LA MAMA EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE CLUB. Based off Broadway on the Lower East Side of New York City’s Greenwich Village, this world-renowned cultural theater club has a proud heritage as an international theater. Founder and director Ellen Stewart organized La MaMa in October 1961. A leader of the avant-garde movement of the 1960s, Stewart’s premise was to develop new, creative, risk-taking, experimental work beyond the influence of Broadway. She also wanted to make a strong commitment to cultural pluralism—to theater that was ethnically diverse and that sustained a universal global vision. She has succeeded within the last 47 years in developing, nurturing, supporting, producing, and presenting new and original performance work by artists of all nationalities from around the world. An amazing number of film, theater, and television luminaries got their starts at La MaMa.
La MaMa is a complex of three theaters, the First Floor Theatre, the Club, and the Annex. It was one of the first theaters to house full-time directors with resident companies. Among this list were Wilford Leach’s La MaMa Troupe, Lee Bruer’s Mabou Mines, Wilford Leach’s ETC, Joel Zwick’s La MaMa Plexus, and Andrei Serban and Elizabeth Swados’s Jones Repertory. Many of these troupes and others from La MaMa have performed throughout the world. The theater also presented, in collaboration, over 1,000 original musical scores to become one of the country’s foremost producers of international performance. In 1967, Stewart, in collaboration with Ted Hoffman, a professor at New York University, introduced the Eastern European Theatre to America when they brought in Jersey Godowsky, Richard Islam, and Ludwig Lassen. Among its honors and awards, La MaMa has received over 30 Obie Awards and several Drama Desk, Bessie, and Villager Awards.
LAFAYETTE THEATRE/PLAYERS (STOCK COMPANY). Built in 1912, the 2,000-seat Lafayette Theatre was located at 132nd Street and 7th Avenue in Harlem. At the time, because of a large presence of whites in the area, the theater was segregated. When C. W. Morganstern, a Broadway booking agent, took over the lease, he desegregated the theater after he hired Lester A. Walton, a black critic for the New York Age to comanage the theater. The first production at the Lafayette was Across the Footlights (27 December 1915) by the Anita Bush Players. Bush had formed the ensemble at the Lincoln Theatre in Harlem before moving her company to the Lafayette because of artistic differences between Bush and management. At the Lafayette, she changed the name of her acting troupe to the Lafayette Players.
In February 1916, Robert Levy took over the management of the Lafayette Theatre; thereafter, the players presented a new show every week, all by white authors. They produced more than 250 short shows (called “tabs”) for the next seven years. More than 360 actors performed in such shows as The Octoroon, The Count of Monte Cristo, Madam X, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Some of the noted performers to appear at the Lafayette Theatre include Clarence Muse, Charles Gilpin, Evelyn Ellis, Frank Wilson, Edna Thomas, Evelyn Preer, and Abbie Mitchell. The lone dramatic play production by a black playwright mounted at the Lafayette was Tom Brown’s The Eternal Magdaline (1917) a “neoromantic” drama. Owing to the success of the players at the Lafayette, Levy added a second and third troupe of players at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC, and the Grand Theatre in Chicago.
The original Lafayette Players thrived in Harlem until 1928, when they could no longer compete with the silent film industry. Although the black actors portrayed white characters by white authors, the players succeeded in developing an appreciation within black audiences for theater, provided opportunities for black actors to shed the image of the minstrel buffoon by performing in straight dramas and melodramas, and helped to advance the fledgling African American theater industry. Thereafter, the Lafayette Theatre struggled through the early stages of the Great Depression with vaudeville shows and silent films, but it was forced to close its doors in 1932.
LAMONT, ALONZO JR. A playwright, Lamont is a native of Baltimore, MD. He graduated from Marlboro College (B.A.) and the University of Iowa (B.A., playwriting). His early work attracted the attention of Hollywood, where he worked as a staff writer on the TV series A Different World. His return to the theater was highlighted by a long, productive relationship with Jomandi Productions, where several of his plays were produced. Lamont’s plays have also been seen at the Goodman Theatre, Arena Playhouse, Ensemble Theatre, Seven Stages, and off Broadway at the American Place Theatre. Some of his plays are The Black Play (1979); Twenty-First Century Outs and Backs (1985); That Serious He-Man Ball (1987), depicting a basketball game where three men explore life’s problems; Vivisections from the Blown Mind; Life Go Boom; and 21st Century Groove. Lamont is the recipient of the James Baldwin Playwriting Award and the Florida Arts Commission playwriting fellowship.
