Young developed a three-pronged program to attract more people to the classics. It includes the Summer Youth Troupe, the after-school program for students 9 to 13, in which excerpts from Shakespearean plays are performed and followed by a question-and-answer period, and the Summer Youth Program, in which students are taught to perform Shakespeare.
The AASC has no theater of its own. Its plays are produced at various venues in the bay area. It employs on average 30 actors and 20 designers every year, while barely making its budget. Despite this, Young has plans for a world tour with the company playing Europe, Asia, and, of course, Africa. She also muses about changing the name to the more accurate designation of the African American Classical Company.
AFRICAN COMPANY (AC)/AFRICAN GROVE THEATRE (AGT). The AC was the first known black theater troupe. In 1816, William Alexander Brown (?–1884), a retired West Indian steamship steward, acquired a house on Thomas Street in lower Manhattan. He offered a variety of instrumental and vocal entertainments on Sunday afternoons in the tea garden at the rear of his house, attracting a sizeable audience from the five boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, and Staten Island) of New York City. Owing to the growing popularity of this novel theatrical activity, Brown moved his venture to Mercer and Bleeker Street in 1821 to the vacated African Grove Hospital, a two-story house with a spacious tea garden. He converted the second floor into a 300-seat theater and renamed the enterprise the AGT.
The company opened the season with a performance of Richard III (September 1821) and thereafter mounted productions ranging from Shakespeare to pantomime to farce. Brown followed with Tom and Jerry; or, Life in London; The Poor Soldier; Othello; Don Juan; and Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack. Brown also wrote and staged perhaps the first African American play, The Drama of King Shotaway (1823), a historical drama based on the Black Carib War in St. Vincent in 1796 against both English and French settlers. Dramas about African American life were practically nonexistent at that time. The company’s principal actors were James Hewlett (1778–1836), the first African American Shakespearean actor, and a young teenager, Ira Aldridge (1807–67), later acclaimed internationally in the capitals of Europe. They learned their craft while sitting in the balcony of Stephen Price’s landmark Park Theatre (New York City), observing the acting styles of European transports in Shakespearean plays.
In 1823, the company presented two benefits for Brown. The date of the first performance is unknown; the second consisted of two parts highlighted by Hewlett performing excerpts from King Shotaway as the chief of the Black Caribs. As AGT’s popularity grew, it also became a diversion and meeting place for white patrons. The company lasted three years before it was burned down in 1823 under questionable circumstances. Shortly thereafter, Aldridge sailed to London, where he was free to practice his craft as a respected professional. He reached the pinnacle of acclaim as a stage actor for over 42 years throughout Europe, Russia, and the British Isles.
AFRICAN CONTINUUM THEATRE COALITION (ACTCO). Located in Washington, DC, ACTCo emerged as a producing entity from a service organization that had been promoting African American theater for over five years. They began operations in 1996 and since then have mounted over 30 plays of distinction and merit under the helm of producing artistic director Jennifer Nelson, who recently left the company but continues in a directing capacity. The theater’s goals of presenting new plays and old favorites grounded in an African American aesthetic have been realized in productions like Spunk by George C. Wolfe, The Oracle by Ed Shockley, The Gingham Dog by Lanford Wilson, A Night with Bessie and Tess by Caleen Sinette Jennings, Buffalo Hair by Carlyle Brown, The Story by Tracey Scott Wilson, and The Hip Hop Nightmares of Jujube Brown by Nelson and Toni Blackman.
Nelson worked in professional theater for over 30 years as an actress, administrator, director, playwright, and educator. Under her directorship, the company established a permanent residency status at the Atlas Performing Arts Center and a new play development initiative with the Fresh Flavas Program and generated a $500,000 annual budget, which is still in the black. ACTCo has received support from the Meyer Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and other corporate entities.
AFRICAN GROVE INSTITUTE FOR THE ARTS (AGIA). The AGIA was born in March 1997 at a conference of theater professionals and practitioners at Dartmouth University. The meeting stemmed from playwright August Wilson’s famous “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech at the Theatre Communication Group’s national conference in 1996. Wilson had called for a summit meeting of black theater people in his speech, and this was the result. It was arranged and organized by Wilson and two Dartmouth University professors, Victor Leo Walker II and William W. Smith. The conference, dubbed “On Golden Pond,” was funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and by Dartmouth University. There were 45 selected participants who labored over five days in examining the many problems of black theater. Over 300 people attended the conference on the sixth day, when it was announced that an arrangement had been made with the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth for training in business management and that Dartmouth University would help establish the AGIA as a vehicle to promote black theater and artists both locally and globally. The AGIA was founded in 1998 with the late Wilson serving as its first chairman. It was named in honor of the African Grove, generally acknowledged as the first African American theater, founded in New York City by blacks in 1821.
Since then, the organization has broadened its scope and now serves as a national arts service organization for the entire African American cultural community in the United States. It has worked with the Getty Research Institute and the National Council of Teachers of English in setting up programs of residency, teacher training, and workshops in poetry and drama to broaden the scope of high school curricula. The AGIA was also instrumental in producing a groundbreaking anthology of literary and performance criticism in the 2003 book Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. That work was authored by playwrights Paul Carter Harrison, Gus Edwards, and Walker. Presently, the AGIA is working on a nationwide Directory of Black Cultural Organizations in the United States and a companion report, The State of Black Cultural Organizations in the United States. Both are scheduled for publication in 2008. Recently, the organization relocated to Los Angeles, where Walker serves as president and CEO.
AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIO FOR ACTING AND SPEECH (AASAS). In 1966, Ernie McClintock formed and incorporated the AASAS in Harlem. He trained his actors in theatrical technique and scene study, with an emphasis on discipline. His goal was to form a school and ensemble theater troupe to teach actors to observe and study black life to recreate a more realistic portrayal onstage of their experiences. McClintock was inspired to start his own company by the experience he gained as an actor and artistic director at Louis Gossett’s Academy of Dramatic Arts and while studying with Edward Albee at the Playwrights Workshop at the Circle in the Square in New York City. McClintock’s pedagogy for actor training encompassed the in-depth study of black history and culture, the study of African dance, African American music and folklore, theater history, and black aesthetics. He wanted students to become more flexible and versatile in developing their craft to create any role from a wide repertory ranging from William Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov to Ed Bullins and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones).
McClintock and company members also developed three original plays he directed. By 1968, the company expanded to a 100-seat theater on 15 West 126th Street, where it remained for four productive years. By then, their training program had increased to over 200 participants. McClintock hired a professional staff of 12 to teach courses as diversified as karate and voice and diction. During the summer of 1970, he took his company to the streets of New York City, rigging two portable stages together to present impressions of city life in the company’s original production of Where It’s At—70. The theme of black pride was realized through poetry, pantomime, songs, and sketches. The troupe also gave lectures on negative elements eroding the cultural fabric of the black community. The company’s in-depth training program prepared them to establish a common ground with street theater audiences as a form of identification. It was not uncommon for audience members to interact verbally with the actors onstage. The following year, the number of productions had increased to nine per season. The studio expanded its basic Actor Training Program to consist of four to six sessions per week for 10 weeks at a cost of $125 per term. Growing pains mandated the company to relocate a year later to a more spacious venue at 415 West 127th Street.
The studio used a variety of methods to finance their productions and programs. They sponsored and took part in community-related concerts, movies, variety shows, and workshop presentations. The source of major funding came from public and private benefactors and donors. Although McClintock was committed to doing black plays, he also wanted to diversify the season. Beginning in 1968, he did just that with Clandestine on the Morning Line by Josh Greenfield; Fortune in Men’s Eyes by John Herbert, a depiction of homosexuality in prison; Moon on a Rainbow Shawl by Caribbean playwright Errol John; and Black Nativity, a Christmas pageant by Langston Hughes. The next year, McClintock resumed his interest in works by black playwrights. The season was comprised of Ed Bullins’s Clara’s Ole Man, Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence, Gilbert Moses’s Roots, Amiri Baraka’s (Leroi Jones) Dutchman, and Marvin X’s Taking Care of Business. The play that brought the company acclaim, however, was N. R. Davidson’s El Hajj Malik (1991) based on the life of Malcolm X. One unique feature of this group was the sharing of directorial responsibilities. At the Baraka festival, graduates of the studio and present students combined to perform in productions with three different directors: McClintock did Junkies, Helmar Cooper did Experimental Death Unit #1, and Woody Carter did Great Goodness of Life. McClintock later moved to Richmond, VA, and formed the Ernie McClintock Jazz Actors.
ALDRIDGE, IRA (1807–67). Born in the United States, Aldridge was the first African American actor of record to achieve success on the international stage. He performed before kings and queens throughout Europe, garnering the reputation as the preeminent Shakespearean actor and tragedian of the 19th century. His father, a lay preacher, sent him to the African Free School in New York, but young Aldridge was attracted to the African Grove Theatre (see ARFRICAN COMPANY [AC]/AFRICAN GROVE THEATRE [AGT]), the first black theater founded by William Alexander Brown in 1821. He apprenticed under James Hewlett, the first African American Shakespearean actor. Realizing he could not achieve success in the United States, young Aldridge worked his passage to Liverpool, England, as a ship’s steward.
From the mid-1820s to 1860, Aldridge slowly forged a remarkable career. He performed in London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Bath, and Bristol in King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice. He also freely adapted classical plays, changing characters, eliminating scenes, and installing new ones, even from other plays. In 1852, he embarked on a series of continental tours that intermittently would last until the end of his life. He performed his full repertoire in Prussia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, and Poland. Some of the honors he received include the Prussian Gold Medal for Arts and Sciences from King Frederick, the Golden Cross of Leopold from the czar of Russia, and the Maltese Cross from Berne, Switzerland. Aldridge died while on tour in Lodz, Poland.
ALDRIDGE PLAYERS. Active in 1926, playwright Frank Wilson formed this short-lived Harlem theater group. The company was named after Ira Aldridge, an actor and playwright at the African Grove Theatre (see AFRICAN COMPANY [AC]/AFRICAN GROVE THEATRE [AGT]) in New York City (1821–23). The ensemble presented three of Wilson’s one-act plays, Sugar Cane, Flies, and Color Worship, at the Harlem Library Little Theatre (July 1926) as guests of the Krigwa Players, who then occupied the facility. The company included William Jackson, Agnes Marsh, Charlie Taylor, Charles Randolph, Virginia Randolph, and Wilson, who both performed and directed. Another thriving group of Aldridge Players out of Saint Louis, MO, toured circa 1927 to 1935 as part of the African American Little Theatre Movement. Frederick O’Neal organized the ensemble with the help of the Saint Louis Urban League. The players acquired a theater, where it produced plays of black life, and its members received instruction in speech and drama for some eight years. O’Neal left the group to pursue a professional career with the Federal Theatre Project.
