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CAESAR, ADOLPH (1938–86). An actor and playwright, Caesar was one of the outstanding actors of the 20th century. During his career, he worked with some of the leading theaters in the country, including the New York Shakespeare Festival, Center Theatre Group, Lincoln Center Repertory Company, American Shakespeare Company, and Negro Ensemble Company (NEC). Caesar was born in Harlem, and upon graduating from high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, from which he retired after 20 years, having achieved the rank of chief petty officer. After studying theater at New York University, he embarked on an acting career, relying on the discipline of his military career; an innate intelligence; and a deep, gravelly voice that conveyed authority. He joined the prestigious NEC in 1970 and played leading roles in Sty of the Blind Pig, The Brownsville Raid, and A Soldier’s Play, among others. It was his role as the crusty sergeant in the latter play for which he became known, a role he repeated in the 1982 film version of the play. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance. In 1977, he wrote his one-man show, The Square Root of Soul, which was performed at the NEC. Caesar then moved on to films, making over 20, including Che, Fist of Fear, Touch of Death, Club Paradise, and The Color Purple, to name a few. His television appearances include The Wild, Wild, West; General Hospital; The Twilight Zone; Guiding Light; and Tales from the Dark-side. With his rich voice, Caesar also made a living doing radio and television voiceovers. Awards for Caesar include an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award as best actor for A Soldier’s Play.

CALDWELL, BEN. A playwright and essayist, Caldwell was born in Harlem, one of nine children. He dropped out of school after his father died in 1954, abandoning his interest in graphic art. A protégé of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Caldwell was inspired to write more than 20 revolutionary one-act plays for the Spirit House Movers in Newark, NJ. His plays were mounted off Broadway and throughout the country. Caldwell’s best-known play, Prayer Meeting; or, The First Militant Preacher (1967), is a humorous look at misguided religiosity. A thief hiding in a closet of a “sellout” black minister speaks to the clergyman as the voice of God and convinces him to become a militant preacher. The Spirit House Movers first produced the show in 1967. Woodie King Jr. Associates followed with a production at Tambellini’s Gate Theatre (July–November 1969) for 111 performances on a program of 4 one-act plays entitled A Black Quartet. Dennis Tate played the burglar and L. Errol Jaye the minister under the direction of Irving Vincent. The Job (1966), Caldwell’s most widely publicized play, criticized social programs that offer only dead-end job opportunities for blacks.

Over the course of two decades, Caldwell authored more than two dozen one-act plays that were produced off Broadway at the New Federal Theatre (NFT). They include The World of Ben Caldwell (1982), a series of skits and monologues (April 1982), for 12 performances. Director Richard Gant assembled a noteworthy cast of Kirk Kirksey, Reginald Vel Johnson, Morgan Freeman, and Garrett Morris. The Great New York City Crisis (1974) was first produced by the Black Vibrations at the annual Black Theatre Alliance Festival in New York City (1974) and later by NFT. Another play of note was The King of Soul; or, The Devil and Otis Redding (1969), a musical tragedy about the fate of the “soul” singer who becomes successful after making a pact with a “white devil.”

During the volatile civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s, the revolutionary tenor of the times influenced the subject matter in Caldwell’s writings as it did with other African American playwrights. The NFT produced an evening of Caldwell’s one-act revolutionary plays under the production title What Is Going On (November 1973). It included All White Caste: After the Separation (1971), about a white liberal who reinvents himself as a “Nigger of the future.” Top Secret; or, A Few Million after B.C. (1969) addresses the use of birth control (B.C.) by women as a device to limit reproduction. The Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles first produced Top Secret before it was included in the What Is Going On program. Family Portrait; or, My Son the Black Nationalist (1969) deals with tensions between a black upward-bound father and his militant son.

Other productions of Caldwell’s works include Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1974). The Seven Principles, a full-length historical pageant coauthored by Ben Caldwell and Yusef Iman, dramatizes the seven principles of the black value system called the Nguso Saba. The Weusi Kuumba Troupe produced Principles at the Black Theatre Alliance annual festival in New York City (summer 1974). Rape (1971) was produced by the Bedford-Stuyvesant Theatre, Brooklyn (October 1971). An Obscene Play (1971) was advertised as a play for adults only. Recognition (1968) is a ritualistic play whereby God gives advice to a confused African American male. Riot Sale; or, Dollar Psyche Fake Out opened in 1968. White policemen offer money to black freedom fighters to buy them off. Unprecedented: What Needs to Be Done (1968) depicts a standoff between a revolutionary spokesperson and an American president. The Fanatic: Testifyin’ (1968) concerns a white man who has a spiritual encounter and testifies before a black church congregation about his former transgressions. The Wall (1967) is set before a graffiti-ridden wall that connotes different messages for blacks than it does for whites. Mission Accomplished (1967) is a condemnation of the role of white missionaries stationed in an African country. Hypnotism (1966) underscores the philosophy of nonviolence as a device to control blacks.

CALDWELL, LAVERNE SCOTT. An actress, Caldwell is a Chicago native. After studying at Northwestern University for a year, she took time off to get married and to bear a son. She renewed her education at Loyola University of Chicago, where she earned a B.A. in theater arts and communication. A few years later, she moved to New York City, where she studied with Uta Hagen and Douglas Turner Ward. Her first career break came in Home by Samm-Art Williams, a play workshopped at the Negro Ensemble Company. Home was moved to the Cort Theatre for a Broadway run in 1980. It was a measurable success, but more important, the world was exposed to the talents of Caldwell. In 1984, she was injured in an automobile accident that kept her out of show business for two years. Upon her return, she landed a role in the Broadway production of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, for which she won the coveted Tony Award as Bertha Holly in 1988. Since then, Caldwell has not looked back, appearing in movies and television but also the stage, her first love, where she has performed in A Raisin in the Sun, Daughters of the Mock, Colored People’s Time, Macbeth, The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove, American Medea, Boesman and Lena, About Heaven and Earth, and From the Mississippi Delta. Caldwell has appeared in two other Broadway shows, Proposals and A Month of Sundays.

As in life, things blow hot and cold in the theatrical world, and for now at least, it is awfully hot in the Caldwell household. She is riding a career high at the moment in playing a recurring role in the hot television series Lost, and her role as Rose Henderson seems to expand in every appearance. The opportunity to play the role was honed with 25 years of experience in show business, which she excelled at onstage and in television and movies. Although Caldwell started out as a stage actor, she has made over 75 appearances in television and movies. Her appearances in movies and television include Waiting to Exhale, The Fugitive, Nip/Tuck, Judging Amy, Cold Case, Devil in a Blue Dress, The Practice, Without a Trace, Ghost Whisperer, Murder One, Chicago Hope, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Doogie Howser, All My Children, JAG, and Up against the Wall. Caldwell has been awarded an Obie Award and a Helen Hayes Award.

CALEB, JOHN RUFUS. A versatile writer, Caleb has divided his career between writing for film and stage and teaching. He was born in South Carolina but grew up in Pennsylvania, where he earned his A.B. at Dickinson College. He later attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he attained his master’s in creative writing in 1973. He has taught at various institutions since and is currently an associate professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia.

His most successful effort has been the 1980 play Benny’s Place, which depicts an aging black tool repairman in a steel mill who is asked to train a younger man to replace him. The result is both heartrending and tragic. Benny’s Place earned a Best Play Award from the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference in 1981 and was made into a movie with Cicely Tyson and Lou Gossett that was aired nationwide by ABC in 1982. Caleb also wrote City Lights: An Urban Sprawl (1984), a surrealistic examination of the progress African Americans have made. Houston: The Day of, and the Night After (1985) shows a day in the life of an African American college student when it is turned upside down after Martin Luther King is assassinated. Jean Toomer’s Cane (1985) is an adaptation of Toomer’s novel examining the theme of “passing” for white. Men of Bronze (1985) addresses the problems faced by the 369th Colored Infantry in World War I. Other plays Caleb wrote are Slave Coffle/With Observer, My Dungeon Shook, Fathers and Sons, The Rehearsal: A Fantasy, and The Ballad of Mistuh Jack. Awards and honors Caleb received include those from the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship.

CAMPBELL, DICK (CORNELIOUS C. CAMPBELL, 1903–94). A native of Beaumont, TX, Campbell was a multitalented actor and singer, theater organizer, director, producer, playwright, and social activist. He attended Paul Quinn College (A.B. in sociology) and Catholic University (M.A.). Campbell and his wife Muriel Rahn, a singing and acting team, were featured in such early musicals as Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds (1928), Hot Chocolates (1929), Brain Sweat (1934), and Cabin in the Sky (1941). In 1935, he organized the Negro People’s Theatre in Harlem with actress Rose McClendon. Three years later, he founded the Rose McClendon Players after her death in 1936.

Among Campbell’s other theatrical activities, he mounted over 65 all-black United Service Organization shows that he toured during World War II; directed On Striver’s Row (1945); served as company manager for Tambourines to Glory (1963); produced and acted in A Ballad for Bimshire (1963); appeared in the film Come Back Charleston Blue (1972); and wrote The Watchword Is Forward (1942), Jim Crow Must Go (1952), and Toll the Liberty Bell (1953). The New York City branch of the Nation Association for the Advancement of Colored People produced the latter two plays. Campbell served as chair of the board of directors of the Coordinating Council for Negro Performers, Inc. (1950s), and director of the Sickle Cell Anemia Foundation of Greater New York. He was also director of information for Operation Crossroads–Africa and chaired the Committee for the Desegregation of the Arts (1960s).

CARIBBEAN AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATRE, INC. (CART). In the mid-1970s, CART was formed in Rego Park, NY, to promote aspiring and talented actors and playwrights from the Caribbean on the New York stage. Trinidad-born Neville Richen was named artistic director and Olivier Stephenson, Jamaica-born, executive director. Located initially in the heart of West Indian culture on Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, the group was handsomely funded by the New York State Council for the Arts. Despite good reviews, CART-sponsored shows had difficulty building a strong, supportive audience. By the fourth season (1979), CART had succeeded with such plays as A Trinity of Four and Fog Drifts in the Spring, two one-act plays by Lennox Brown from Trinidad; Sweet Talk and Alterations by Michael Abbensetts from Guyana; and Journey through Babylon, a ritual fantasy based on the poems of Olivier Stephenson dealing with the experiences of a Caribbean man in New York. Arlene Quiyou of Trinidad conceived and directed the show.

For the 1979–80 season, CART offered a pair of plays entitled The Roomer and The Visitor by Amirh Bahati (Patricia Roberts), followed by Shango de Imam: A Yoruba Mystery Play, where the gods (male and female) determine the fate of humankind. Cuban playwright Pepe Carril wrote the script, and Susan Sherman adapted it to English. La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club Dance Drama Workshop hosted the Richen-directed production. No record exists of CART’s activities between 1980 and 1985 after Stephenson left the organization.

For the next few years, Jeffrey Anderson-Gunter from Jamaica, an actor and director, took the helm of CART before moving to Los Angeles. His successor, Rudolph Shaw from Guyana, presented a minifestival of one-act plays in May 1986 at the New Theatre on East Fourth Street, Manhattan. That same year, CART offered Derek Walcott’s Beef in My Chicken (October 1986). It is a slight and static comedy set in 1960 Trinidad showing a family’s resistance to “industrial development.”

In 1987, Stephenson came back briefly to direct Stafford (Ashani) Harrison’s Indian Play, a “cantankerous comedy.” It played for eight performances at the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company in Brooklyn. Stephenson then returned to Jamaica. Shaw became CART’s executive director in 1988, and he held a fund raiser at the Lincoln Center Neighborhood Theatre, at which excerpts from several Caribbean plays were enacted.