LAMPLEY, ONI FAIDA (1959–2008). An actor and playwright, Lampley is a veteran performer and writer from Massachusetts with a long career in the theater. She earned her B.A. from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. from New York University’s Graduate Acting Program. She also studied at Julliard’s Playwright Program, where she received the prestigious Lincoln Center Lacombe du Nouy Award. Her first play, Mixed Babies, won the coveted Helen Hayes Award for outstanding new play in 1991. It was produced widely and eventually published by Dramatists Play Services. Lampley is an acclaimed performer whose acting career in theater, film, and television has dominated her writing efforts. She has appeared in Third Watch, Law and Order, The Sopranos, Two Trains Running, and Dragonfly. Nonetheless, she is an avid, opportunistic writer whose persistence has resulted in writing such plays as The Dark Kalamazoo, Waiting for My Man, Put My Father in the Ground, and Tough Titty. In 1998, she was invited to the prestigious Sundance Screenwriters Lab. She has been a guest lecturer at George Mason University and has also taught writing to young people in New York City and Washington, DC, public school systems. Other honors and awards for Lampley include those from such organizations as the Rockefeller Production Fund, Playwrights Center, Jerome Foundation, William and Eva Fox Foundation, New York State Foundation on the Arts, and DC Commission on Arts and Humanities.
LANGE, THEODORE “TED” WILLIAM. Lange is a well-known actor, director, and playwright who has excelled in television, film, and stage. This global recognition stems from a 10-year run on the TV sitcom Love Boat. An Oakland, CA, native, he graduated from San Francisco City College and attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, where he was steeped in all phases of theater. This prepared his foray into the theatrical world. He soon found success on Love Boat, where he not only acted but also wrote seven of their scripts and directed some 17 episodes.
While still an actor, Lange has also written for the stage, penning over 20 plays. His efforts include Lemon Meringue Façade, a comedic look at the lives of four disparate women; Behind the Mask: An Evening with Paul Laurence Dunbar, a one-man show about the title character; Born a Unicorn, a rock musical depicting the life of the African American Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge; and Four Queens—No Trump, which depicts four black women playing bid whist (a card game) as they reveal aspects of their lives, for which Lange received the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Best Play Award in 1997. He has also written A Foul Movement and Day Zsa Voo. His latest play is George Washington’s Boy, an exploration of George Washington’s close relationship with his personal slave Billy Lee. Lange has appeared on Broadway in Hair and in numerous theaters across the country in such Shakespearean roles as Petruchio, Bottom, and Macbeth. He has taught film directing at University of Southern California’s School of Cinema and Television. Lange has also written numerous screenplays and film scripts.
LAWRENCE, REGINALD (SHEPSU AAKHU). See AAKHU, SHEPSU (REGINALD LAWRENCE).
LEE, CANADA (LEONARE LIONEL CORNELIUS CANEGATA, 1907–52). Active between the 1930s and 1940s, Lee was a stage and screen actor. He first gained notice for his portrayal of Banquo in Orson Welles’s Voodo Macbeth (1936) at the Lafayette Theatre, the home of New York Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). He received critical acclaim as Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1941), for other Broadway roles, and for his work in such films as Lifeboat and Body and Soul (1947).
Born and raised in Harlem, Lee left home at age 14. After his career as a welterweight boxer was cut short by an eye injury, he made his professional debut as an actor in Voodoo Macbeth. Subsequent FTP roles followed with Brown Sugar (as Henry, 1937), Haiti (as Bertram, 1938), Mamba’s Daughters (as Drayton, 1939), and Big White Fog (as Victor Mason at the Lincoln Theatre, 1940). Lee made his Broadway debut in Native Son, followed by Anna Lucasta (as Danny, the sailor, 1944), The Tempest (as Caliban, 1945), On Whitman Avenue (as David Vennett, 1946), The Duchess of Malfi (as Bosolo, in whiteface, 1946), and Set My People Free (as the slave leader George, 1948). During the 1930s and 1940s, Lee came under congressional scrutiny for his involvement in the Communist Party, resulting in him being blackballed in the entertainment industry. The father of one child, Carl Lee (b. 1933), the elder Lee died in 1952 from complications of pneumonia. In 1976, he was enshrined in the Black Filmmaker’s Hall of Fame.
