NATIONAL BLACK THEATRE (NBT). Located in Harlem on 125th Street, the NBT was organized in 1968 by the late Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, a well-known writer, producer, director, teacher, organizer, and actress from East St. Louis, IL. Teer’s journey to the NBT began in 1960 after a promising career at the Negro Ensemble Company and her disenchantment with portraying stereotypical images of blacks on Broadway. She redirected her creative expression to experimenting with an Afrocentric theory of performance training. Audiences and performers undertake a spiritual and cultural journey that liberates spirits, strengthens minds, and raises African American consciousness. This process is achieved through a five-cycle self-awareness technique: “the Nigger,” “the Negro,” “the Militant,” “the Nationalist,” and “the Revolutionary.” Her mission was to maintain and develop cultural traditions of African descent and to counteract the negative aspects of European culture. The NBT became known as the Sun People’s Theatre of Harlem because of its attention to politics, education, entertainment, social- and psychodrama, and African cultural rituals that were reportedly grand, highly energized, and functional. In 1983, Teer expanded her entrepreneurial aspirations for the NBT by purchasing a 64,000-square-foot city block of property on 125th Street and 5th Avenue. The NBT may be the first revenue-generating black theater arts complex in the country and one of the few viable theatrical ventures to survive into the third millennium. This is a testament in large part of the vision and creativity of Teer.
NATIONAL BLACK THEATRE FESTIVAL (NBTF). The NBTF began in 1989, the brainchild of Larry Leon Hamlin, artistic director of the North Carolina Black Repertory Theatre of Winston-Salem. The festival is held every other odd year. It was conceived with the goal of uniting black theater companies in America and ensuring the survival of the genre into the next millennium. It has succeeded beyond its wildest expectations, attracting theater companies, celebrities, and people from all over the world. The NBTF is now considered one of the most historic and culturally significant events in the history of black and American theater. The first festival attracted over 10,000 people. Seventeen theater companies were involved, such as the Negro Ensemble Company, Jomandi Productions, Freedom Theatre, and Cultural Odyssey. They gave over 30 performances in a one-week span. Since then, the NBTF has attracted more than 60,000 people during the six-day event.
The festival has proven to be a windfall for the city of Winston-Salem, bringing in revenues of over $10 million during the one-week period. It has succeeded because of Hamlin’s determination. He was also ably assisted by the venerable Dr. Maya Angelou, an early supporter and professor at nearby Wake Forest University. She served as chairperson for the inaugural festival. Since then, each festival has been overseen by two cochairpersons. Each festival has an overall theme and a set of events structured around performances. Over the years, the bill of fare has changed. There are still workshops on subjects common to black theater but also a reader’s theater of new works, a poetry slam, a black film festival, and offerings of hip-hop theater. Hamlin also initiated a new Performance Black Theatre Series for performance artists. An ongoing feature is the Living Legends Awards Project, where outstanding members of the theatrical profession are honored. Over the years the festival has honored Sidney Poitier, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, August Wilson, Cicely Tyson, Ed Bullins, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Diahann Carroll, Jason Bernard, Lloyd Richards, and a host of other theater artists. By 2001, the NBTF had become an international event. Performances climbed exponentially to over 100 during the week-long event. The plays presented during the festival are disparate and versatile, such as The Dance on Widows Row by Samm-Art Williams, Dink’s Blues by Phillip Hayes Dean, From the Mississippi Delta by Endesha Mae Holland, The Jackie Wilson Story by Jackie Taylor, Rhyme Deferred by Kamilah Forbes, and The Piano Lesson by August Wilson. The festival has grown to the point where it is now underwritten by major corporate sponsors like Coca Cola, Sara Lee, Bank of America, American Express, R. J. Reynolds, Wachovia Bank and Trust, and the city of Winston-Salem. Over the years, the NBTF has become a focal point of cultural significance for black people involved in theater and the arts. On 8 June 2007, the founder and driving force behind the NBTF, Larry Leon Hamlin, died.
NATIONAL BLACK TOURING CIRCUIT (NBTC). The NBTC is based in New York City through the offices of the New Federal Theatre. For the last 32 years, the NBTC has been presenting black plays of substance and clarity to an increasing audience both in the United States and abroad. Conceived by the ubiquitous Woodie King Jr. with the support of the Black Theatre Alliance (BTA), its purpose was twofold: to make black theater productions available to a larger audience and to create a viable mechanism for the economic development of the participating organization by sharing the net proceeds.