In February of the next year, CART presented Masquerade by Ian Valz at the United Nation Library as part of the celebration marking Guyana’s 19th anniversary as a cooperative republic. Fred Tyson directed it. In May, the company revived two short plays from the “Rest of America” festival, presenting them at a regional high school in Aberdeen, NJ. The 1990s brought a resurgence of CART strengthened by the addition of Jemma Redman, a Trinidadian, as new artistic director. The company became more innovative with its season of original presentations, musical comedies, monologues, and programs featuring mainstream plays. By the beginning of the new millennium, CART had expanded its offerings to non-Caribbean plays, such as My Children, My Africa by South African Athol Fugard (white). The play raises a moral question about the liberation of oppressed people.

CARLOS, LAURIE. An actor, playwright, and director, Carlos is an iconic figure in the world of black theater. Known primarily as a performance artist, Carlos has worked for years in stretching the boundaries of traditional Western theater where actors are there to perform a play. Carlos is recognized as a leader in the performance art field in which she has worked for the past 20 years. She develops character studies that incorporate issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality while defying the unities of time and space, past and present, beginning and ending, to create images of wholeness.

Carlos was raised on the Lower East Side of New York and worked a variety of jobs until she met Ntozake Shange and began working with her on Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. Carlos created the role of the “Lady in Blue” when it played at Joseph Papp’s NYSF/Public Theatre and reprised the role on Broadway. After a lengthy run on Broadway, Carlos worked with the theater/dance group Urban Bush Women, but she returned to the world of theater and in time became a pioneer and trendsetter working with Robbie McCauley, Keith Antar Mason, and Sharon Bridgeforth in the evolving world of black performance art. A list of the works Carlos developed includes Teenytown, Heat, Nonsectarian Dances with the Dead, Organdy Falsetto, Zion Science, White Chocolate for My Father, and The Cookin’ Show. Carlos was an artistic fellow at Penumbra Theatre and was also on the board of the Jerome Foundation. She was the recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Theatre Communications Group, National Endowment for the Arts, and the McKnight Foundation.

CARPETBAG THEATRE (CT). Based in Knoxville, TN, the CT developed out of an idea whose time had come and was fueled in part by the fervor and energy that came out of the civil rights movement. It was time to tell the story of racism, sexism, discrimination, and access to basic rights and services that had been denied for so long. It was founded in 1969, chartered in 1970, and began searching for and developing scripts that dealt with the death penalty, domestic violence, black feminism, environmental racism, red lining, and other issues endemic to the black community. For over 35 years, the CT has been producing work that is issue driven, historically based, and rooted in the culture of the African American diaspora.

Wilmer Lucas, a writer in residence at Knoxville College, was the original force behind the theater. Linda Parris-Bailey came in 1974 and over time guided the company to become more of a multigenerational entity. The company itself mostly generates CT plays during long improvisational sessions where everyone contributes with an emphasis on divergent viewpoints. Everything is taped, a writer is chosen—sometimes commissioned—and a hard-copy script is developed. Examples of some of the scripts developed and performed include Red Summer, a story of Knoxville’s 1919 race riot told in documentary form. Nitram Sacul is a praise work for women who mentor women. Dark Cowgirls and Prairie Queens is a story of seven of the most colorful black women in the history of the American West. Swopera is a consortium of actors and poets performing in a spoken word opera. Nothin’ Nice is a contemporary piece focusing on black family and environmental justice issues.

The CT also offers a series of workshops, residency projects, and other services focusing on empowerment, skill development, and information gathering. This includes role playing, collaborative writing, story circles and swaps, creative drama, and movement. The CT’s support has come from the community and such other sources as the Rockefeller Foundation, East Tennessee Foundation, Knoxville Cornerstone Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and W. K. Kellogg Foundation.

CARR, GREGORY S. An actor and playwright from St. Louis, MO, Carr is a graduate of Southern Illinois University and a member of the Chicago Alliance for Playwrights. He has written Revolution/Revelation (1991), A Colored Funeral (2005), Sandtown (2004), Ain’t Got No Time to Die (2004), Jacob’s Well (1991), No Place to Go (1995), Losing Mogadishu (2003), and Johnnie Taylor Is Gone (2005). Carr’s plays have been produced at Karamu Repertory Theatre, First Run Theatre, the St. Louis Black Repertory Theatre, and the National Black Theatre Festival.

CARROLL, VINNETTE (1922–2002). Carroll was a director, black theater organizer, actress, playwright, and adaptor and conceiver of original shows. She has been acknowledged as an outstanding black female director in America, receiving numerous awards for playwriting, acting, directing, and contributions to the theater.

Born in Harlem, Carroll lived from age three to eight in Jamaica. She was educated at Long Island University (B.A. in psychology, 1944), New York University (M.A. in psychology, 1946), and Columbia University (Ph.D., completed studies but not dissertation). She studied with Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic Workshop, Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio (1948–50), and Stella Adler (1954–65). She also taught for several years at the High School for the Performing Arts in New York, headed the Ghetto Arts Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, and was a member of the Directors Unit of the Actors Studio.

It was at the Urban Arts Corps during the 1960s in Greenwich Village where Carroll, as organizer and artistic director, conceived and staged most of her dramatic works. Carroll coauthored with Micki Grant two of her most success musicals, Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope (1970) and Your Arms Too Short to Box with God (1975). Carroll directed both productions. Grant, an actress, also provided the book, music, and lyrics. These two shows initiated a lasting professional partnership between Carroll and Grant. Cope, conceived by Carroll, utilizes song and dance based on blues, gospel, jazz, rock, calypso, and traditional ballad rhythms to celebrate coping mechanisms of African Americans. Your Arms is a full-length gospel musical conceived by Carroll, with music and lyrics by Alex Bradford and additional music by Grant. The Gospel of Matthew is told in the black vernacular. It was commissioned by the Spoleto Festival in Italy (summer 1975) and opened in New York City (1976) the next year for an extended run.

Other successful Carroll–Grant projects include Through the Looking Glass (1969); Croesus and the Witch (1971); Step Lively, Boy (1972); The Ups and Downs of Theophilus Maitland (1974); I’m Laughin’ but I Ain’t Tickled (1976); and Love Power (1974). Carroll also conceived, adapted, produced, or directed several other musicals. Among them are Trumpets of the Lord (1963), an adaptation from James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones (1927); But Never Jam Today (also produced as Alice, 1969); When Hell Freezes Over, I’ll Skate (1979); The Great Gettin’ Up Morning (1963), based on God’s Trombones; All the King’s Men (May 1974); and What You Gonna’ Name That Pretty Little Baby (1979).

Carroll also distinguished herself as an actress. She won the Obie Award (1961) for her work in Moon on a Rainbow Shawl and was highly praised for her role as Sojourner Truth in a segment of the CBS program We, the Women. She received numerous honors and awards, such as the Ford Foundation grant for directors (1960–61); Emmy Award for conceiving, adapting, and supervising Beyond the Blues, presented on CBS (1964); Outer Critics’ Circle Award for directing (1971–72); National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Image Award (Los Angeles, 1972); Harold Jackman Memorial Award (1973); three Tony nominations, two for directing (1973 and 1977) and one for the best book for a musical (1976); Audience Development Committee Board of Directors Award for contributions to the theater (1973); Frank Silvera Writers’ Workshop Foundation Award (1977); and the Dramatists Guild Committee for Women’s first annual award (1972) given to an outstanding female dramatist for her contributions to the theater (shared with playwright Alice Childress). In 1985, Carroll started a production company in Fort Lauderdale, FL. She died on 5 November 2002 after a prolonged illness.

CARSON, GERALD. A playwright, screenwriter, and poet, Carson is an alumnus of the Sonia Sanchez Writers’ Workshop held at the Countee Cullen Library in Harlem (1970–71). His most produced play is Infirmity Is Running (1976), a domestic drama in two acts about relationships within a black family. The Theatre of Renewal at the Stagelight Theatre in New York City produced it (September 1976). Carson’s other two plays are Friends (1976) and Jenny (1976). His screenplay The Unforgettable Experience of Billy Joe McAlester (1977) is an adaptation of The Ballad of Billy Joe McAlester, about a love affair between a white woman and a black man who is killed by a jealous white rival.

CARTER, STEVE HORACE. Carter is an award-winning playwright, director, scene designer, and production coordinator. Born in the Caribbean Islands, his family migrated to the United States. Upon graduation from high school, he joined the U.S. Air Force, where he served from 1949 to 1953. Working with Maxwell Glanville at the American Community Theatre, Carter gained practical theatrical experience as a costume and set designer, lighting and sound technician, and playwright.

In 1967, Carter joined the staff of the newly founded Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), where he functioned as head of the playwright’s workshop and in a variety of positions, including playwright in residence. The NEC selected his first play, One Last Look (1967), as part of the 1967–68 season. It is a satirical comedy about a dead man whose mistress, wife, and children speak about him at his funeral. During Carter’s 12 years with the NEC (1969–81), he coordinated the Playwright’s Workshop, and the NEC produced three of his other plays. In Eden (1976), tensions erupt between two family members when a West Indian follower of Marcus Garvey falls in love with a southern African American woman. Terraced Apartment (1968), a satirical comedy, is about a lower-income couple that feels displaced when they move into a middle-income neighborhood. Nevis Mountain Dew (1978) is set in a West Indian household in Queens. Family and friends gather to celebrate the 50th birthday of the patriarch, who is confined to an iron lung. After they become inebriated with “mountain dew” (whiskey), he begs the family to unplug the machine to relieve his agony.

Carter received an Audience Development Committee (Audelco) Award for Eden as best play of the year and the Outer Critics Circle Award (1976) as the season’s most promising playwright. Nevis garnered the Burns Mantle Theatre Yearbook’s Best Play Award (1978–79). Carter also directed Raisin’ Hell in the Son (1962) for the NEC and was costume designer for The Sty of the Blind Pig (1971).

Carter moved to Chicago in 1981 and joined the staff of the Victory Gardens Theatre (VGT) as playwright-in-residence. This was a fertile period for Carter, as he wrote some 11 plays over the next 16 years as well as established the Playwrights Ensemble for the VGT. Some of the plays were somewhat successful, such as Dame Lorraine, House of Shadows, and Pecong. Other plays he authored during that period include Tea on Inauguration Day; Speile 36; or, The Fourth Medal; Mirage; Shadows; and Rampart Street. Carter’s plays have been produced throughout the world, including in Hong Kong, London, Canada, and the Netherlands.

Carter earned a Guggenheim fellowship in 1982 and in 2001 was honored by the National Black Theatre Festival with a Living Legend Award for outstanding contributions to black theater. Other fellowships have come from the Rockefeller Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; and the McDowell, Ragdale, and O’Shaunessy Foundations. He also received an Audelco Award.

CASH, ROSALIND (1938–95). Cash was an actor of extraordinary elegance and versatility known primarily for her work as a charter member of the prestigious Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) in the late 1960s. A vocalist as well as an actor, Cash performed for over three years in such diverse works as Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, Kongi’s Harvest, and Dream on Monkey Mountain. When the resident company was disbanded several years later, Cash found herself scrambling for work along with thousands of other New York actors. She prevailed and enjoyed a brief but distinguished career onstage, TV, and the big screen.

Cash was born in Atlantic City but moved to New York City while still a teenager. After attending City College of New York, she began her career in the acting profession. She attracted critical attention when she appeared with James Earl Jones and Ellen Holly in King Lear at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1962. Her Broadway debut was in The Wayward Stork in 1966. Cash was known for her determination not to accept roles she felt were demeaning or stereotypical. She would work as a secretary, a keypunch operator, or a jazz vocalist until the right part surfaced. Among the many television shows and movies she made were Uptown Saturday Night; Klute; Cornbread, Earl, and Me; Cagney and Lacey; Kojak; The Mary Tyler Moore Show; Hill Street Blues; Thirty Something; The Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, and Barney Miller. Cash was also widely known for her recurring role as the matriarchal nurse Mary Mae Ward on the soap opera General Hospital. She died relatively early but was most proud of her work with the NEC and with never having wavered in being true to herself and her standards.