ALEXANDER, LEWIS M. (1900–45). Born in Washington, DC, Alexander was an actor, director, poet, essayist, and pioneer playwright of the 1920s. He attended Dunbar High School and Howard University and also studied at the University of Pennsylvania. As a professional actor, he made his Broadway debut in 1923 in the Ethiopian Art Players’ production of Salome and the Comedy of Errors. He was a member of the Playwrights’ Circle and the Ira Aldridge Players (see ALDRIDGE PLAYERS) and directed several black theater groups in Washington, including the St. Vincent de Paul Players, the Ira Aldridge Players of Grover Cleveland School, and the Randall Community Center Players
ALEXANDER, ROBERT. Playwright/Author. Robert Alexander may not have the name recognition of an August Wilson or a Suzan-Lori Parks, but he is one of the most significant literary lions in black theater today. Alexander has written some 30 plays, been a playwright in residence at three separate professional theaters, and cowritten four anthologies of African American plays. Alexander was born and raised in the Washington, DC, area where his parents exposed him to the world of theater. His early influence was toward the more militant fare of LeRoi Jones and Ed Bullins. After earning a bachelors degree in 1975 from Oberlin College, he headed west and settled in the San Francisco bay area. It was there that he was exposed to the works of R. G. Davis’s San Francisco Mime Troupe, where he found out humorous satire trumps hateful rhetoric every time.
It was in San Francisco that he earned an M.F.A. from San Francisco State in 1980. He also served a residency with the Mime Troupe, with which he wrote six plays, including Secrets of the Sand (1982), Fact Wino vs. Armageddon (1982), and I Ain’t Yo Uncle: The New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1993). He then married and began raising a family of his own. He returned to the world of academia in 1996, earning a second M.F.A. at the University of Iowa.
Alexander was playwright in Residence at both the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco, and the Wooly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, DC. His works have been performed nationwide including Actors Theatre of Louisville, Trinity Repertory Company, Jomandi Productions, Mark Taper Forum, Kennedy Center, Karamu House, the Hartford Stage Company, and Horizon Theatre. Some of the plays he has written are Air Guitar: (A Rock Opera), Alien Motel 29, The Last Orbit of Billy Mars, Will He Bop Will He Drop?, On a Street With No Name, Freak of Nature, and Forty Acres: The Reparations Play. He has written or cowritten a total of four play anthologies including Colored Contradictions (1996), Plays From Wooly Mammoth (1999), The Fire This Time (2004), and Plays From the Boom Box Galaxy: Anthology for the Hip Hop Generation (2008). Alexander is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pew Charitable trust.
ALEXANDER, ZAKIYAH. Alexander is an emerging playwright of the 21st century. She earned a B.A. from Binghamton University and an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. She has had readings at Actors Express, New Dramatists, Vineyard Theatre, and New Professional Theatre. In addition, her works have been developed and performed at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Greenwich Street Theatre, Pace Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and the Producer’s Club. Of the plays she has written, the most successful has been The Etymology of Bird, which won her the coveted Theodore Ward Prize in 2005. She was rewarded with a full production of the play at Columbia College under the direction of Charles “Chuck” Smith. A partial list of Alexander’s plays include Blurring Shine, Prayala, After the Show: A Play in Mask, Present Company, Sick, Elected, One Smart Trick, Sweet Maladies, and Momentary Delay. Alexander is a resident member of New Dramatists, EST Youngbloods, and Women’s Work Project Playwrights Lab. She is the recipient of the James Duvall Phelan Award, New Dramatists fellowship, New Professional Award, and Theatre Playwriting Award.
ALICE, MARY SMITH. Alice is a respected character actor in theater, a profession she has worked in for over 35 years. She transitioned adeptly between working onstage, in television, and in movies. Born in Indianola, MS, Alice studied at the teachers college at Chicago State University (B.A.). She began her professional life as a teacher in the Chicago school system, but her passion was for acting. She made her stage debut in the early 1960s in Ossie Davis’s hilarious satire Purlie Victorious. In the mid 1960s, Alice moved to New York City and began studying acting with Lloyd Richards. She made her professional acting debut in 1967. Alice has performed in such prestigious theaters as the Long Wharf Theatre, McCarter Theatre, Goodman Theatre, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre, American Place Theatre, and St. Mark’s Playhouse. She has appeared in a variety of plays, including A Rat’s Mass by Adrienne Kennedy, Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, Zooman and the Sign by Charles Fuller, Spell #7 by Ntozake Shange, and Fences by August Wilson.