King was assisted in the development and nurturing of the plan by Gloria Mitchell of the BTA and by Shauneille Perry, veteran actor and director. After years of fund raising, working out union contracts, and making key contacts, the NBTC opened its first production at the Terrace Theatre in the John F. Kennedy Center in 1975. Using small casts and working on tight budgets, the NBTC has performed in over 175 cities and numerous festivals, including the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, NC, and festivals in Bermuda; England; and Osaka, Japan. Examples of productions over the years include Love to All, Lorraine by Elizabeth Van Dyke, a one-woman show based on the life of the late playwright Lorraine Hansberry; Celebration by Shauneille Perry, comprised of poetry and music from Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sojourner Truth, Stevie Wonder, and others celebrating the African American tradition; Monk ’n Bud by Laurence Holder, a play based on a true incident honoring the spirit and friendship between jazz greats Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell; Rosa Parks by Von H. Washington Sr., a play revealing why Parks refused to move from her bus seat in Montgomery AL, and her life after moving to Detroit; and Grandma’s Quilt by Karen Annette Brown, a one-woman show from the postslavery (see SLAVERY THEME) era to the present day wherein a grandmother explains to her family what the workings on a quilt represent.
NEAL, LAWRENCE “LARRY” PAUL (1937–81). A playwright, author, and scholar, Neal was an important figure of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He was a prime architect in the flowering black arts movement that emerged during this tumultuous time period. A native of Atlanta, GA, Neal grew up in Philadelphia, where he earned a B.A. from Lincoln University (1961) and an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania (1963). He set the tone for a new black aesthetic in his 1964 article “The Negro in the Theatre” and quickly followed with “The Cultural Front,” asserting the need for separate and equal black cultural endeavors. In 1968, he teamed with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) in writing Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. It featured the works of Hoyt Fuller; Sonia Sanchez; Harold Cruse; Calvin C. Hernton; Ed Spriggs; and other poets, playwrights, and short story and essay writers of the black experience. It is the seminal work of the black arts movement.
Between 1963 and 1976, Neal taught writing at Yale University, City College of New York, and Case Western Reserve University. Also, he spent three years as executive director of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. In 1965, Neal and his wife purchased a large brownstone in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem, and it attracted literary figures like Ishmael Reed, Quincy Troupe, and Stanley Crouch, who met there almost weekly for discussions of the arts. During this period, Neal founded and edited several of the most influential journals of the 1960s, Liberator, Soulbook, The Journal of Black Poetry, and Black. In addition, he assisted Baraka in founding the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in 1964 and served as its administrator. Neal is also the writer of two books of poetry, Black Boogaloo (1969) and Hoodoo Hollerin’ Bebop Ghosts (1974).
Neal wrote two plays of note. The Glorious Monster in the Bell of the Horn (1976) is a full-length poetic drama. A day before U.S. forces dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, a group of African American artists and writers talk about what life means to them. New Federal Theatre produced it in New York City (July 1979) for 12 performances. Glenda Dickerson directed the show with music by Max Roach. In an Upstate Motel (1981) is a full-length crime drama. Two convicts hide out from the mafia in an upstate motel. The Negro Ensemble Company produced it in New York City (April–May 1981) for 45 performances. Paul Carter Harrison directed a fine cast featuring Phylicia Ayers-Allen and Carl Gordon. The Guggenheim Foundation awarded Neal a fellowship in 1970 for Afro-American critical studies. After Neal died in 1981, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities established the Larry Neal Writer’s Award. The competition is open to all District of Columbia residents, 8 to 18, for artistic excellence in three genres: poetry, fiction, and essays. Cash awards are presented in each category.
NEAL, ROME. Raised in New York City, Neal is a man of many talents, a performing artist, director, producer, and jazz singer. Since the early 1980s, he has been artistic director of the world-famous Nuyorican Poets Café in Manhattan. His interest in theater began in the early 1970s after he took an acting class at Baruch College and the professor put him in a play. This was the beginning of Neal’s independent self-promotion. He began creating, producing, and directing himself in his own work. Neal burst upon the theatrical scene with his breakout performance in Shango de Ima, which was nominated for and received 11 Audience Development Committee (Audelco) Awards.
Neal’s best-known one-man performance piece is Monk ’n Bud by Laurence Holder, for which Neal received five Audelco Awards—two for acting, two for directing, and one for light design. Monk is about the legendary jazz musician, bassist Thelonious Monk, who died on 17 February 1982, and Bud Powell. The play opened at the Nuyorican in February 2000, where it ran for two months. Neal and Holder moved it to a theater space on 42nd Street and then to the Theatre for the New City and back to the Nuyorican for three weeks before it went on tour. Thereafter, they took it to the National Black Theatre Festival (NBTF) in Winston-Salem, NC (2001), and from there to Philadelphia to the Cleft Note Club, where they performed it twice, and then to Hartford, CT, at the Artists Collective. Monk received critical acclaim at the NBTF and from Jason Zinoman of the New York Times. Neal also collaborated with Holder on two other plays that Holder wrote and Neal directed—Ruby and Pearl, about women in the burlesque business, and Red Channels, about McCarthyism in the 1950s. Another piece Neal both acted in and directed was Signs by Gabrielle N. Lane, a four-character piece that was done at Theatre for the New City and for which he won an Audelco Award as lead actor. Neal and Holder’s next project is The Jazz Singer, in which he sings. It is about a down and out jazz singer who is trying to put his life back together.