CASTILLO THEATRE (FORMERLY CASTILLO CULTURAL CENTER). Castillo is located at the All Stars Projects Performing Arts and Learning Center on West 42nd Street. It is an off-off-Broadway theater in New York City, bringing challenging, thought-provoking entertainment to the heart of the theater district. Since it was launched in 1983, Castillo has produced over 100 main stage productions by 20 authors from seven different nations. Fred Newman, the artistic director and playwright, is a major source for new plays and musicals produced at Castillo. The company is noted for its experimental productions and politically engaged plays. Among Castillo’s signature works are Sally and Tom (The American Way), a musical that explores the 30-year-relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Crown Heights, a play performed by six African American and six young Jewish actors, examines the violence between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991. Satchel: A Requiem for Racism is about the incomparable black pitcher Satchel Paige. Stealin’ Home deals with the relationship between the great African American baseball player Jackie Robinson and his southern white teammate Pee Wee Reese, and Sessions with Jesus presents the son of God seeking therapy.

CHAKULA CHA JUA THEATRE COMPANY (CCJTC). The CCJTC was formed in 1985 to provide an outlet for local actors, playwrights, and directors in the black arts community. Its goal was to present the works of African American playwrights as they reflect the experiences of black people in America and throughout the world. Chakula Cha Jua (also known as Cayette McNeill) is the company’s founder and artistic director. He has been an active participant in the black arts movement for more than 25 years. Under his direction, the company has presented a variety of new and exciting works for both adults and children. The company has performed for public libraries, community centers, churches, lounges, prisons, and more than 100 schools in New Orleans and throughout the southern region. The CCJTC has been a regular fixture in the Alliance for Community Theatres’ annual New Orleans Black Theatre Festival. Jua was recipient of the Alliance’s Best Director Award in 1990, and the company was bestowed the award for best production in 1993. In 1991, the CCJTC was one of the few theater groups from the South represented at the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, NC. The CCJTC is a member of the Alliance for Community Theatres, Inc.; the Southern Black Cultural Alliance; and the Black Theatre Network.

CHARLES, MARTIE. See EVANS-CHARLES, MARTIE (MARTHA EVANS CHARLES, MARTIE CHARLES).

CHICAGO DRAMATISTS (CD; THE PLAYWRIGHT’S THEATRE). Founded in 1979 in the old Organic Theatre, CD relocated to 1105 West Chicago Avenue in 1988. Artistic director Russ Tutterow maintains that CD’s mission has not changed since its founding: to discover, nurture, and promote the plays and playwrights that will contribute to the national theater repertory and a greater goal—to touch the lives of audience members. CD’s policy is to commission an artist-in-residence for a three-year renewable term. It prefers to work with the development of writers for a long period of time. CD may retain up to 24 resident playwrights and hires over 600 actors and directors each year, making it one of the largest employers of artists in Illinois. It is possibly the only program of its kind in the United States.

CHICAGO THEATRE COMPANY (CTC). Douglas Alan-Mann cofounded the CTC in 1984, along with two men from Experimental Black Actors Guild (X-BAG). Mann had begun his tenure in Chicago theater with the legendary X-BAG in the early 1970s. Located on Chicago’s South Side, the CTC is an Equity-affiliated organization. Mann, the artistic and production director, defined its mission as to enhance the cultural environment of the city’s South Side by presenting compelling and universal themes from an African American perspective and to provide a collaborative environment where local African American artists and craftsmen can develop and hone their talent and skills. Mann directed several major award-winning CTC productions. Among them are the critically and publicly acclaimed productions Ritual by Stanley-Bennett Clay, Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting (world premiere) by Ed Schmidt, Hannah Davis by Leslie Lee, Roseleaf Tea by Judi Ann Mason, and Pill Hill by Samuel E. Kelly. Mann also performed in 16 productions for the company, which garnered him a Joseph Jefferson nomination for acting.

The CTC has mounted 50 professional productions (most showcasing new work). Noteworthy shows include Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, Po Have You Seen Zandile, The Sovereign State of Boogedy Boogedy, The Little Tommy Parker Colored Celebrated Minstrel Show, and Mens. Another play, Train Is Comin’, a new musical by local playwright McKinley Johnson, made history by being the longest-running play in the CTC’s 17-year history. It was nominated for 11 Black Theatre Alliance (BTA) Awards and received four excellent reviews. Standing-room-only audiences and more award nominations followed with outstanding productions of Do Lord Remember Me by James de Jongh and the critically acclaimed Shaking the Mess Outta’ Misery by Shay Youngblood. The CTC has helped nurture and provide artistic and economic opportunities to more than 1,500 Chicago-based minority artists. Some of those artists have gone on to highly successful careers, such as director/actor Robert Townsend and actress Irma P. Hall. The CTC has received 20 Joseph Jefferson Award nominations and over 30 BTA nominations. The Joseph Jefferson Award was received in different categories for Pill Hill, Po Have You Seen Zandile, and Do Lord Remember Me. To date, the CTC has received 16 BTA awards, again in different categories.

CHILDRESS, ALICE (1916–94). Born Alice Herndon in Charleston, SC, Childress was a distinguished contemporary playwright, author, actress, director, and lecturer. She received her education in the Harlem community of New York City at P.S. 81, Julia Ward Howe Jr. High School, Wadleigh High School, and Radcliffe Institute (1966–68) as a scholar-writer. After her marriage to Alvin Childress, a veteran actor of stage, films, and television, dissolved, she married Nathan Woodard, a musician and film director. For 10 years, Childress acted, directed, and served on the board of directors at the renowned American Negro Theatre (ANT) in Harlem during the 1940s. In 1944, she made her Broadway debut as an actress in ANT’s Anna Lucasta. This role led to spots on television and several off-Broadway stage plays, such as Theodore Browne’s Natural Man and Abram Hill’s On Striver’s Row.

Childress has written more than a dozen stage plays; four, however, distinguish her as a playwright of prominence: Florence (1949), Trouble in Mind (1955), Wedding Band (1966), and Wine in the Wilderness (1969). Florence is a one-act drama that centers on a black mother sitting in a segregated waiting room at a southern bus station. She plans to visit her daughter Florence, who aspires to be an actress, in New York City. The mother decides to forgo her trip after talking with a southern white actress who is also on her way to New York. Instead, the mother sends her daughter money to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. ANT first produced Florence in Harlem (1949). Subsequent productions were by the Committee for the Negro in the Arts at Club Baron in Harlem (September 1950), the Negro Arts Players also in Harlem (August 1952), and the Southside Center of the Performing Arts in Chicago (1966).

Trouble in Mind is a two-act dramedy. Actors assemble in a rehearsal hall for a play about race relations in the antebellum South that is bound for Broadway. A veteran black stage actress comes into conflict with her white director’s depiction of a black mother’s relationship with a rebellious young son. The play received the Obie Award (1956) for best off-Broadway play. The Greenwich Mews Theatre first produced it off Broadway (November 1955) for 91 performances. Featured in this fine cast were Clarice Taylor and Hilda Haynes. Trouble was scheduled to open on Broadway (April 1957) as So Early Monday Morning, but ironically the same issue in Trouble of whites co-opting the work of African Americans erupted between Childress and the director of Trouble. Childress withdrew the show; however, the British Broadcasting Corporation did telecast it (twice in October and November 1964).

Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White is a three-act drama that addresses miscegenation in a South Carolina town during World War I. After a 10-year relationship, a white man and black woman plan to go North to get married because of social restrictions prohibiting such a union in the South. The University of Michigan first produced it in 1966, with Ruby Dee as the central character Julia, a role she reprised in several other productions. Abbey Lincoln and Jack Harkins rounded out the cast. Other productions of Band ran at the Virginian Theatre in Chicago (1971) and the New York Shakespeare Festival/NYSF/Public Theatre off Broadway (September 1972–February 1973) for 175 performances, directed by the author and Joseph Papp. It was televised as a two-hour ABC theater special (April 1975).

Wine in the Wilderness is a dramedy in one act. Set in Harlem amid the social upheaval of the 1960s, a middle-class artist learns a lesson in blackness from a woman he mistakenly believes is a street person. The National Entertainment Television (1969) first produced the show in Boston as part of an experimental series of plays; thereafter, productions were staged at the Kuumba Workshop in Chicago (1971); by the Howard University Players in Washington, DC (1972); and at the National Black Theatre in New York (1977).

Among the other plays Childress authored are The African Garden (1970) and Just a Little Simple (1950), a full-length musical revue. The latter is an adaptation of Langston Hughes’s Simple Speaks His Mind, about an ordinary Harlem dweller, Jesse B. Simple, who has extraordinary insight about life. The Committee for the Negro in the Arts opened the show at Club Baron in Harlem (September 1950) for a two-month run. Gold through the Trees (1952) is a historical dramatic revue in eight scenes chronicling the black protest movement against civil disobedience from South Africa to America and back to South Africa. Man Bearing a Pitcher (1955) is a full-length drama set in biblical times. A fictional family holds Christ’s last supper in his home to save Christ from being crucified.

The World on a Hill (1968) is a one-act drama set on a Caribbean island about a white woman and her son, who reassess their lives after an encounter with a young black man. The Freedom Drum (original title, Young Martin Luther King at Montgomery, Alabama, 1969) is a tribute to the chief architect of nonviolence during the civil rights movement. Childress’s husband, Nathan Woodard, wrote the musical score. The Performing Arts Repertory Theatre opened it at Symphony Hall, Newark, NJ (May 1969), and followed with a bus and truck tour for two years (1969, 1972). String (1969) is a one-act drama about a Rastafarian-type black character accused of stealing. A production by the Negro Ensemble Company was produced off Broadway at the St. Marks Playhouse (March–April 1969) for 32 performances. The cast included Arthur French, Esther Rolle, and Clarice Taylor. Mojo: A Black Love Story (1970) centers on a rekindled relationship between a divorced Harlem couple. The New Heritage Repertory Theatre Company premiered it in Harlem (spring 1970). The African Garden is a drama with music that centers on a black man’s search for his African birthright. It was written while Childress was in residence at the Radcliff Institute for Independent Study, a Harvard University appointment. When the Rattlesnake Sounds (1975) is a one-act play depicting Harriet Tubman working in a New Jersey hotel to help the cause of abolition. Let’s Hear It for the Queen (1976) is a one-act drama with a theme borrowed from a Mother Goose story. Sea Island Song (1977) is a full-length drama commissioned by the South Carolina Arts Commission about the Gullah-speaking people of the Georgia Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Stage South produced it during Alice Childress Week (1977) in Charleston, SC. Gullah (1984) is another full-length musical based on Childress’s research of the subject title. The music was by Nathan Woodard, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst produced it (spring 1984). Moms (1984) is a collaboration between Childress and Clarice Taylor. It is a three-character full-length show centering on the life and career of comedian extraordinaire Jackie “Moms” Mabley. The Hudson Guild Theatre produced it in New York (February–March 1987). Walter Dallas directed the show with Taylor as Moms, S. Epatha Merkerson as her confidante, and Grenaldo Frazier as her pianist and lover. Childress coauthored a drama, Hell’s Alley (1938), with her first husband, Alvin.

Childress was a member of the Dramatists Guild, Actors Equity Association, New Dramatists, and the Harlem Writers Guild. Her numerous awards and honors include an Obie Award for Trouble in Mind (1956), a grant from the John Golden Fund for Playwrights (1957), the Sojourner Truth Award presented by the National Negro Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, the Black Filmmakers first Paul Robeson Medal of Distinction (1977), and the Audience Development Committee Pioneer Award (1985).