Since 1974, Alice has appeared in over 50 different television and movie ventures, such as Kojak, Police Woman, All My Children, The Women of Brewster Place, Serpico, Good Times, L.A. Law, Bonfire of the Vanities, Enter, The Matrix, Law and Order, I’ll Fly Away, Soul Food, Cosby, Touched by an Angel, Down in the Delta, and The Matrix Online. Over the years, Alice has been fortunate to appear on Broadway four separate times, including in Fences in 1987 opposite James Earl Jones, for which she won a Tony Award for best actress and a Drama Desk Award. Alice also won an Emmy Award for her 1993 performance on television in I’ll Fly Away.
ALLISON, HUGHES (1908–74). Born in Greenville, SC, Allison, a playwright, moved with his family to Newark, NJ, in 1919. A graduate of Upsala College, he wrote in several mediums and is reputed to have written some 2,000 radio scripts during his lifetime. During the Depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) hired Allison as part of the Federal Theatre Project group in New Jersey, providing him with his first opportunity to gain exposure in the performing arts.
Recognition for Allison as a writer came with The Trial of Dr. Beck (1937), a play about eugenics. A mulatto doctor is accused of killing his dark-skinned wife, who sells hair straightners for black women. The trial becomes a referendum on skin color, not evidence, and the murderer’s identity comes as a shock to all. Owing to the success of the play, it was moved to Broadway, where the late William Bendix played the light-skinned doctor. Two other plays Allison penned are Panyared (1938), the story of a kidnapped African prince sold into slavery, and It’s Midnight over Newark (1941), a Living Newspaper dramatization of black physicians not being allowed to practice their profession. Production plans for both shows were halted after Congress closed down the WPA in 1939. Allison continued to write for the Newark Evening News and other publications. In 1940, he, along with Abram Hill, Langston Hughes, Theodore Ward, Powell Lindsay, and George Norford, organized the nonprofit Negro Playwrights Group.
ALONZO PLAYERS. Cecil Alonzo founded the group in Brooklyn in 1966 as the Players Eight. As the administrator, director, producer, actor, and principal playwright, Alonzo changed the original name to the Alonzo Players. Growing up in Williamsburg, VA, he made his stage debut in a church pageant at age five. He received a B.A. in theater arts and English education from Norfolk State College, VA (1965), and studied acting and speech with the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (1968). He became interested in film and television production and public relations with Third World Cinema Productions in 1972. Since 1981, he has taught communication skills and public speaking for Empire State College, the School Arts League, and the New York City Board of Education.
The players are best known for their rendition of Black Voices and Somewhere between Us Two. Voices, a poetic review in two acts, was produced in 1969. Alonzo interlaced his own material with excerpts from African American poets to retell black history from the time blacks were brought to America to the 1960s. Alonzo opened the show at the Courtyard Playhouse in New York City (March 1971), aired it on the Public Broadcasting System (1973), telecast it in the New York City area around 1973, and produced it at the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn (1973). Alonzo’s second work, Somewhere between Us Two (1972), was written in collaboration with Rob Taylor. It is a poetic love story in one act about two pen pals who are disappointed in each other when they finally meet.
AMBUSH, BENNY SATO. Ambush, a veteran of the American stage, is a native of Worcester, MA. He earned a B.A. in theater arts from Brown University and then headed West, where he earned an M.F.A. in theater from the University of California at San Diego. His first break came when the indomitable Zelda Fichlander hired him as an apprentice at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. He is the producing-director-in-residence at Emerson College in Boston, MA. He is perhaps best known as the producing director of the Oakland Ensemble Theatre, a theater that he rescued from obscurity, where he produced and directed plays from 1982 to 1990. Ambush was also an associate artistic director at the American Conservatory of Theatre and served as an interim artistic director at Rites and Reason Theatre.
Ambush is very much a humanist. He believes in cultural diversity, and his work reflects just that. He has directed a variety of plays, such as Ferenc Molnar’s The Play’s the Thing, Molière’s Tartuffe, A Bicycle Country by Nilo Cruz, and Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson. He has directed at some of the leading theaters and educational institutions across the country, including GeVa Theatre, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Playwrights Horizons, Actors Guild of Lexington, California State University, Lincoln Center, North Carolina School of the Arts, Arizona Theatre Company, the National Black Theatre Festival, and Florida Stage.
AMERICAN NEGRO THEATRE (ANT). Formed by Abram Hill, Frederick O’Neal, and others in Harlem, ANT was an outgrowth of the illustrious Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in Harlem. Active between 1940 and the mid-1950s, it was governed by four goals: to develop a permanent acting company trained in the arts and crafts of the theater that also reflected the special gifts, talents, and attributes of the black people; to produce plays that honestly and with integrity interpreted, illuminated, and criticized contemporary black life and the concerns of the black people (and particularly the Harlem community); to maintain an affiliation with and provide leadership for other black theater groups throughout the nation; and to utilize its resources to develop racial pride in the theater rather than racial apathy. The earliest elected officers included Hill (chairman, artistic director, and resident playwright), O’Neal (assistant chairman, company manager), and John O’Shaughnessy. The major technicians were Perry Watkins, Charles Sebree, and Roger Furman, set designers, and George Lewis, lighting technician.
For five years (1940–45), the theater was housed in the basement of the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library, known as the Harlem Library Little Theatre and specially renovated for the group. In 1945, ANT was forced to move to the Elks Lodge at 15 West 126th Street, then known as the American Negro Theatre Playhouse. It later became the home of the Elks Community Theatre. ANT moved again in 1950 to a loft on West 125th Street, its last residence before the theater closed.