NEGRO ENSEMBLE COMPANY (NEC). The NEC was founded in the summer of 1967 under the direction of actor Robert Hooks; actor, playwright, and director Douglas Turner Ward; and producer and director Gerald Krone (white). From its beginning, the NEC was criticized for its integrated administration, its grant from the Ford Foundation, its location in Greenwich Village, and its first season’s bill. Clearly, in its nascent stage, the objective of the NEC was to survive. Events that culminated in the formation of the NEC began in 1965–66 with the production of two one-act plays by Ward, Happy Ending and Day of Absence, both satires. They ran for 15 months off Broadway, and both were popular and critical successes. Hooks was the producer, Krone the producer/manager, and Philip Meister the director, who five years earlier had been unsuccessful in raising enough capital to produce the plays.
Owing to the attention his plays engendered, Ward was asked by the New York Times to write an article on the Afro-American in the theater titled “American Theatre: For Whites Only?” (14 August 1966). Ward stressed the need for an established black theater by African American playwrights with an unfettered, imaginative black angle of vision. He targeted blacks to be his primary audience, but he also wanted to attract a better-informed black audience that shared common experiences to readily understand, debate, and confirm or reject the truth or falsity of the playwrights’ explorations. He also emphasized that he did not want whites to be excluded. Ward’s Times article attracted the attention of W. McNeil Lowrey at the Ford Foundation, motivating them to recommend a grant for such a theater. A formal proposal was written up and submitted, which Ford accepted. Along with cofounders Hooks and Krone, Ward eventually received a Ford grant of $434,000 to establish the NEC. A nucleus already existed in the form of Hooks’s three-year-old Group Theatre Workshop. There was therefore no problem in finding a talent pool. Ward and his cofounders decided to make the St. Marks’ Playhouse at 133 Second Avenue the permanent home of the NEC because it had been the site of Ward’s successful playwriting debut. A clearly defined policy established the company as a black-oriented, black-controlled theater of high professional standards with an extensive training program in all facets of theater from acting to backstage crafts.
The NEC’s inaugural season began in January 1968 with a production of Peter Weiss’s polemic on Portuguese colonialism Song of the Lusitanian Bogey. Generally, critics agreed that the production was skillful and intense, overshadowing the mediocrity of the script. It was this polished and poised production that impressed the critics and the public and established the NEC’s credibility and gave reason to believe blacks could control their destiny in the theater. Much of the NEC’s success, however, was clouded by adverse criticism. Some white critics condemned the Ford Foundation for encouraging black theater groups to remain segregated. Ward came under attack for what was perceived as his dictatorial control over the company and his sanctioning of mediocrity through the production of bland, innocuous plays. Some New York critics and black theatergoers raised a pertinent question: Is the NEC really black theater? Supporting this argument was Harold Cruse’s definition of black theater as an institution completely controlled by blacks financially, technically, and administratively. Because the Ford Foundation, seen by many to epitomize the capitalist establishment, financed the operation of the NEC, it meant the company could not lay claim to financial independence.
Perhaps in capitulation to strong ethnocentric pressure, the NEC’s 1968–69 season was highlighted by a series of black-oriented, black-authored plays. To commemorate its second season (1969–70), the NEC presented God Is a (Guess What?) by Ray McIver and Lonnie Elder III’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. Featured also was a bill of one-act plays that included String by Alice Childress, Contribution by Ted Shine, Malcochon by Derek Walcott, and Man Better Man by Errol Hill, and a European tour finished off the season.
The plays selected during the theater’s early days were Peter Weiss’s Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, Australian playwright Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest. These plays reflected the black experience, but they were not written by African American playwrights. As the company developed, the directors produced more black-authored plays, but they continued to repudiate revolutionary plays, feeling they were simply “bad plays.” Ward said he was tired of handing out leaflets on street corners and writing for the Daily Worker. Ward was no longer interested in what he called the leftist writing. He felt a strong desire to deal with the black experience in all its complexity. That style for Ward may have been naturalistic plays, which the NEC soon started producing. Ward believed black audiences wanted to see these kinds of plays because they could closely identify with the aspirations of the characters.