CHILDS, KIRSTEN. Actor, composer, and playwright, Childs is a rarity in the world of theater. All her life, she has seen herself as a chameleon and “rather bubbly.” A native of Los Angeles, she developed her craft at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Childs is a black woman who can act, dance, sing, compose, and write. She has written songs for Dianne Reeves; costarred with Chita Rivera in a touring production of the musical Chicago; and performed on Broadway in Dancin’, Jerry’s Girls, and Sweet Charity. She is also the author of three musicals, one of which was the recipient of multiple industry awards.

Childs’s most successful play is the musical The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin produced by Playwrights Horizons in an off-Broadway production in 2000. The production earned her an Obie Award and three Drama Desk nominations. In addition, she has written the musicals Wasted and Northstar. She was a cowriter on the musical Sundiata: Lion King of Mali. Her musical Miracle Brothers premiered at the Vineyard Theatre in 2005 to mixed reviews. Childs has been commissioned by the McCarter Theatre to adapt the 19th-century poem “The Highwayman” for the stage and is working with novelist Walter Mosely on a musical project. She has been honored with such awards as the Edward Kleban Award, Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Musical Theatre Award, Jonathan Larson Grant, Rockefeller Foundation grant, Multi-Arts Production Fund grant, and Audience Development Committee Award.

CHISHOLM, ANTHONY. A journeyman actor, Chisholm has received public acclaim for portraying the “wise fool” in the plays of August Wilson. He has appeared in over 45 productions of Wilson’s works since his inaugural stint in Two Trains Running in 1992, the 5th play in the 10-play Wilson cycle. Chisholm, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Eugene Lee remain as the key interpreters of August Wilson plays. A native of Cleveland, OH, Chisholm was raised by a single mother who wrote poetry and novels. He joined the U.S. Army and fought in the Vietnam War. While in the service, he was offered a scholarship to attend Yale University after winning a dramatic reading contest, but the scars of the Vietnam conflict had left their mark—he never used the scholarship. Chisholm joined Karamu Repertory Theatre and received his first formal theatrical training there. Upon moving to New York, he found work in the theater, including the plays Ice Bridge and Tracers, produced at Joseph Papp’s NYSF/Public Theatre. Around 1990, Chisholm crossed paths with director Lloyd Richards, who accepted him as a student at the Yale School of Drama. Though the Wilson canon of plays flourished at that time, Richards felt Chisholm was “not ready” and held off casting him for two years. However, Wilson felt otherwise and importuned Richards to give Chisholm a chance. Chisholm was cast. Chisholm has parlayed that opportunity into acknowledgment as one of America’s best character actors. He has appeared in movies and television, but his first love is the stage. Honors for Chisholm include an Obie Award, a Drama Desk Award, and a Laurence Olivier Award.

CINCINNATI BLACK THEATRE COMPANY (CBTC). Founded by Don Sherman in 2001, the CBTC mission is to keep alive the spirit of black theater by offering top-notch theatrical productions through powerful performances, exhibits, educational programs, and a nationally renowned talent competition for the Showtime at the Apollo tour. The CBTC has become a model institution for the preservation of African American art, history, and culture. The company offers a full season of dance, drama, poetry, visual art, and children’s programs, reaching an estimated 20,000 people annually. The workshops (all styles, including rap) are free, such as theater arts classes, history of dance workshops, “Wonderful World of Writing” workshop, “Namibian Cultural Awareness,” Children’s Theatre Company, and special performances and events. For the 2005–6 season, the CBTC selected an appealing cross-section of plays, such as Amen Corner; Black Nativity; Once on This Island; Before It Hits Home; and Purlie Victorious, a tribute to its writer, Ossie Davis.

CIVIC THEATRE GUILD. This short-lived theater located at the Spring Street YMCA in Columbus, OH, was active between 1935 and 1937 under the auspices of African American playwright Ronald T. Hamilton. The guild’s production season included Hamilton’s social problem play Crack of the Whip (c. 1930), about a group of black vacuum-cleaner salesmen who were all fired from a white firm. The black head salesman forms his own company and lures customers away from his previous employer. The Columbus Drama Festival produced it (April 1935). Sharecroppers by Randolph Edmonds is a social protest play set in the Deep South. Black and white sharecroppers unite to fight against inequity. The Ogden Theatre produced it (May 1938).

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT. From the time blacks were first brought to America, they have always fought for civil rights. The most notable civil rights movement in the United States was a journey that lasted roughly 14 years (1954–68). Thousands of people were killed as the nation teetered on the brink of anarchy. That effort was instrumental in getting changes to laws governing interstate commerce, voting, employment, and housing and had the net effect of leveling the playing field for people of color. The civil rights movement also had a seismic effect on the artistic endeavors of black America—particularly black theater—which transformed from a previously marginalized entity into a robust, artistic arm of the civil rights movement, but more important, it became a viable entity within the American theatrical movement.

Instead of being an unwanted stepchild begging for acceptance from an American theatrical community from which it was excluded on racial grounds, African American theater became an entity unto itself. It gained momentum by coloring itself in terms of a black cultural aesthetic, with its own plays that reflected the culture of past and present black Americans and Africans. Black theater incorporated current and ongoing issues of the movement into plays and musicals that generated a sense of excitement and approbation from a newly developing audience. The civil rights movement offered a rallying cry for black America but especially theater artists, who used their skills to create, illuminate, and comment on the movement as it lurched from one crisis to another.

Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun is a prime example of how a playwright brought to the forefront one of the seminal concerns of the civil rights movement—the issue of equal opportunities in housing for blacks in search for the American dream. A mother buys a home for her family in an all-white suburb of Chicago, while her son objects. His aspirations are to buy a liquor store and become an entrepreneur. The subject matter for this theme is drawn from the author’s own life experience. Hansberry’s father was a litigant in a lawsuit against restrictive housing covenants in Chicago. The suit was decided in the affirmative for the elder Hansberry by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the restrictive housing covenants in Chicago were illegal.

In 1961, actor and playwright Ossie Davis, an icon of his time, used humor in addressing a civil rights issue in his biting satire Purlie Victorious. A stereotypical southern plantation owner who refuses to adjust to the changes brought about by the civil rights movement is frozen in time, while his more progressive son acquiesces and works with blacks toward a more equitable solution. The play enjoyed a successful Broadway run at both the Cort and Longacre Theatres. Ten years later, it was transformed into a successful musical.

Long before the civil rights movement began to take hold in the early 1950s, the legendary poet, author, and playwright Langston Hughes addressed civil rights issues of injustice in much of his writing. His 1938 song-play Don’t You Want to Be Free? unfortunately met with indifference. In 1963, however, with the civil rights movement in full swing, Hughes used the resources of his own Harlem Suitcase Theatre, backed by endorsements from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Congress of Racial Equality, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to write and produce Jericho: Jim Crow, a song-play. It was a pastiche of poetry, speeches, gospel songs, and Negro spirituals telling the story of discrimination and segregation from a historical standpoint. The play opened on 12 January 1964 and was an instant success, running until the end of April. It subsequently became a staple of the movement, and excerpts from the play were performed frequently at civil rights fund raisers.

Other plays and musicals that focused on aspects of the civil rights movement include Fly Blackbird (1960), written by James V. Hatch (white) and Clarence Bernard Jackson. It was a musical inspired by the sit-ins in Greensboro, NC. Blackbird opened in Los Angeles before playing off Broadway, where it won an Obie Award for best musical of 1962. Ballad of the Winter Soldiers (1964) by John Oliver Killens and Loften Mitchell celebrates black freedom fighters throughout history. Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope (1972) is a musical by Micki Grant and Vinnette Carroll about a group of African Americans struggling to exercise their civil rights. It opened in 1972 and played over 1,000 performances before closing in 1974. Cope won Tony Awards for best musical, best book, and best score. Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) was dedicated by its author, James Baldwin, to the “dead children of Birmingham” after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four girls in 1963. It is based loosely on the killing of Emmit Till, the young teenager who was slaughtered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Days of Thunder, Nights of Violence (1971) by Douglas Q. Barnett explores many aspects of the civil rights movement. The highlight of the play centers on the 1969 trial of the “Chicago Seven,” where Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, was ordered bound and gagged in the courtroom by Judge Julius Hoffman. The actual transcript was used as the basis for the scene that stopped the show every night. In 1963, Ann Flagg, director of the children’s theater component at the famed Karamu Repertory Theatre in Cleveland, OH, wrote Great Gittin’ Up Mornin’ (taken from the old Negro spiritual) about a family preparing for their daughter’s first day at a previously all-white school.

The initial thrust of the civil rights movement had always attempted to redress issues that treated black people as second-class citizens. As the movement evolved, however, it incorporated themes of black pride, black power, and the black aesthetic. In addition, the paperback revolution and the development of television led to a widespread dissemination of the history of blacks in America and Africa. The black theater that evolved from the civil rights movement was unique. It wanted and achieved a theater that was independent, expressed a black cultural aesthetic, and explored the deep African-centered history of black people in America. It was not interested in replicating Western theater traditions of such masters as Arthur Miller or Eugene O’Neill. In large part, the civil rights movement defined what black theater is today—a nationwide network of independent theaters that develop and present plays from the bottomless reservoir of the black experience.

CLARK, CHINA PENDARVIS. Playwright China Clark has functioned as screenwriter, director, filmmaker, professor, and installation artist during her career and is recognized as being one of the leading writers of this era. Clark was born in Pennsylvania. She holds two M.A. degrees, one in liberal arts and the other in English literature, and a Ph.D. in philosophy. She was a staff writer on The Cosby Show and taught playwriting at the New Federal Theatre and the Frank Silvera Writer’s Workshop. She has taught playwriting, screenwriting, and philosophy at various institutions, both here and abroad, and currently teaches at the College of New Rochelle in New York.

Clark has written well over 30 plays, and they have been produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, African American Total Arts Theatre, New Federal Theatre, and Urban Arts Theatre and overseas in England, Germany, and Italy. She is a member of the Writer’s Guild of America. A partial listing of her plays includes Black and Blue Visions (2000), about three men who meet in a bar during a snowstorm in New York City. One is Irish, one is English, and the other is African American. They form an emotional bond as they wait for the storm to end so they can contact the special women in their lives, but it turns out they are all waiting for the same woman. Sugar Brown—Divine and May (1997) is about Sugar and May, two diametrically opposite women who meet in a metaphorical prison find they have several things in common. Bessie Smith Speaks (1994) is a drama with music. Neffie (1975) is a mythical fantasy of the undying love of a woman for a man. In Sorrow’s Room (1975) is a story of a young black woman in search of her identity as she is pulled between a domineering mother and men who see her only as a sexual object. Perfection in Black (1971) shows a conflict between a black woman and a black man. Other plays Clark wrote are The Madwoman’s Room, Why God Hates Reverend Chandler, The Chinese Screen, and The Sabian. Clark has received such honors and awards as the Woolrich Foundation Award, Hannah del Vecchio Award, Goldberg Award, New York Council on the Arts fellowship, Puffin Award, and Martin Award.

CLASSICAL THEATRE OF HARLEM (CTH). A not-for-profit professional theater company in residence at the Harlem School of the Arts (HSA), the CTH is the only year-round theater company in the Harlem community that is performing a classic repertory. In 1998, Alfred Preisser and Christopher McElroen (both white) combined their life savings of less than $9,000 to set the groundwork for the HSA. Preisser became the director of the theater program and Christopher McElroen the marketing director. The impetus for the company grew out of the success of a Shakespeare workshop Preisser and McElroen taught at the HSA in fall 1998. They were successful in persuading the HSA to use the small, underutilized HSA theater building that was next door to the school. Back then, the school used the theater solely for eight student performances a year. With more than a dozen years of combined performing and producing experience behind them, they were thrilled about starting a professional theater company that would incubate in residence in the HSA, as had the Dance Theatre of Harlem and the National Black Theatre many years before. To date, the HSA has created over 700 temporary jobs, and nearly 40,000 people have come to see their productions.