ANT’s program was divided into three categories: stage production, a training program, and a radio program. Stage productions included On Striver’s Row by Hill (September 1940); Natural Man by Theodore Browne (May 1941); On Striver’s Row, the musical version by Hill (March 1941); Three Is a Family by Phoebe and Henry Ephron (November 1943), which transferred to Broadway (April 1944); Anna Lucasta by Philip Yordan, adapted by Hill (June 1945); Garden of Time by Owen Dodson (March 1945); Henri Christophe by Dan Hammersmith (June 1945); Home Is the Hunter by Samuel Kootz (January 1946); On Striver’s Row by Hill (revived February 1946); Angel Street by Patrick Hamilton (July 1946); Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey (July 1946); You Can’t Take It with You by Moss Hart and George Kaufman (August 1946); The Peacemaker by Kurt Unkelbach (November 1946); Tin Top Valley by Walter Carroll (March 1947); The Later Christopher Bean by Sidney Howard (July 1947); Rope by Eugene O’Neill (July 1947); The Show Off by George Kelly (August 1947); Rain by John Colton and Clemence Randolph (December 1947); The Washington Years by Nat Sherman (March 1948); Sojourner Truth by Katherine G. Chaplin (April 1949); Almost Faithful by Harry Wagstaff Gribble (June 1948); Riders to the Sea by John Millington Synge; and Freight by Kenneth White (February 1949). The play that brought ANT the most recognition, however, was Anna Lucasta. It opened at the Harlem Library Theatre, but Broadway producers were anxious to move it downtown because of its commercial appeal. The show ran on Broadway for 957 performances before it toured throughout the country and later abroad in London. The success of Anna on Broadway had a twofold effect on the company. It caused the demise of ANT because it departed from the company’s community roots, and this resulted in the loss of its founder Hill, who resigned due to the shift in goals and ideology.
The second category was an aggressive training program that launched the careers of some of the more recognizable African American artists in the field, such as Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Frederick O’Neal, Alice Childress, Maxwell Glanville, Hilda Simms, Earle Hyman, Clarice Taylor, Gordon Heath, Isabel Sanford, Roger Furman, and Rosetta LeNoire.
The last category was a weekly series of radio programs presented from 1945 to 1946 entitled “New World A-Coming.” The format was a weekly half-hour dramatic program that ranged from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol to Arthur Laurent’s The Face and Paul Lipschutz’s The Last Page. Operatic productions included Pagliacci, H.M.S. Pinafore, Rigoletto, and The Barber of Seville. The company also presented operatic productions on Sunday afternoons on Station WNEW.
AMERICAN THEATRE OF HARLEM (ATH). Located in New York City, the ATH was founded in 1989 by the late Hal DeWindt, who passed away in 1997. DeWindt had done it all. A former actor, director, producer, and model, he worked for Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival, was a former film executive in Hollywood, and held a position as an acting professor at Loyola Marymount University at the time of his death. DeWindt started the ATH with a mission to ground the student in the fundamentals of acting in preparation for a professional career. He set up ongoing acting workshops, readings, showcases, and occasional productions. Keith Johnston, an early student of DeWindt who has put his own imprint on the program, has guided the ATH. He instituted a one-act play festival and annual film festival and created the Shine Program, an educational theater component that provides workshops for youth, community, and corporate groups.
Aside from regularly scheduled play readings, the ATH also produced plays geared to the experience level of the actors being trained. Plays are considered from one to three acts and from plays in the African American canon to established plays in the European/American tradition. The ATH has mounted plays ranging from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire to George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum. The plays are performed at the South Oxford Space in the arts community of Fort Greene in Brooklyn. The ATH is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and is a member of the Alliance of Resident Theatres. See also HARLEM.
ANDERSON, CHRISTINA. Playwright and Kansas City native, Anderson graduated from Brown University. Her first play was Sacagawea: Breath of an American Spirit, which she developed using the research to performance method taught at the Rite and Reason Theatre at Brown University. It received a staged reading at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in 2000. Other plays she wrote include Construction of a Black Diva, a one-woman show; The Indian Wants the Bronx; Confessions Written on Brown Paper Bags; Revelations: The Outtakes (2003); and Going Home (2006). Anderson’s plays have been produced at the Provincetown Playhouse, Coterie Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, and other venues. She is the winner of a Kennedy Center Award (2003) and a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award (2004).
ANDERSON, DIANA (1937–83). This playwright was a native of Buffalo, NY. Upon earning her A.B. from the University of Southern California (1963), she moved to New York City, where she studied at Gene Frankel’s Theatre Workshop. She worked as a resident playwright/instructor at the Back Alley Theatre and a visiting artist/lecturer at the University of South Florida. Anderson is credited with writing over 15 plays. They include A Long Way from Here, Let Me Count the Ways, Charlie Still Can’t Win No Wars on the Ground, The Black People’s Party, Nightcap, If I Were a Chameleon, (Mis) Judgement, The Unicorn Died at Dawn, Closing Time, and Black Sparrow. Anderson’s plays have been produced at the Back Alley Theatre, the West End Repertory Theatre, and other venues.