LEE, EUGENE. Lee, an actor and director, was a veteran of the theater wars. He worked for the prestigious Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) in New York where was in the original production of Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play; and many regional theaters across the country and abroad. Lee is well known as an interpreter of August Wilson, having appeared in almost every play the late writer wrote. In addition, Lee works in film and TV and is a playwright. He is best known for East Texas Hot Links (1994), set in the 1950s in the South, where the Ku Klux Klan still roamed at will. It centers on random killings and disappearances in a community where blacks and whites are all “good ol’ boys.” Lee also wrote Fear Itself (1996). Lee graduated from Southwest Texas State University. He was an adjunct professor of playwriting in the School of Theatre at the University of Southern California.
LEE, LESLIE. A playwright, television scriptwriter, and fiction writer, Lee was born in Bryn Mawr, PA. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A. in biology and English) and at Villanova University (M.A. in theatre), where he began writing plays. Two of his plays were first produced while he was working at Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (1969–70). He has taught playwriting at the College of Old Westbury in New York (1975–76), was a playwright-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania (1980), and coordinated a playwriting workshop at the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) in 1985 and the Douglass Creative Arts Center in New York.
Lee’s award-winning play, The First Breeze of Summer (1975), is a semiautobiographical drama in two acts. It reflects three generations of a black middle-class family whose quarrels cause the revered grandmother to start reminiscing about the heartaches and sacrifices it took for the family to achieve middle-class status. It won an Obie Award as best play (1974–75), a Tony Award nomination, a John Gassner Medallion for playwriting, and three distinguished acting awards. Woodie King Jr. produced it in association with the NEC off Broadway at St. Marks Playhouse (March–April 1975) under Douglas Turner Ward’s direction. Frances Foster played the role of the grandmother with Reyno (who won both an Obie Award and a Clarence Derwent Award) and Moses Gunn (who won an Obie Award). The play opened on Broadway at the Palace Theatre (June–July 1975), running for 48 performances. Thereafter, King directed it at the Center Stage in Baltimore, MD (March 1977), for 36 performances, with Claudia McNeil as the grandmother. The Theatre of Universal Images mounted it in New York City (January–March 1983). It was also adapted into film by PBS on WNET-TV’s “Theatre in America” series (1976), starring Moses Gunn. It won a Mississippi ETV Award for best film adaptation (1977).
Between Now and Then (1975) is a drama in two acts. A white man is paralyzed with fear that mixing of the colored and white races will cause the white race and culture to disappear. The play was produced by the New Dramatists in New York City (February 1975) and by the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn (1983). The War Party (1975) is a political drama inspired by the author’s personal experiences of a political power struggle within a civil rights organization. The play depicts a young mulatto woman’s search for her own identity. The New Dramatists produced it in New York (1975) under the direction of Douglas Turner Ward, and the NEC produced it at Theatre Four in New York (October–November 1986). Colored People’s Time (1982) is a full-length historical play. It depicts events from the Civil War to the Montgomery bus boycotts. The NEC produced 32 performances of the play (March–April 1982) under the direction of Horacena Taylor. Among the cast were L. Scott Caldwell, Charles Weldon, and Debbie Morgan. The play received a best play nomination in 1983 for an Audience Development Committee Award. Phyllis (1986) is a full-length musical with book by Lee and music and lyrics by Micki Grant. It is based on the life and work of the eighteenth-century black American poet Phyllis Wheatley, a slave born in Senegal who learned to read and write and gained the admiration of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. It was produced by Ralph Madero Productions in association with the United Negro College Fund. It previewed at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem (October 1986). Hannah Davis (1987) is a full-length domestic drama focusing on the grown children of an upper-middle–class black family coming to terms with their own lives as well as with the illness of their father. The Crossroads Theatre Company in New Brunswick, NJ, produced it (March–April 1987).