Since being incorporated in February 1999, the CTH has been steadily breaking new theatrical ground in New York and has attracted large and unusually diverse audiences. Its plays have varied greatly in style and subject matter, from the ancient Lysistrata (October 1999) to the contemporary classic Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (June 2006) to the avant-garde Funnyhouse of a Negro (February 2006). Not since the heyday of the 1970s has such interest, enthusiasm, and acclaim been accorded the theatrical productions in Harlem. Each season has brought larger audiences and wider acclaim. In just six years, the CTH has established a highly productive and accomplished theater company, winning five Obie Awards, generating more than 100 reviews, and receiving 543 Audience Development Committee nominations. In May 2004, the CTH received a special Drama Desk Award for artistic excellence for “creative and bracing staging of the world’s great playwrights.”

CLAY, BURIAL (1943–78). A playwright, Clay was born in Abilene, TX. He lived a short but productive life, leaving behind a vast body of work. He earned a B.A. and an M.A. from San Francisco State University. The author of over 35 plays, his writings appeared in several major publications, and he was also the publisher/editor for the San Francisco Black Writers Literary Magazine. The Negro Ensemble Company produced two of his plays, Buy a Little Tenderness in 1972 and Liberty Call in 1974. Some of Clay’s other plays are A Dance for Demons, The Gentle Rose Decays, No Left Turn, Jesebelle, The Creation of the World, Greasy Spoons, X’s, and Rawhead and Bloody Bones. Clay was a member of the California Writer’s Workshop. In 1975, he received a Playwright’s Award from the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center and a playwright fellowship from the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco.

CLAY, CARL. Clay, a director, playwright, screenwriter, and actor, was born in Harlem. From the age of six, he was raised in southeast Queens. He attended Newtown High School, Pace University (B.A. in theater and education), and Brooklyn College Graduate School (theater directing). He also studied under the noted Broadway director Alan Schneider. Clay received his screenwriting and directing training at the International TV/Film Institute with Emmy Award–winning director John Kotty (director of the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman) and Academy Award–winning screenwriter William Kelly (Witness, 1988). In addition, Clay studied at the Third World Training Institute and Columbia University’s Institute for Not-for-Profit Management.

Clay has worked at CBS News as a TV desk assistant to newscaster Dan Rather, an intern for Melvin Van Peebles’s Whiz Group, and a participant in a World Cinema Training Program initiated by Ossie Davis. Clay also worked as an actor and producer assistant in such featured films as Greased Lighting, starring Richard Pryor and Pam Grier. His work on TV shows include The Driver, featuring Ron O’Neal; Love Boat; Charlie’s Angels; The Marilyn Monroe Story, and The Joe Louis Story.

As CEO at the Black Spectrum Theatre Company, Inc. (BSTC), Clay wrote over 15 plays and directed 20 films about African American youths, trained over 1,000 actors, and produced over 150 plays and 20 jazz concerts with such artists as Roy Ayers, Roberta Flack, Stanley Turrentine, Freddie Hubbard, and Angela Bofil. The BSTC provided a training ground to help launch the careers of such actors as Lisa Carson (Ally McBeal) in her first feature film, Desiree Coleman (Mamma I Want to Sing), David Baptist (WB Network), and Byron Mims (Fences on Broadway).

Among Clay’s numerous awards and honors are an Audience Development Committee Award as producer of the year for Deadwood Dick Legend of the West; or, Them Niggers Went That Away, a satire by Warren B. Burdine. He won an American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers Music Lyricist Award for his songs in the film Coffey and first place at the annual Wornen’s Media Award Competition as lyrist for the ABC TV special Turkey Treasure. Clay also received a National Library Association Award for his breakout film Babies Making Babies, as well as an International Film and TV Festival bronze medal for The Follower and Clear Vision, a film about male responsibility in teen pregnancy. In 2000 and 2001, his films Urban Encounters: What to Do If You Get Stopped by the Police and Justice Done were recipients of the National Black Programming PBS Awards for outstanding youth programs. He was inducted into the Los Angeles film union International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Screen Actors Guild. Clay also received acknowledgment for outstanding professional achievement at Spectrum by local and national organizations.

CLEAGE, PEARL MICHELLE. Born in Springfield, MA, Cleage grew up in Detroit. She gained a reputation as a multitalented playwright, essayist, poet, and writer of fiction and essays. Cleage is the daughter of an elementary school teacher, Doris, and prominent author, clergyman, and founder of the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church Reverend Albert B. Cleage Jr. After an unsuccessful bid for the governorship in 1962 on the Freedom Ticket, he became a black nationalist, changing his name to Jaramogi Abebe Agyemen.

Cleage enrolled at Howard University in 1966, where she studied playwriting under Owen Dodson, Ted Shine, and Paul Carter Harrison. The institution produced two of her one-act plays. Within three years, she left Howard and married Michael Lomax, a politician. Relocating with her husband to Atlanta, she earned an A.B. in drama and playwriting from Spelman College in 1971 and pursued an M.A. in Afro-American studies at Atlanta University. Meanwhile, after 10 years of marriage, Cleage and Lomax divorced in 1979.

Cleage gained notice as a playwright in the 1980s with Puppetplay (1981), Hospice (1983), Good News (1984), and Essentials (1984). In 1992, however, it was Flyin’West that brought Cleage national recognition with her presentation of African Americans migrating at the turn of the century to an all-black town out West. It premiered at the Alliance Theatre Company in Atlanta under the direction of Kenny Leon. During the season of 1992–93, Flyin’ was the most produced African American play at regional theaters throughout the country. Other plays that added to her renown as a playwright are Blues for an Alabama Sky and Bourbon at the Border. Cleage was playwright-in-residence at Spelman College, the editor of Catalyst, and artistic director of Just Us Theatre Company. Most recently, she wrote a best-selling novel entitled What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, an Oprah Book Club selection. She also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs, and the Georgia Council for the Arts. In addition to her playwriting, Cleage has contributed essays to such national magazines as Essence, New York Times Book Review, Ms., and Black World. In 1990 and 1991, she published collections of her essays entitled, respectively, Mad at Miles and Deals with the Devil.

Cleage was the winner of the Norman Felton Playwriting Award (1976), playwright-in-residence at the University of Michigan in its Guest Artist Program (1982), recipient of first prize for poetry from Prornethean Literary Magazine (1968), winner of the Atlanta mayor’s fellowship in the arts (mid-1970s), and recipient of National Endowment for the Arts residency grants through Just Us Theatre Company (1980s) and Georgia Council for the Arts residence grants from the city of Atlanta (1980 and 1983).

CLORINDY, THE ORIGIN OF THE CAKEWALK (1898). Called a “Negro opera,” Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk was the first musical by Will Marion Cook (1869–1944) and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Cook wrote the original sketch, composed the music, and coauthored the lyrics with Dunbar. It is a love story set on a plantation in Louisiana during the 1840s that traces the origin of the cakewalk dance. It introduced ragtime music and the cakewalk to New York audiences. The Casino Roof Garden first produced Clorindy on Broadway during the summer of 1898. The cakewalk became a dance craze both in the United States and abroad. Clorindy is the first known black musical to depart from the negative minstrel tradition of the early 1900s and to depict a more positive portrayal of African American performers.

CLUB BARON. Located at 132nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, Club Baron housed theater productions during the early 1950s to showcase several important productions. The Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA) produced three plays of record: Alice Childress’s Just a Little Simple (September 1950) and Gold through the Trees (April 1952) and William Branch’s first play, A Medal for Willie (October 1951). Simple was an adaptation of Langston Hughes’s “Simple” stories; Gold through the Trees commented on the black struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Medal dramatically underscored the ironies of a black American soldier fighting and dying to secure freedoms for others abroad that he was unable himself to enjoy at home. The stellar cast for Medal included Clarice Taylor (as the mother), Julian Mayfield, Kenneth Mannigault, Helen Martin, and Eli Wallach. The club also hosted a Burlap Summer Theatre production of an evening of one-act plays in 1953, codirected by Maxwell Glanville and Ruth Jett.

CLUNIE, GLORIA BOND. A playwright and educator, Clunie is from Henderson, NC. She holds a B.S. in speech and an M.F.A. in theater from Northwestern University. She worked in the Evanston, IL, school district as a drama specialist. She was the founder/director of the Fleetwood Jourdain Theatre for eight years and helped to found the Playwrights Ensemble at the Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago. Clunie was also an accomplished director, having directed shows at Chicago Theatre Company, Fleetwood Jourdain, and Northwestern University. In addition, she assumed the mantle of playwright. Her plays have been produced in Chicago and many other black theaters across the country.

Two of Clunie’s most recognized dramatic works are North Star (1995), a play about a character’s decision in 1960 to join the historic lunch counter sit-in movement in Greensboro, NC, and a black child’s bond with her father, and Shoes, a story of events surrounding the 1965 civil rights–era bombing of an Alabama church that killed four black children. Other plays by Clunie include Sweet Water Taste; Secrets; Sing, Malindy, Sing!; Dreams; Some Enchanted Evening; Basket of Wishes, Bucket of Dreams, A Children’s Play; and Mirandy and Brother Wind, adapted from a book of the same name by Patricia McKissac. Clunie is the recipient of several awards and honors, including an Illinois Arts Council fellowship, Ann Flagg Multicultural Award, National Endowment for the Arts education fellowship, Scott McPherson Award, and Ted Ward Playwriting Award.

COLE, BOB (ROBERT ALLEN COLE JR., 1868–1911). An Athens, GA, native who grew up in Atlanta, Cole was a multitalented director, actor, entertainer, playwright, songwriter, and producer of vaudevilles. Active at the turn of the 20th century, Cole broke new ground in the development of African American musical theater. His professional career began as a cabaret singer in Chicago, where he joined the cast of Sam T. Jack’s The Creole Show in 1890, for which he was stage manager. There he met his future wife, dancer Stella Wiley, with whom he performed in several early shows until their divorce two years later. By the mid-1890s, Cole was in New York City, where he established the All-Star Stock Company. He assembled a residence company of a group of aspiring young black performers at Worth’s Museum at 6th Avenue and 13th Street, the first professional stock company and training school for black performers (c. 1896).

A year later, Cole starred in and cowrote with Billy Johnson A Trip to Coontown (1897), a musical farce with additional music by Willis Accooe. It is the first known full-length musical comedy written, performed, directed, and produced by African Americans and one of the first to depart from the negative portrayal of blacks in minstrelsy. The plot centers on a naïve old black man who is saved at the last minute from being cheated out of his pension by a con man. In the cast was Cole, who introduced the character with whom he was to become identified—Willie Wayside—a tramp whom he played in whiteface. This landmark production showed producers and theater owners that there was an audience for all-black shows. Coontown opened on Broadway at the Third Avenue Theatre (4 April 1898) for eight performances. The show toured for two seasons before closing in 1891. During this time, Cole and Johnson also produced the Black Patti Troubadours, starring Sissieretta Jones, dubbed the “Black Patti,” who was Cole’s protégée. Cole wrote many of the skits, sketches, and full-length musical comedies for the troubadours. Coontown was one of the few African American shows to play successfully in the South.

At the turn of the century, Cole teamed with the Johnson brothers, James and J. Rosamond, from Jacksonville, FL, both writers and composers of musical comedies. The trio’s most successful show was The Shoo-Fly Regiment (1906), for which they assembled a cast of 50. That same year, Cole and James Weldon Johnson opened another musical comedy, The Red Moon (1906), about Minnehaha, the daughter of an Indian chief who leaves her father to return to a government school for Indians and blacks to claim her child. The show starred Abbie Mitchell as Minnehaha and featured Aida Walker (Mrs. George Walker) who sang and performed “Wildfire.” Cole did the book and lyrics, and Johnson provided the music. The show played in Philadelphia before moving into New York’s Majestic Theatre for a short run. On 2 August 1911, Cole had a mental breakdown and died.