ANDERSON, GARLAND (1886–1939). A pioneer playwright and moralistic philosopher of constructive thinking, Anderson was the first African American known to have a serious full-length drama produced on Broadway. Active in the theatre for over 10 years (1920s–30s), he achieved national prominence as the “San Francisco Bellhop Playwright.” Born in Wichita, KS, Anderson completed only four years of formal schooling before the family moved to California. Working as a bellhop in a San Francisco hotel, he often shared his optimistic philosophy of life with guests, who encouraged him to write about his ideas. Anderson believed an individual might achieve anything in life through faith. He got the idea of writing a play after seeing a production of Channing Pollock’s moralistic drama The Fool. He wrote his first play, Appearances (1924), in only three weeks with no training in playwriting style or technique. Failing to find a producer, he personally raised $15,000 toward the production. Despite numerous obstacles, his play opened on Broadway in 1925 with the help of Al Jolson and U.S. president Calvin Coolidge. The courtroom drama is about a bellboy (played by Lionel Monagas in the first production) on trial when he is falsely accused of raping a white woman. Owing to the central character’s strong moral convictions, he is eventually exonerated. Anderson spent the last period of his life lecturing on his beliefs about constructive thinking, on which he wrote a book entitled Uncommon Sense (1933). His achievements in the face of overwhelming racial, financial, and educational limitations were widely publicized.
ANDERSON, VALETTA. Playwright and administrator, Anderson has been involved in theater on multiple levels, including as dramaturge, director, facilitator, and professor on the collegiate level. A native of Chicago, Anderson received her education in Atlanta, GA, including instruction at the Academy Theatre School of Performing Arts. She has developed her works through workshops and staged readings at such venues as Seattle’s ACT Theatre, Women Playwrights Festival, Horizon Theatre, and Theatre Emory and the Southeast Playwright’s Project. Her plays have been produced by Kuntu Repertory Theatre, Jomandi Productions, National Black Theatre Festival, and Essential Theatre.
A partial list of Anderson’s plays include Leaving Limbo (2006), which is about a young hip-hopper who travels back to Africa in search of identity and is puzzled at what he finds. She’ll Find the Way Home (2003) is set in Mississippi in 1870. It is a story of a young woman’s rite of passage in discovering her history. Other plays Anderson wrote are Dorothy D. (1994), Dr. Love and the Fabulous Diamond Jubilee, No Virgins in Paradise (1992), Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn (2001), and Traveling Thomas (2002). Among the honors and awards Anderson received are the Georgia Council for the Arts, AT&T Award, Rockefeller Foundation Award, and Theatre Emory Commission. She is a member of Dramatists Guild, Literary Managers and Dramaturges of America, and the Southeast Playwrights Project.
ANDREWS, REGINA ANDERSON (1901–93). Andrews, a playwright and librarian, was from Chicago. She attended Wilberforce College and the University of Chicago before graduating from Columbia University (M.L.S.). She began work as assistant librarian at the 115th Street branch of the New York Public Library during the 1920s in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance. Bright and articulate, her influence turned a rather drab, nondescript library into a thriving oasis of culture that presented art exhibitions, a drama series, and a “Family Night at the Library” that attracted such luminaries as Marcus Garvey, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Langston Hughes. Her home in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem became one of the famed “salons” of the Harlem Renaissance where members of the Writers Guild and intellectuals would meet, like Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, Jesse Fausett, and W. E. B. DuBois.
Caught in the New Negro Movement of the time in 1927, Andrews helped DuBois found the Krigwa Players, which later evolved into the Negro Experimental Theatre. It was an extension of DuBois’s axiom of a theater “by us, for us, about us, and near us” and served as an inspiration in the development of black theater across the country. They performed all their plays at the library for a nominal fee. Anderson was also a fledgling playwright who wrote three plays under the pseudonym of Ursula Trelling. They are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder (1931), a story of a black person being lynched while the congregation prayed in church. Underground (1932) is about the Underground Railroad. The Man Who Passed is a one-act play of eight pages. In 1947, Andrews stepped forward again and helped playwright Loften Mitchell found the People’s Theatre, using the library as a base of operation. Several of Mitchell’s plays were produced there, including The Cellar (1947), The Bancroft Dynasty (1947), and The Shames of the Nation (1952).
Andrews believed professional librarians could play a significant role in providing access and opportunity to a wide variety of people through the medium she worked in, the library. Over a period of 44 years, she did just that, as well as worked diligently to preserve African American history and culture. Some of her papers are stored at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. Andrews is the recipient of the Asia Foundation Award.
ANITA BUSH PLAYERS (ABP)/THE ANITA BUSH ALLCOLORED DRAMATIC STOCK COMPANY. An actor, dancer, and producer, Anita Bush turned to drama after a back injury ended her dancing career in musical theater and vaudeville. She organized the ABP, a highly significant pioneer dramatic stock company. She presented her idea of launching a dramatic stock company to Eugene “Frenchy” Elmore, assistant manager of the newly renovated Lincoln Theatre in Harlem, a vaudeville house. Bush convinced Elmore that she could assemble a production within two weeks (even though she did not have a company). Elmore was sold on the idea and signed Bush to a contract. She secured Billie Burke, an active white director/playwright in the Harlem community, to direct the group in his play The Girl at the Fort, a light comedy with five characters. She assembled a promising group of actors that included Carlotta Freeman for the dramatic and emotional roles, Dooley Wilson for the comedic and light character roles, and Andrew Bishop for the juvenile lead roles.