Lee was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation playwriting grant (1966–68), Shubert Foundation playwriting grants (1971–72), Obie Award, Isabelle Strickland Award for excellence in the fields of arts and human culture, a National Endowment for the Arts playwriting grant (1982), and a Eugene O’Neill Playwriting Conference (Waterford, CT) playwriting fellowship (1980).
LENOIRE, ROSETTA (1911–2002). An actor, singer, dancer, and producer, LeNoire was a renaissance figure of the 20th century. She fought back from her own personal adversity to become not just a formidable talent onstage but also a leading advocate for nontraditional casting to provide opportunities for actors of color. She also founded the Amas Repertory Theatre in 1968 to develop original musicals and provide training and opportunity for actors of color.
LeNoire was born with rickets, which doctors treated by breaking both legs so they could grow in a proper fashion. Her godfather, the great Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, taught her dancing as a learning exercise for her legs. She also studied music and voice under musician Eubie Blake. When she grew of age, she performed in several revues with Robinson. One of her first legitimate stage appearances was the groundbreaking 1936 Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth, directed by the legendary Orson Welles. Over a lifetime, LeNoire built a fabulous career in which she made 23 Broadway appearances in such vehicles as Anna Lucasta; The Royal Family; A Streetcar Named Desire; You Can’t Take It with You; Blues for Mister Charlie; Finian’s Rainbow; The Hot Mikado; Paul Robeson; and her own creation, Bubbling Brown Sugar. LeNoire was also a frequent television performer, appearing in episodes of The Guiding Light, Search for Tomorrow, A World Apart, Gimme a Break, and Family Matters. Movies include Moscow on the Hudson, Playing for Keeps, and Brewster’s Millions.
LeNoire received a Theatre World Special Award in 1993. She received the prestigious National Medal of the Arts Award by President Bill Clinton in 1999, who said, “Rosetta did more than dream of a theater with no color bar; she actually built one.” Her work in this field was recognized in 1989 by Actors Equity Association, who initiated the Rosetta LeNoire Award, given annually for outstanding contributions to the universality of the human spirit in the American theater. LeNoire was the first recipient.
LEON, KENNY. A director, actor, and producer Leon represents the new generation of theater artists who have worked their way up through the trenches to assume a prominent role in the industry. He is cofounder and presently artistic director of the True Colors Theatre Company based in Atlanta, GA, and Washington, DC. Their mission is to preserve African American classics while producing a diverse group of plays from the traditional canon of Western culture. The company was founded in 2002. Prior to that, Leon was head of the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta. He is one of a few black artistic directors of a traditional white regional theater, joining Harold Scott, Sheldon Epps, Tim Bond, Tazewell Thompson, George C. Wolfe, and Benny Sato Ambush. Leon served in that capacity from 1990 to 2001, during which the company grew to over 100 employees with a $7 million budget. The Alliance Theatre produced an eclectic selection of plays, everything from Shakespeare and Molière to Arthur Miller and August Wilson.
Leon, a native of Florida, graduated from Clark Atlanta University. During his early career as an actor, Leon was featured in such plays as Blood Knot, A Christmas Carol, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and The Island. Over a lengthy career, he has directed plays at the Hartford Stage, New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Arena Playhouse, and Huntington Hartford Theatre. On Broadway, he directed the 2004 production of A Raisin in the Sun with Phylicia Allen-Rashad and Sean Combs that garnered two Tony Awards and a Drama Desk Award nomination for Leon. As a result, before his death, Wilson chose Leon to direct the last 2 plays in Wilson’s 10-play cycle, Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf. Gem was produced on Broadway in 2004–5 and Golf in 2005, shortly after the author’s death. That both productions were received so well is confirmation of Leon’s ascendancy to the top rank of American directors. Leon’s honors and awards include the Boston Theatre Award, Bronze Jubilee Award, Connecticut Critics Circle Award, Morehouse College Candle in the Dark Award, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Eugene McDermott Award.