COLEMAN, RALF “MESHACK” (1898–1976). Coleman was born in Newark, NJ. He was an actor, stage manager, theatrical director, playwright, and a pioneer of the little theater movement in New England during the 1920s and 1930s. He studied theater at Harvard University under H. W. L. Dana; at Provincetown Wharf Theatre, MA; and at Boston Experimental Theatre. Coleman acted with and directed the Allied Arts Players, Boston (1927); the Boston Players (1930–33); and the Beacon Hill Little Theatre (1930s). He made his professional debut with the New York production of Paul Green’s Roll, Sweet Chariot (1933–34), playing the romantic lead. In addition, he directed the Negro Unit of the Works Progress Administration Federal Theatre of Massachusetts (1935–39) and produced and directed plays for the United Service Organization circuit during World War II and for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Negro College Fund in Boston. He was also the stage manager for Anna Lucasta on Broadway, in Chicago, and on tour, from 1945 to 1949. He was a member of Actors Equity Association, Negro Actors Guild, and the Saturday Evening Quill Club (a Boston writers’ group). Among his more representative plays is The Girl from Back Home (known as The Girl from Bam, 1929), a one-act drama about a mistress of a Harlem racketeer who escapes from that lifestyle. Paradox (1930) is a one-act play produced at the Barn in Boston. Swing Song (1937) is a one-act protest melodrama set in the Deep South and centering on the pregnancy of a white woman by a black man who is being threatened by a lynch mob. The Federal Theatre of Boston produced it (c. 1938).

COLLIE, KELSEY E. Collie is a director, playwright, and teacher. He was educated at Hampton Institute (A.B. in English, speech, and drama, 1967), George Washington University (M.F.A. in dramatic arts, 1970), and Howard University (doctoral studies in communication arts, 1975). He taught English and drama at various colleges in Washington, DC, prior to joining the Department of Drama at Howard in 1975 as assistant professor and director of the Children’s Theatre. He developed touring programs, conducted seminars and workshops, and served as resource person for numerous groups.

His theatrical experiences include TV appearances and presentations, as well as extensive acting, directing, and producing at Howard and in the DC area. Collie made his mark, however, as a playwright of children’s musicals, including Fiesta (1969), a musical in one act. A young man’s search for truth and happiness leads him to a South American village, where he saves the fiesta from becoming a fiasco when it is discovered that the ceremonial donkey has been stolen. It was written and presumably produced at George Washington University in Washington, DC, as his M.F.A. thesis (1970). Celebration (1973) is a children’s play with songs. People of a West Indian nation vote out of office a selfish, egotistical prime minister for stealing money. The Howard University Drama Department produced it (1973). Randy’s Dandy Circus (1974) is a musical about a young boy who inherits a circus. His envious aunt and uncle sabotage the opening by stealing all the animals, but the boy triumphs after all with the help of his friends. It was produced by Howard University Children’s Theatre in Washington, DC (summer 1974), and presented on the “Young News” segment of WRC NBC-TV, Channel 4 (November 1974).

Other plays Collie wrote include Black Images/Black Reflections (1975), which is a historical-ritual theater piece that is a chronicle narrative of Afro-American experiences and contributions to the United States’ development, depicted through song, movement, and dramatization. Howard University’s Children’s Theatre produced it and presented it on Howard University Presents over WRC NBC-TV, Channel 4 (May 1975). Good Friday; or, The End and the Beginning (1962) is a morality drama in one act. Ten people seeking shelter in a cave from an atomic holocaust attempt to come to grips with themselves and each other. It Happens Every Summer (1963) is a musical comedy in two acts. It deals with experiences shared by a group of young people who are working as summer camp counselors for a church youth program. Where Is Love (1963) is a children’s drama in one act and a little girl who runs away from an orphanage in search of love. The Gift: Sermon in Three Dramatic Sketches, Including a Litany (1964) is a one-act play depicting how humans are often unmindful of the gift of love God has given each. How to Succeed with a Little Bit of Luck (1964) is a musical comedy in two acts about a young woman who visits her cousin in New York City and gets a big theatrical break, but she has some minor problems in the romance department. Hell’s Belles (1965) is a musical comedy in two acts about an angel who is sent from heaven as an emissary and promptly falls in love with an attractive hellion. Kids! (1966) is a musical comedy in one act about girls who want to know what the boys are doing in their clubhouse, so they send in a spy. The parents want to know what both are up to. Ash Wednesday (1967), a one-act play, is a morality play based on Ash Wednesday scriptures. Several persons at a cocktail party are revealed to be jealous, petty, and lustful, as they share the bread and wine served by the host, who is a priest. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World We Live In (1967) is a musical revue in one act. Topical issues, including politics, religion, and minority problems, are satirized in song and dance. Maybe Some Day (1968) is a domestic black experience drama with music in one act. It centers on a young woman’s conflict with her mother’s teachings and her desire to have a good time with her friend and neighbor, who is very hip and popular.

THE COLOR PURPLE (2005). Based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Oprah Winfrey brought the musical version of The Color Purple to the Broadway Theatre (1 December 2005) in New York City, where it played for 910 performances. Gary Griffin directs it, with music by Brenda Russell, scenic design by John Lee Beatty, lighting design by Brian MacDevitt, sound design by Jon Weston, orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick, musical supervision by Kevin Stites, and musical direction by Linda Twine. Told through gospel, jazz, ragtime, and blues music, the show is about a black woman overcoming adversity through forgiveness and love while finding her place in the world.

The show was nominated for nine awards. Among them, La Chanze won the Tony Award for best actress in a musical for the role of Celie. Also nominated for Tony Awards were The Color Purple (best musical); Marsha Norman (book of a musical); Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray (score, music, and/or lyrics); Felicia P. Fields, (actress, featured role, musical); Victor Dixon (actor, featured role, musical); John Lee Beatty (scenic design, musical); Paul Tazwell (costume design, musical); and Donald Byrd (choreography). Purple also won a Grammy Award for music and lyrics. On 10 April 2007, the four-time Grammy Award nominee Fantasia Barrino joined Purple, replacing Jeannette Bayardelle as Celie and becoming the first American Idol winner to play a role on Broadway. A touring version of Purple opened at the Cadillac Palace Theatre in Chicago (17 April 2007).

COLOR STRATIFICATION. During the antebellum and postslavery (see SLAVERY THEME) era in the South, color stratification divided the African American community and disrupted family unity. Once white men began mixing with and impregnating black women against their will during slavery, they produced biracial offspring for whom, in most instances, they relinquished all responsibility for their care and upbringing. These children were considered black by the hegemonic culture and therefore were not only shunned by white society but were also forced to live within the black community, and even there, they were sometimes treated as outsiders. Occasionally, when a white father took some responsibility for the care of his children, they were afforded greater opportunities for upward mobility. Some passed as white; others integrated into the black community; and some became leaders in the black community. Among them, some set themselves apart as being of “superior blood.” In both Rachel (1916) by Angelina Weld Grimké and Big White Fog (1935) by Ted Ward, a dark-skinned young black boy is castigated because of his color. The former is by a white schoolteacher and the latter by a biracial grandmother whose intraracism is based on self-hate. These two plays show how many black children are made to feel inferior and worthless and explain why some lack motivation and do not excel in the classroom.

Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs (1970) is set in a fictitious colonized African country and has to do with three brothers, Eric, Abiose, and Tshembe. Eric, whose black mother was raped by an army general, is the most visible because of his light complexion. He is not only emblematic of the rape of Africa that sets him apart from his darker-skinned brothers, but he also represents a new warrior spirit of the “modernized” African. In Dael Orlandersmith’s full-length drama Yellowman (2002), she portrays the psychological effect social attitudes rooted in slavery have on a biracial light-complexioned young black man. See also ASSIMILATIONISM.

COLORED ACTORS’ LEGION (CAL)/COLORED ACTORS’ UNION (CAU). In 1920, the Actors Equity Association, a white union, listed only two black actors among its members, Leigh Whipper and Leon Williams. Two African American theatrical unions, the CAL and the CAU, were formed to protect the interest of black artists. The CAL, initiated in January 1921 in Cincinnati, OH, was short lived. Elected officers were Henry Drake (president), R. C. Pugsley (secretary), Lew Henry (recording secretary), T. S. Finley (treasurer), and Salem Tutt Whitney (arbitrator of disputes between management and actors).

In July of that year, the CAL merged with the CAU based in Washington, DC. Organized by S. H. Dudley, the CAU expanded upon the goals set by the CAL: to protect members against irresponsible persons and conditions in the industry and the undesirable practices on the Theatre Owners’ Booking Association circuit; to give guidance to black performers; to see that acts were sufficiently varied; to guarantee timely contracts that could not be easily broken by managers and performers; to classify and improve the quality of acts; to help provide acts with new materials, new writers, and new songs; and to protect female performers against the unwanted sexual advances of unscrupulous managers. Original CAU officers in 1921 were President Henry Wooden (trick cyclist and tab manager), Secretary Boots Hope (monologist and comedian), and Treasurer S. H. Dudley. By September 1921, membership had topped 800, and the CAU had 27 stock companies and 500 vaudeville acts enrolled from which to draw talent. Three years later, membership fees were raised from $2 to $5 under the newly elected officials: Secretary Talfair Washington, Recording Secretary Joe Watts, Chief Deputy Bart Kennett, General Manager and Treasurer Dudley. In 1926, Kennett published the Colored Actors’ Union Theatrical Guide, an official handbook that listed the officers and membership at that time. It contained addresses of agents in the United States and abroad, provided biographies of Dudley and other noted black performers, outlined a brief history of black theatricals in America, and presented endorsements and advertisements from many leading performers, as well as other information concerning the progress of blacks in America. Negro Actors Guild of America superseded the CAU in 1937.

THE COLORED MUSEUM (1986). This comedy by George C. Wolfe is in 11 playlets. Since winning the Crossroads Theatre playwriting contest and staging its debut there on 26 March 1986 under Lee Richardson’s direction, Colored Museum has become a staple in black theaters across the nation. Set in an African American museum, the play is a scathing satire on the likes, desires, traditions, and mores of the black community. The show begins with a slave crossing from Africa to America that takes place on an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean. Thereafter, the playwright lampoons various aspects of black culture, Afro wigs, black musicals, Josephine Baker, black matriarchy, colored people’s time, food, and Ebony magazine, as well as other icons. That same year, a New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre production won the 1986 Dramatists Guild Award.

COMMUNITY ACTORS THEATRE (CAT). A nonprofit organization, CAT was founded in 1986, in San Diego by Jennie Hamilton, owner, producer, director, writer, and actor. Housed in the former ironworkers union office on the corner of 54th and College Grove Drive, CAT may have been the only black-owned theater in the San Diego Oak Hill neighborhood. Most of the plays are written, produced, directed, and performed by local black actors. CAT is the recipient of many Aubrey Awards over the years (the San Diego community theater equivalent of the Tony Award), and the Top Judges Award for Hamilton in 2000. Local playwright Calvin Manson received a Best Direction of a Drama Award for Passion and Honey, a story about a poet and her childhood friends.

CONCEPT EAST THEATRE (CET). The CET was another black arts institution that emerged from the civil rights movement and thrived between 1961 and 1978. Woodie King Jr. and David Rambeau, who raised $100 each from 10 friends to renovate an old bar into a theater space, fathered it. Their friends included the playwright Ron Milner and Cliff Frazier, who would play instrumental roles in the life of King and of black theater in general. The bar, located at 401 East Adams Street, was renovated into a theater space with 75 seats and an art gallery in the lobby. The 10 investors did all the work, including building sets, lighting, box office, and administration.