The company opened with Fort at the Lincoln Theatre (November 1915). During the next six weeks, they presented a different play every two weeks with great success. Maria C. Downs, a wealthy entrepreneur of Cuban descent and proprietor of the Lincoln Theatre, ordered Bush to change the name of the group to the Lincoln Players. Bush refused and took her company to the Lafayette Theatre, where they opened with Across the Footlights (December 1915). Thereafter, ABP mounted a play each week—mainly adaptations of off-Broadway melodramas and the classics. They included The Gambler’s Sweetheart (adapted from The Girl of the Golden West) and an abridged version of Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon. In March 1916, the Lafayette Theatre management purchased the company from Bush and changed the name (with her consent) to the Lafayette Players, which eventually became one of the best-known black dramatic stock companies in America. Within a year, Bush organized four new groups of Lafayette Players in other cities for her circuit tour. In 1920, Bush left the Lafayette Theatre to pursue a film career in all-black films.
APOLLO THEATRE. This historic landmark Harlem theater located on 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue in New York City is the best-known black-oriented vaudeville variety house in the United States. A place where stars are born and legends are made, the Apollo has been the springboard that launched the careers of celebrated artists from the past to the present. Its luminaries span from Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Sara Vaughn, and Pearl Bailey to James Brown, Michael Jackson, and Luther Vandross. Frank Shiffman and Leo Brecher (previous owner of the Lafayette Theatre) purchased the establishment and named it the Apollo. From its opening day in 1934 to the present, the amateur night has been an audience favorite. During the early years, the comedy was low and bawdy, and the artists sometimes performed in blackface. Among the more popular comedians were “Tim” Moore, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham, Eddie Green, and Mantan Moreland.
The Apollo gained a reputation as the premier variety vaudeville house, but it also offered theatrical productions on occasion. In 1950, the management mounted two plays by white playwrights: One was Rain, with Nina Mae McKinney in the role of a prostitute. The other was Detective Story, with Sidney Poitier and Hilda Haynes in the lead roles. Both were staged with all-black casts, but neither attracted large audiences. Thereafter, management reverted to its variety vaudeville policy that appeared to meet audience expectation. For almost three decades, the Apollo survived several financial crises while accruing a million-dollar debt. Despite the deficit, Percy Sutton and the Inner-City Broadcasting Coral purchased the Apollo in 1981 to preserve it as a landmark Harlem theater. Management revived the amateur night in 1985 and celebrated the Apollo’s 50th-anniversary grand reopening with a special, nationally televised Motown salute climaxed by Michael Jackson’s “moon walk.” Two years later, Show Time at the Apollo began airing on national television. By 1991, the state of New York had acquired the theater as a nonprofit organization to ensure the theater’s ongoing success. Because of this change in status, the Apollo team was able to book more high-profile shows. They mounted Harlem Song, a new Broadway-style musical directed by award-winning playwright and director George C. Wolfe, and hosted benefits in addition to headlining shows with such artists as Stevie Wonder, Vanessa Williams, and Wynton Marsalis.
ARANHA, RAY. Playwright and actor, Aranha was born in Miami, FL. He attended Florida A&M University (B.S.) and studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He has taught drama, conducted acting and writing workshops, and acted at leading regional theaters throughout the country. Aranha also garnered a measure of success as a playwright. His most noted play, My Sister, My Sister (1973), is a full-length drama set in the 1950s. A young girl attempts to cope with her family, the world, and her feelings. The Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut (September 1973) produced it for 44 performances. Ashton Springer, an African American producer, sponsored it off-off-Broadway at the Little Theatre in Greenwich Village in New York City (April–January 1975) for 119 performances.
Other Aranha plays of merit include The Estate (1976), a full-length historical drama. It focuses on Thomas Jefferson’s’ relationship with his slave mistress Sally Hemmings and a confrontation between Jefferson and Benjamin Banneker, the black scientist who surveyed and designed Washington, DC. The Hartford Stage Company produced it under the direction of Duane Jones (January 1976) for 44 performances. The Afro-American Total Theatre produced it off Broadway (January 1978). Sons and Fathers of Sons (1983) is a full-length drama set within three decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The action contrasts the development of three young men: a student, a sharecropper’s son, and a college professor. Two are distraught over a lynching of a young black man in another county and is similar to one in their town, while the third works out his relationship with the past and future at a black college in Tallahassee, FL. Walter Dallas directed a cast of Graham Brown, Robert Gossett, Phylicia Allen-Rashad, Ethel Ayer, and Eugene Lee. Aranha is the recipient of a Rockefeller playwright-in-residence grant (1975) and a Drama Desk Award (1974) for My Sister, My Sister (1973) as best playwright (Seret Scott won for leading actress). Barbara Montgomery won both the Audience Development Committee Award and the Obie Award for the role of the mother.