LEWIS, DAVID. A playwright, Lewis was born in New York City, and his upper education was at the New School for Social Research. He has several plays. A representative sampling includes Gonna Make That Scene (1967), about an elevator that is a metaphor for two black men trying rise to middle-class status; Do Your Thing (1970), a comedy in which a man visits a paranoid friend in Harlem, who refuses to allow the visitor to enter his home; and Georgia Man and Jamaican Woman (1970), a comedy about cultural differences between American blacks and Jamaicans. Other plays include My Cherie Amour (a comedy, 1970); Sonny Boy (a comedy, 1970); A Knight in Shining Black Armor (1971); Mr. B. (1971); One Hundred Is a Long Number (a children’s comedy, 1972); Heaven—I’ve Been There; Hell—I’ve Been There Too (1972); and Bubba, Connie, and Hindy (a satire, 1975). Lewis is a recipient of the New American Playwriting Award (1959).
LIGHTS, FREDERICK L. Brother of Ellen Stewart (founder and director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City), Lights is known for two plays, The Underlings (1948), about miscegenation, and Mood Indigo, about the life of Duke Ellington. Lights has written at least six other plays, All over Nothing (1948), Samson and Lila Dee (1952), and Barbershop Boogie, Boys Like Us, Perepity, and Pigeons en Casserole, all of which were pre-1976.
LILLIE, VERNELL A. A director, educator, producer, and playwright, Lillie is the former chair of the Africana Studies Department at the University of Pittsburgh and the “apple pie mother” of the black theater movement. Lillie became an associate professor at the university in 1972. In 1974, she established the Kuntu Repertory Theatre (KRT) as a platform for the plays of fellow associate and playwright Rob Penny and to examine African American life from a sociopolitical and historical perspective. The theater has produced over 100 plays and at one time served as an incubator for a novice, beginning playwright—August Wilson. Like her counterpart, Woodie King Jr., she has done it all, from acting to directing and producing to founding a theater of long-standing merit in the KRT.
Lillie is highly credentialed, holding both a Ph.D. and an M.A. from Carnegie Mellon University, a B.A. in speech and drama from Dillard University, and a graduate studies in education and English from Texas Southern University. She has been trained in psychodrama, playback theater, and problem-solving theater. Lillie has directed plays from the classical repertory and plays from the black theater movement, like The Miracle Church by Sybil Berry, Tambourines to Glory by Langston Hughes, Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage, Over Forty by Celeste Bedford Walker, and Seven Guitars by August Wilson.
As a playwright, she has written several plays, including Crawford Grill Presents Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson: Standing on Holy Ground, The Buffalo Soldiers Plus One, and the stirring tribute to Martin Luther King Lift Every Voice and Sing. She has also been a strong supporter of the distaff side of theater and is credited with nurturing the careers of Elizabeth Van Dyke, Eileen J. Morris, Jacqueline Moscou, Marta Effinger, P. J. Gibson, Phylicia Allen-Rashad, and Marta Jones, among others.
In a career exceeding 50 years, Lillie has amassed many awards for her work as both an educator and a theater artist. They include an Alpha Kappa Alpha Outstanding Teacher Award, a Governor’s Award for the arts, University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Distinguished Teaching Award, and a Career Achievement in Education Award. Additionally, the Vernell Lillie Endowed Scholarship Award was established at Dillard University in 1997. She retired in 2006.
LITTLEWAY, LORNA. Like most theater people, Littleway, a director, is a jack of all trades, functioning equally as an actress, playwright, producer, and educator. She is founding director of the Juneteenth Legacy Theatre in Louisville, KY, a position she has held since the company’s inception in 1993. A New Yorker, Littleway holds not only a B.A. from the University of Southern Maine and an M.A. in playwriting from Goddard College but also an M.F.A. in directing from Southern Methodist University. She has worked in regional theaters and colleges and universities across the country, including the New Horizon Theatre St. Louis Black Repertory Theatre, Stamford Theatre Works, Queens College, Lehigh University, Lincoln Center Theatre’s Director Lab, and Brown University.