Nine plays were produced in their first season, including the first play ever by Milner, titled Life Agony (1961). It would eventually turn into Who’s Got His Own. During the first five years of operation, the theater produced over 35 plays and also published three issues of Black Theatre Arts Magazine. More important, it was surviving on earned income and not falling into the grant trap. In 1971, the theater moved into an abandoned high school at 60 East Harper Street and in 1972 merged with the Spirit of Shango Theatre that Milner had started. They enjoyed one of their greatest successes with a production of Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones) Slave Ship in 1973. It had a cast of 150 and enjoyed sell-out houses for four months. King, who had functioned as the managing director, left the company in 1964, touring in a production of Malcolm Boyd’s play A Study in Color. The play was a big success in New York, and King decided to stay. He found a job in his profession and has not looked back since. He rose to a preeminent position in black theater through his work at the Mobilization for Youth, the Henry Street Playhouse, the New Federal Theatre, and his many Broadway productions. David Rambeau took over managing the theater after King left. The CET was destroyed by fire in 1974, but attempts to revive the theater under Von Washington along with an infusion of CETA money failed, and the company formally disbanded in 1978.

CONGO SQUARE THEATRE COMPANY (CSTC). Derrick Saunders and Reginald Nelson, cofounders of the CSTC, met while pursing their B.F.A. degrees in theater at Howard University in Washington, DC. Sanders went on to receive his M.F.A. from the University of Pittsburgh, and Nelson earned his M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The CSTC, based in Union Park on the Near West Side of Chicago, is a non-Equity theater with a culturally diverse ensemble of actors. The title is a reference to the New Orleans marketplace where slaves of African descent congregated from the early 1800s to the Civil War to sell various products and to celebrate their existence through drumming and dancing. The city was also considered the birthplace of jazz and became known for jazz and blues.

The company debuted with a three-show inaugural season, the first two at Chicago Dramatists. August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson opened in the fall of 2000. Wilson attended and spoke to the audience after the show. Cheryl L. West’s AIDS-themed drama Before It Hits Home followed. The Island by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona concluded the season at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Studio Theatre (CCCST). The CSTC also reprised The Piano Lesson at Theatre on the Lake. It opened the 2001–3 season at Chicago Dramatists with the premier of All by Geoffrey Ewing and Graydon Royce, a play about the life of a popular prizefighter. Endesha Ida Holland’s From the Mississippi Delta followed. Playboy of the West Indies, set in Trinidad, was the last offering. The CSTC also showcased the troupe’s women artists. By the sixth season (2006–7), CSTC audiences were applauding the three-show offering of African Company Presents Richard III by Carlyle Brown (directed by Aaron Todd Douglas, founding ensemble member), Black Nativity by Langston Hughes, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson (directed by Derrick Sanders, founding artistic director).

COOKE, ANNE M. (1907–87). Cooke was a theatrical troupe organizer and actress of the academic stage. A significant female director of African American academic theater, she founded and headed a successful drama program at several black universities. Known by her students as “Queen Anne,” Cooke was an active theater practitioner from the Harlem Renaissance (1920s) through the volatile 1960s and 1970s. Born in Washington, DC, Cooke grew up in Gary, IN. She received her advanced education from Oberlin College (B.A., 1928), Yale University School of Drama (Ph.D. in theater, 1972), and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she studied for one year. She taught at North Carolina A&T College and at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, in 1927.

Cooke cowrote Our Old Kentucky Home, a drama of slave heroism during the Civil War. She also played the role of a Creole slave in the show. Other acting roles included the title character in Clarisse (1893) at Spelman College. The show was taken to Chicago. That same year, she traveled to the West Indies, Panama, and Costa Rica, giving a series of dramatic performances on a dual program with the contralto soloist Nonie Bailey Hardy. On her return to the United States, she became interested in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), particularly his back-to-Africa movement, and joined the UNIA in 1917. By 1919, she was one of the top officers of the movement and began traveling on behalf of the organization to Jamaica and Liberia. In 1927–28, she staged the pageant Ethiopia at the Bar of Justice for the UNIA in Kingston, Jamaica, and other locations. She remained with Garvey’s organization until about 1930. Cooke died in Washington, DC, at age 80.

CORTHRON, KARA LEE. Corthron is a 2006 graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program. Her most recent play, Wild Black-Eyed Susans, was produced at Elizabeth Van Dyke’s “Going to the River 2006,” a celebration of African American female playwrights. The play was developed at Juilliard and received another major reading in July at the Circle East Repertory Theatre at the University of New York in New Paltz. Corthron is also a winner of the New Professional Theatre Writer’s Award (2006) for her play End Zone Zepher and a finalist for the 2006 Theodore Ward Prize for African American playwrights.

CORTHRON, KIA. A playwright, Corthron was born in the small town of Cumberland, MD. She received a B.A. in communications from the University of Maryland and an M.F.A. in theater arts from Columbia University in 1992. Considered an attractive woman who speaks rapidly in a high-pitched voice, Corthron is admittedly a political writer who wants people to think. Her writings have explored such themes as cloning, police brutality, abandoned land mines, gang violence, and homelessness. She is prominent among the tidal wave of African American female writers who emerged as a dominant force in the 1990s and into the 21st century. Corthron’s plays have been produced in the United States and around the world, and professional theaters have commissioned 9 of the 15 plays she wrote. The commissions have come from the Long Wharf Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, Goodman Theatre, Second Stage, and the Royal Court Theatre in London, among others.

Among Corthron’s plays are Wake Up Lou Riser (1992); Cage Rhythm (1993); Come Down Burning (1993); Life by Asphyxiation (1995); Seeking the Genesis (1996); Splash Hatch on the E Going Down (1997); Digging Eleven (1999); Force Continuum (2001); Breath, Boom (2001); The Venus De Milo Is Armed (2003); Slide Glide the Slippery Slope (2003); Snapshot Silhouette (2004); and Light Raise the Roof (2004). In a relatively short career, Corthron has earned significant honors, including the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, Joe A. Callaway Playwriting Award, New Professional Theatre Playwriting Award, Manhattan Theatre Club Van Lier playwriting fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group residency, Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, and Mark Taper Forum’s Fadiman Award.

COTTER, JOSEPH SEAMON, JR. (1895–1919). Cotter, a playwright, journalist, and poet, was born and reared in Louisville, KY. He was the son of Joseph Seamon Cotter Sr., a talented journalist, playwright, poet, teacher, and community developer. Carter Jr.’s education began with his older sister Florence Olivia, who taught him to read. He graduated from Central High School in 1911, where his father was the school principal and his teacher. His mother, Maria F. Cox, was also a teacher. Cotter attended Fisk University in Nashville, TN, for two years before being stricken with tuberculosis, a disease that claimed the lives of both his sister in 1914 and himself seven years later. During the last seven years of his life, Cotter completed a collection of one-act plays and poetry before his untimely death at age 24. On the Fields of France (1920) is a protest play in one short act. It is a story about two American army officers, one black, one white, both mortally wounded. As they lie dying hand in hand on a battlefield in northern France, they wonder why they could not have lived in peace and friendship in America. Cotter’s plays The White Folks’ Nigger and Caroling Dusk were never published.

COTTER, JOSEPH SEAMON, SR. (1861–1949). Cotter, the father of poet-playwright Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr., distinguished himself as a playwright, poet, author, and educator. He was historically significant as an early African American playwright of record to be published. He was a Kentuckian born in Bardstown and reared in Louisville. His father, Michael J. Cotter, was of Scotch–Irish ancestry, and his mother, Martha Vaughn Cotteran, was an African American. Cotter married Maria F. Cox, a teacher, on 22 July 1891. They had three children: Leonidas died in 1900 before his adolescence, and tuberculosis claimed the lives of Florence Olivia (died 1914) and Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr. (died 1919).

Cotter was essentially a self-educated man who learned to read at age three. He worked as a manual laborer until he was 24 to help his poverty-stricken family, attended night school for 10 months, and emerged a teacher at Western Colored School (1893–1911). He also taught in several private and public schools in Kentucky (1885–93) and distinguished himself as founder and principal of Samuel Coleridge Taylor School (1911–42) in Louisville, KY. He was elected to the Louisville Board of Education in 1938 and instituted storytelling contests at the town’s public libraries.

Cotter’s most significant play, Caleb, the Degenerate: A Study of the Types, Customs, and Needs of the American Negro (1901), is a four-act thesis play. It gained him the distinction of being the second black American ever to have a play published, the first being William Alexander Brown, proprietor of the African Grove. Caleb dramatizes Booker T. Washington’s educational philosophy of the “accommodations,” as in industrial education over liberal arts education, as a means of achieving race progress. Caleb, the central character, is emblematic of the rebellious “bad” black man pitted against the “good” black man at an industrial school administered by the Bishop and Pious Olivia. The show was read publicly but never staged. Two other representative plays by Cotter were published around the turn of the century, Caesar Driftwood and The Chastisement. The former is a one-act comedy set the night before a wedding. There is a rumor that Caesar will disrupt the proceedings, however it is only a joke initiated by the bride. Chastisement is a one-act moralistic thesis play written in short staccato dialogue. In it, a miserly, stern, and hypocritical father’s family teaches him a lesson. Cotter also wrote six volumes of poetry and a poem, “The Tragedy of Pete,” a folk ballad. In addition, he utilized Italian sonnets and dialect verse as written by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Cotter died on 14 March 1949.

COUNTS, ANGELA M. A playwright, Counts was born and raised in Detroit. She earned her M.F.A. in theater from the University of Southern California. She is a working playwright in the theater world whose work has been rewarded by several awards of note. These include a Lorraine Hansberry Award for her 1994 play Hedy Understands Anxiety, focusing on a woman searching for her grandmother as a key to the past. Edge of Blue Light is the story of a woman of color living with HIV/AIDS. Other plays she has written include Sari Yams, Flower Child, Saxophone Me Baby, Seein’ Eyed Dogs, To Thine Self, and Ocean Waves. Counts has also been bestowed with a Van Lier playwriting fellowship.

COURTNEY, WARD. A Hartford, CT, playwright, Courtney was associated with the local Charles Gilpin Players (CGP) and later the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in Hartford. The CGP (not associated with the Gilpin Players of Cleveland, OH) had been an important part of Hartford cultural life for more than 15 years and was reorganized as a Negro Unit of the Works Progress Administration Federal Theatre Project. Ward is the author of two plays produced and published by the Hartford Negro Unit of the circa 1939. Stars and Bars, a full-length drama, appeared in the Living Newspaper and addresses abuses in housing, medicine, employment, and inequities of public facilities in Ward’s home town of Hartford. Trilogy in Black, a full-length modern drama, incorporates themes from Greek tragedies to examine issues by African Americans after World War I.

CRESCENT THEATRE (CT)/CRESCENT PLAYERS (CP). Built in 1909, the Crescent Theatre located on West 135th Street may be Harlem’s first theater. Martinson and Nibur, two white liquor dealers, initiated the idea of catering to the new black trade coming into the Harlem community. Under these two owners, the CT became a Mecca of entertainment for the affluent class of African Americans who were gradually replacing the whites then moving to other communities in New York City. Comedian Eddie Hunter became the moving force behind the CT. The owners had approached him during the CT’s first year of operation to present his comedy act Goin’ to the Races. This was the first known black show to use the stage and screen simultaneously to create the effect of talking pictures. Hunter subsequently wrote and produced several shows at the CT, including The Battle of Who Run, Why Husbands Leave Home, and Broadway Sal. During the next few years prior to World War I, a variety of other programs were presented. Among the members of the company were Edmona Addison (a singer) and the team of Hodges and Lauchmere (former vaudeville artists). The CT premiered H. Lawrence Freeman’s grand opera The Tryst and began attracting talent from other competitors. Because of the popularity of shows at the CT, the nearby Lincoln Theatre was forced to emphasize a vaudeville and motion picture policy to lure customers back to the Lincoln.