ARENA PLAYERS (THE COMPANY). Conceived by Samuel H. Wilson and friends after they first met in Wilson’s living room, this little theater company was housed at the Arena Playhouse in Baltimore, MD. Comprised mostly of former members of the Krigwa Players from Baltimore, the playhouse has operated continuously since 1953. It is unknown when it was built. The first production was Hello Out There, a one-act play by white playwright William Saroyan, presented on the campus of Coppin State College. Mainly relatives and friends attended. An impressive number of players went on to work on Broadway and in movies and television.
ARENA PLAYHOUSE (THE THEATER). One of the oldest continually operating black theaters in the country, Arena Playhouse is located in Baltimore, MD. It was founded by a group of nine black actors and actresses led by Samuel H. Wilson. They called themselves the Arena Players, a community theater, and their first production was a double bill of William Saroyan’s Hello Out There and Thornton Wilder’s Happy Journey. Over the years, they have performed in a church, a gymnasium, and a recreational hall. In 1969, they acquired the old St. Mary’s Church building for $10,000. Along with that came the name Arena Playhouse.
The space was renovated several times until it housed a 314-seat arena theater, classrooms, rehearsal spaces, children’s theater, youth theater (13 to 18), and art gallery. By 1992, the Arena Players, the resident company, had adopted an all-black repertoire, and the audiences were primarily black. Their daily activities were augmented with poetry jams, stand-up comedians, and guest celebrity appearances, but by 1996, a sluggish economy, Samuel Wilson’s death, competition by white theaters that began producing black plays, and the advent of Urban Circuit plays being produced in Baltimore caused the playhouse to plummet into serious debt.
Managing director Rodney Orange Jr., however, cut back on expenses; organized a fund-raising drive led by some of their alumni, like Charles S. Dutton, Trazana Beverley, and Andre DeShields. He also broadened the base of support by attracting private-sector companies and foundations to become involved. By 1997, Orange had erased the debt, and the theater and the land it owned were valued at over $1 million. All this was made possible at a community theater, where no one is paid, save the managing director, Orange, and any musicians jobbed in for a particular play or musical.
The playhouse grew into one of Baltimore’s most celebrated institutions, with a six-play season, a thriving youth program, and a modern 314-seat theater in the heart of the Mount Vernon arts district.
ASSIMILATIONISM. During the latter part of the 1960s, along with greater opportunities for upward mobility, blacks sought access to every segment of society. They wanted to integrate financially and socially into the hegemonic culture. Assimilationism, however, came at a cost, as many blacks had to cast aside their notion of blackness and deny or lose their cultural identity and sense of self. This created a crisis in the black aesthetic movement as well as the black nationalist movement in their quest for a united black front. In Ed Bullins’s satire Electronic Nigger (1964), an “Uncle Tom” black teacher parrots the majority culture to gain access to the American dream at the expense of his own people. A post office employee in Great Goodness of Life (1964) by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) is willing to “figuratively” kill black revolutionaries to live happily in his world of bowling and whiteness. In both Take a Giant Step (1954) by Louis Peterson and A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, a black family decides to leave the inner city to move into an all-white suburb to escape crime and to provide a better education for their children—the former family is from Harlem, the latter from Chicago. Gabe, a playwright in the play he is writing in No Place to Be Somebody (1969), kills his central character, Johnny Williams, because he has the “Charlie Fever,” as well as his alter ego, Machine Gun, a revolutionary, so that his soul may be “White and Snow.”
AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE (AUDELCO) AWARD. In 1973, Vivian Robinson (1924–96), a social reporter and theater critic for the Amsterdam News, formed the Audelco as a voluntary nonprofit organization. As president elect, she wanted to applaud what others ignored—recognition of African American theater—and to increase attendance by stimulating an interest and appreciation of black theater. To this end, Audelco issued an affordable theater voucher to theater patrons for $5, financed by the Theatre Development Fund. It enabled audiences to attend productions by lesser-known theater companies in the black community as well as plays off and on Broadway for as little as $1 per show. To supports its activities, Audelco conducted membership drives and fund-raising affairs, solicited contributions, organized theater parties at reduced prices, and disseminated information about black theater through a bimonthly newsletter. The organization also generated income from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
In addition, Robinson initiated an annual recognition award to honor excellence in black theater and to illuminate black theater companies and artists. New York theater critics and members of the theater academy seldom recognized contributions of African American performing artists at the annual Tony, Obie, or Drama Desk Awards—each considered the paragon of artistic achievement. Audelco set up a nominating committee to select artists in various categories, including best actor, director, playwright, designers (lighting and set), special honorees, and pioneer and rising star awards. For a $25 fee, theater practitioners may become a member and participate actively in the voting process. The winners of the various categories are announced at Audelco’s annual recognition awards held in November at Aaron Davis Hall in Harlem.
In 2002, Audelco celebrated its 30th anniversary. Among the Audelco award winners were actors Phylicia Allen Rashad (Gem of the Ocean) and Rome Neal (Monk). After 35 years of operation, it is still acknowledged as the most significant award for black artists. The awards brought prestige to Audelco, provided visibility to black theaters relatively unknown, increased theater attendance, and raised the stature and marketability of black artists. Upon Robinson’s death in 1996, Audelco had awarded more than 400 theatrical practitioners for their contribution to the advancements in African American theater, a tribute in large part due to her great vision, leadership, and generosity of spirit.