Among the plays she has directed are Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Funnyhouse of a Negro, Miss Evers’ Boys, Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery, Your Obituary Is a Dance, Trouble in Mind, A Raisin in the Sun, and Trick the Devil. Littleway is also a working playwright and has written the following plays: Young Sistas; A Collective Piss and the Devil’s Beating His Wife; Billy, Lena, and the Duke: A Night of Ellington Music; Juneteenth Cotton Club Revue; and Kinder, Gentler Nation. Littleway is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab and is a past president of the Black Theatre Network. Honors for Littleway include a Dramatist Guild fellowship, the Sallie Bingham Award from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and a playwright fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. Littleway is professor of theater arts at the University of Louisville.
LIVINGSTON, MYRTLE SMITH (1902–74). A playwright and teacher, Livingston was born in Holly Grove, AR, and reared in Denver, CO, where she received her elementary and high school education. She studied pharmacy at Howard for two years (1920–22) and was a member of a medical sorority, Rho Psi Phi. In 1925, she married William McKinley Livingston, a physician. She received an A.B. from Colorado State Teachers College at Greeley (1927) and an M.A. from Columbia University (1940). Livingston taught in the public schools of Denver prior to accepting a position at Lincoln University in Jefferson, MO, where she taught health and physical education from 1928 to her retirement in 1972. She spent the remaining two years of her life sharing a condominium with her sister in Hawaii, where she died in 1974 at age of 72.
Livingston won third prize in the Crisis Contest Awards for her play For Unborn Children (October 1925). It is a plea in one act against intermarriage and was the first play published in Crisis (July 1926). Frances (1925) is a melodrama in one act centering on the relationship among a black woman, a white landowner, a teacher, and a civil rights worker. The Norman Players of Philadelphia produced it at St. Peter Claver’s Auditorium (1925). It received first prize in the Opportunity Contest Awards (May 1925).
LORRAINE HANSBERRY THEATRE (LHT). Located in San Francisco, the LHT is one of a handful of black theaters that have been in existence for over 25 years, celebrating its anniversary in 2006. Over the years, the LHT has worked out of four different locations and has mounted over 100 plays from such playwrights as Ifa Bayeza and Shakespeare. It was founded in 1981 by Artistic Director Stanley Williams and Managing Director Quentin Easter, whose goal was threefold: to establish a quality theater able to present America’s foremost black playwrights, to provide opportunities for local actors and technicians, and to foster youth development through workshops and outreach programs. The LHT has presented the works of Nobel laureates Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison, Pulitzer Prize winners August Wilson and Alice Walker, and award-winning plays from Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and others. One of its biggest successes was the 1999 production of Marcia Leslie’s play The Trial of One Short-Sighted Woman versus Mamie Louise and Safreeta Mae.
Success did not come easy for Easter and Williams. The early years were rough, but they persevered. It was not until they moved to their present site in downtown San Francisco that things turned around. With help from then-mayor Willie Brown, the LHT moved into a downtown theater at Sutter and Mason. The theater, a 300-seat modified proscenium thrust stage with excellent sight lines, proved to be a hit with all involved. The theater continues to put on five to six productions every year and works collaboratively with other high-profile institutions, like the American Conservatory Theatre, Cultural Odyssey, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, in mutually beneficial endeavors. The theater has attracted over 20,000 patrons over the years and has been honored with many awards, including six Dramalogue Awards, two New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards, the National Black MBA Association Award, San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Cyril Magnin Award, Charles Schwab Renditions Award, National Black Theatre Network Winona Fletcher Award, and California Alliance for Arts Education Award.
LOTT, KARMYN BERTRINA. A playwright, Lott is a native of Amarillo, TX. A graduate of West Texas State University, she studied playwriting at the Henry Street Settlement and at the Negro Ensemble Playwrights unit under Steve Carter. She has written over 15 plays, including We Shall, a celebration of Martin Luther King’s activities during the civil rights movement, and Once upon a Time, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Other plays she authored are His Dream, a children’s play; Pepperwine, a musical play; Old Soldier; Breakfast for My Friend; Hot Sauce; Songs from My Sister; Stop and Think; and Hush Sweet Baby. Lott’s plays have been produced at the Negro Ensemble Company and the Theatre Guinevere. During her career, she has received a Ragdale Foundation writer’s scholarship, a McKnight Foundation fellowship, and a College Access Program Public Service grant. She is a member of the Writer’s Guild.