The CP also got its start at the CT. The Muse and Pugh Stock Company founded by Clarence and Ophelia Muse and Willard Pugh moved their group from the Franklin Theatre in Harlem to the CT. They changed their name to the CP, presented a repertoire of plays, and resided there for one year (1914–15). The group moved to the Lincoln Theatre to form the Lincoln Players (after the Anita Bush Players). Unable to compete, the CT was soon forced to close its doors shortly thereafter. The CP apparently produced several plays, including Another Man’s Wife, featuring Clarence Muse as a comic philanderer and his wife as stereotypical “poor little orphan girl.” After one season, the group moved to the Lincoln Theatre, where it was absorbed into the Lincoln Players.

CROSSROADS THEATRE COMPANY. In 1978, two Rutgers graduates, Ricardo Khan and L. Kenneth Richardson, shared a dream of establishing a professional black theater in New Brunswick, NJ. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams with the founding of Crossroads Theatre Company. Their mission was to provide opportunities for black theater artists and to present positive images of black life and culture. They converted the second floor of an old sewing factory into a 132-seat theater and with the aid of the Comprehensive Employment Training Act and Ford Foundation money mounted their first production, Leslie Lee’s First Breeze of Summer. Initially, the audiences were small, but they grew over time. They specialized in new works, developing a program called “New Play Writes” and attracting such new names as Dominic Martin, Emily Mann, and others. Crossroads was in the forefront in regard to gender equity. They hired Sydne Mahone as director of play development, resulting in over 20 productions by women playwrights. Taking advantage of $20,000 from CBS and Dramatists Guild, a nationwide contest led to their pick of George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum for production. It became a huge hit and was picked up by Joseph Papp, who produced it at the NYSF/Public Theatre. Within 10 years, Crossroads had a budget of $1.25 million. Along the way in 1988, the board for “personal issues and health” dismissed cofounder L. Kenneth Richardson.

In 1990, with a budget of $2.8 million, the company moved into a new 264-seat theater located in the New Brunswick Cultural Center. Essentially, they were tenants, and it cost them from $80,000 to $90,000 per year in rental costs. Also in 1990, Crossroads became a member of the League of Resident Theatres, thus joining 265 other theaters with regional equity status. Again, costs went up exponentially. The move coincided with a 50 percent cut in State Arts Council funding. They embarked upon a massive fund-raising effort that was not entirely successful. It did, however, enjoy a tremendous success that year with its production of It Ain’t Nothing but the Blues, which became a national staple. Nonetheless, the company plunged on and in 1991 gained national attention by mounting Leslie Lee’s Black Eagles, a play about the Tuskegee airmen of World War II. President George H. W. Bush, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, and civil rights icon Rosa Parks all hailed the production.

Between 1992 and 1999, the company went through four managing directors. The company struggled on, and on its 20th anniversary in 1998, it mounted a world-class production of August Wilson’s Jitney. In the spring of 1999, Crossroads was awarded the Tony Award for a continuous level of artistic achievement contributing to the theater nationally. It was a tremendous recognition of all that Crossroads had achieved. Then, inexplicably, Artistic Director Ricardo Khan left the theater for his native Trinidad, stating he needed “rest and renewal.” The dam broke, however, in September 2000. It was announced that Crossroads was some $1.7 million in debt. The New Brunswick Cultural Center canceled their lease, and Crossroads cancelled the season. The theater was dark during the 2000 and 2001 seasons. Efforts continued behind the scenes to revive the theater, led by new board chairman Rheinhold Ponder, but an agreement with debtors and financial agencies fell apart, and Ponder resigned.

Since then, Khan returned and resumed his former post, albeit with a revised mission for Crossroads as follows: to explore beyond traditional black theater and to connect the dots between all people—European, Hispanic, and Asian peoples—who identify with the African American diaspora. His goal was to make the black experience more exciting onstage without being viewed as a victim because he says it gets stale artistically. The theater worked out a debt-reduction plan, reducing its deficit down to four figures. The board was revitalized, and many of its former subscribers returned. It opened the 2005–6 season with New Jersey native Savion Glover’s Tap Legends and followed with Cookin’ at the Cookery, a new play about blues legend Alberta Hunter by Marion J. Caffey. With a new board, a financial restructuring, and a new mission, Crossroads intends to regain the swagger and verve it once had. But to do that, critics feel the company must avoid the temptation of submerging itself in “soft money.”

CULLEN, COUNTEE PORTER (1903–46). A playwright, novelist, and author of children’s books, Cullen was also a leading African American poet and one of the outstanding figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Cullen’s birthplace has been listed variously as Louisville, KY; Baltimore, MD; and New York City. Records, however, show he was adopted by the Reverend Frederick Cullen, pastor of Salem Methodist Church in New York City. He was educated at DeWitt Clinton High School in New York, New York University (A.B., 1925, Phi Beta Kappa), and Harvard University (A.M., 1926). In 1928, he married Yolande DuBois, daughter of W. E. B. DuBois, but the marriage dissolved a year later. He remarried 14 years later to Ida Mae Robinson. That same year, he went to Paris on a two-year Guggenheim fellowship for study and creative writing. There he wrote The Black (1929). When he returned, he began teaching in the public schools of Harlem, where he remained until his death in 1946. The next year, Harold Jackman established the Countee Cullen Memorial Collection at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University).

Cullen’s literary efforts took various forms. Among his dramas and adaptations, his best-known play is St. Louis Woman (1933), a three-act musical with book by Cullen and Arna Bontemps. Set in the 1890s, it is adapted from Bontemps’s novel God Sends Sunday (1931). Lil Augie, an internationally known horse jockey, involved in a lover’s tryst, begins losing races after the woman’s boyfriend is found dead. The Gilpin Players produced it first at the Karamu Repertory Theatre in Kentucky (1933) and then in Cleveland, OH, for five performances (November 1933). It premiered on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre (March–July 1946) for 115 performances. Harold Arlen did the music and Johnny Mercer the lyrics. The cast featured Ruby Hill in the lead role with Pearl Bailey—her Broadway debut.

Among Cullen’s other dramatic renderings are The Medea (original title: By-Word for Evil, 1935), a two-act play with a prologue and epilogue. It is a modern adaptation of the tragedy of Euripides, written originally for the popular Broadway veteran actress Rose McClendon. It was scheduled to open at Hedgerow Theatre in Moylan–Rose Valley, PA, but was canceled after McClendon’s untimely death. Under its original title, the show, directed by Owen Dodson, premiered at Atlanta University (March 1940). Medea in Africa, an adaptation by Dodson, was produced by the Fisk University Stage-crafters in Nashville, TN (1944–45). The Howard Players mounted it at the Howard University Drama Department in Washington, DC (April–May 1963). From there, it was taken on tour to a number of colleges in New England, including Dartmouth, the University of New Hampshire, Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Williams. Dodson also directed these versions of the show. One Way to Heaven (1936) is a full-length dramatic adaptation based on Cullen’s novel by the same title. The importance of a black church in Harlem is exemplified through the relationship of a devout woman and her atheist husband. Directed by Jasper Deeter, it was produced by the Hedgerow Theatre in Moylan–Rose Valley, PA (September 1936) and subsequently by the American Negro Theatre at the 135th Street Library Theatre in Harlem (November 1943) for 37 performances, at the Harlem YMCA, and at the Hempstead, NY, United Service Organization.

The Conjur Man Dies (1936), a three-act farcical mystery adapted by Cullen and Bontemps, was considered the most popular Federal Theatre play among Harlem audiences. More than 20,000 theatergoers saw the dramatization of Rudolph Fisher’s novel The Conjur Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem. Superstition, voodoo, sorcery, and Harlem come into play when a conjure man is murdered. Arena Playhouse first produced it two years after Fisher’s death as part of the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project at the Lafayette Theatre, New York (March–April 1936), for 24 performances. J. Augustus Smith and Joe Losey directed it, with music performed by the Works Progress Association (WPA) Orchestra under Joe Jordan’s direction. It went on tour with a traveling unit of the WPA players as part of the New York City Recreation Department’s Outdoor Recreation Program. The Cleveland Federal Theatre opened it first (1936), and later, the Gilpin Players presented it at the Karamu Repertory Theatre (February 1938). The Third Fourth of July (1946) is a one-act symbolic drama Cullen coauthored with Owen Dodson. Black and white families are brought together during World War II after the death of a son. It is intertwined with movement, poetry, and music. The Drama Division of the New School for Social Research, New York, commissioned the show.

Cullen might be best known for his poetry. While a student at New York University, he began writing poetry. As a sophomore, he placed second in the national Witter Banner Poetry Contest for “The Ballad of the Brown Girl” (1922). In 1925, he won the Witter Banner Award and also published his first volume of poetry, Color, which established his reputation as a poet. He also won the Harmon Foundation’s gold medal for literature in 1927, and in the same year, he published his second and third poetry volumes, Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown Girl, and edited an anthology of black American poetry, Caroling Dusk.

CULTURAL ODYSSEY. Idris Ackamoor founded Cultural Odyssey in 1997 in San Francisco and assumed the position of executive director. Rhodessa Jones joined the company four years later as coartistic director. Together they developed over a dozen original productions that demonstrate their vision of arts and social activism. Since its inception, artists of all cultures have committed the two to the creation of original work. They have undertaken a series of innovative collaborations with nationally renowned artists, such as dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones, jazz percussionist Don Moye of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and pianist Cecil Taylor. Odyssey is one of the bay area’s leading touring ensembles that regularly travels throughout the United States, as well as Japan, the Caribbean, and Europe. The company has developed deep artistic roots and community support in San Francisco by showcasing productions, presenting local and national acts for bay area audiences, and creating innovative arts training programs for the community. Odyssey is dedicated to interacting with its community to develop performances and services that have transforming effects. In 1989, Jones set up a residence at the San Francisco County Jail that resulted in the Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women, a visionary model for using art to transform a population in need. This is one example of an art-based project that helped to reduce the numbers of women returning to jail.

CUNEY-HARE, MAUD (1874–1936). Born in Galveston, TX, Cuney-Hare was married to William P. Hare. She was a pioneer playwright of the 1920s and leading figure in the Negro little theater movement in Boston. Cuney-Hare was associated prominently with the Allied Arts Theatre Group as an author, pianist, lecturer, musicologist, and composer. She received her education from Howard University and the New England Conservatory of Music. After graduation, she established the Musical Art Studio in Boston and gave concert piano recitals in the New England area. Later, she became the director of music at the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Institute of Texas, a position she also held at Prairie View State College.

The work that distinguished Cuney-Hare as a playwright is Antar of Araby (1926). It is a historical romance in poetic prose, with an overture and incidental music and a prologue in four short acts. The overture is by Clarence Cameron White and the incidental music by Montague Ring, a pseudonym for Amanda Ira Aldridge, daughter of Ira Aldridge. Antar is adapted from Cuney-Hare’s article “Antar, Negro Poet of Arabia.” It follows the legendary exploits of Antar Bin Shad-dad, a celebrated black Arabian poet and storyteller. The story centers on this warrior of humble origins who has to find a way to win the hand of his beloved Abla, an Arabian maiden of noble heritage. Allied Arts Center produced it in Boston first in 1926 and again in 1928.

Cuney-Hare was also recognized as an author of poetry, nonfiction, and scholarly books on black music history. Among her books are Norris Wright Cuney: A Tribune of the Black People (biography, 1913), The Message of the Trees: An Anthology of Leaves and Branches (poetry, 1918), Six Creole Folk Songs: With Original Creole and Translated English Text (1921), and Negro Musicians and Their Music (1936), a classic in its field. In addition, she edited a music column in Crisis for many years.