The NEC produced a line of successful plays, all more or less naturalistic evocations of black family life, most notably Lonne Elder III’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (1969), Phillip Hayes Dean’s The Sty of the Blind Pig (1971), Joseph Walker’s The River Niger (1972), and Leslie Lee’s The First Breeze of Summer (1975). Although these plays did do well commercially, the NEC did not restrict itself to naturalistic family dramas. To back its promise to introduce new playwrights and actors, to develop new resources, and to explore uncharted aesthetic frontiers, the company experimented with plays that varied in style, form, content, and perspective. The range of styles extended from the symbolic realism depicted in John Scott’s Ride a Black Horse (1970–71) to Lennox Brown’s use of symbolic expressionism in A Ballet behind the Bridge (1971–72). After Paul Carter Harrison mildly rebuked the NEC in his book The Drama of Nommo for ambivalently capitulating to white standards, the NEC mounted Harrison’s “cosmic focused” ritual The Great MacDaddy during the 1973–74 season. Clearly, a precedent was set this second season, for the company went on to produce new plays by young and previously unknown black playwrights. In a decade, the NEC had compiled a stellar roster of playwrights that listed the names of Lonne Elder III, Joseph A. Walker, Paul Carter Harrison, Leslie Lee, Phillip Hayes Dean, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Lennox Brown, John Scott, Silas Jones, Judi Ann Mason, Steve Carter, Charles Fuller, Gus Edwards, and Samm-Art Williams.
Besides promoting playwrights, the NEC has boosted the careers of many actors and actresses, some of whom went on to achieve greater exposure in film and television. At one time or another, the NEC boasted a roster that included Moses Gunn, Frances Foster, Adolph Caesar, Denise Nicholas, Roxie Roker, Esther Rolle, Rosalind Cash, David Downing, Judyann Elder, Arthur French, Hattie Winston, Clarice Taylor, Allie Woods, and Ron O’Neal. Others who performed with the NEC are Stephanie Mills, Cleavon Little, Richard Roundtree, Lauren Jones, and Roscoe Lee Browne. A large portion of contemporary African American dramatic literature has come from NEC productions. And most certainly, the artistic quality of many of those productions was enhanced by such designers as Edward Burbridge. Before going on to design for Broadway, the movies, and television, scene designer Burbridge worked with the NEC on such shows as The Lusitanian Bogey and the road company production of The River Niger.
Just as the Free Southern Theatre had done several years earlier, the NEC in 1978 faced the reality of possible extinction and decided to devise constructive plans to ensure its survival. New programs were instituted to revitalize and reinstitutionalize the organizational structure. Through developmental projects, production activity was increased and strengthened. While a complete overhaul of the administrative and artistic staffs was affected through changes in personnel, the corporate board was expanded. Professionals were hired to administer, attract outside support, and ensure the institution’s stability. Classroom instruction was replaced by an apprenticeship program and on-the-job training. The company expanded its playwrights’ unit and continued its commitment to the discovery of new playwrights. Certainly, the NEC demonstrated its interest in showcasing the works of young black playwrights with its “Works in Progress” Program for the 1971–72 season. Playwrights from other theater companies were also asked to participate. By presenting the plays of Ed Bullins, Martie Evans-Charles, and Sonia Sanchez, the NEC used the occasion to show its impartiality and nonsectarianism. The company was not indifferent toward other mediums of entertainment, especially television, which broadcast The First Breeze of Summer (WNET) and Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (ABC). A film version was made of The River Niger, but because the NEC was allowed only minuscule input, the company escapes blame for the movie’s artistic and commercial failure.
In July 1980, the NEC moved to a larger theater farther uptown at 424 West 55th Street. Its first major production in the new Theatre Four facility was not until October 1980, when they presented Samm-Art Williams’s The Sixteenth Round. New York Times critic Mel Gussow gave the play and the performance a less than enthusiastic review. Although opening night had been postponed while the script was shortened and some roles strengthened, it seems the play was still not ready for production. That aside, the NEC saw the move as a renaissance of sorts. The main goal was to make the theater company, at least, completely self-sufficient. Consensus among NEC members was that the company should try to get along on box-office receipts and subscriptions rather than foundation largesse. Nonetheless, the company expected to receive a $300,000 grant from their biggest benefactor, the Ford Foundation. By 1980, Ford had granted NEC nearly $2 million. Still, the company felt it could generate enough income to maintain its self-sufficiency by raising ticket prices, mainly producing works by established playwrights, and depending on its new location to attract a larger, mixed audience. A year before the NEC’s historic move uptown, Douglas Turner Ward represented the company in Zambia, Central Africa. For two weeks during the summer of 1979, Ward directed a project jointly sponsored by the Zambian government and the International Theatre Institute of Paris. Working in a village not far from the Zambian capital of Lusaka, Ward helped young African actors prepare skits designed to entertain and educate the villagers.
After Ward, the original founder of the NEC, left the company, O. L. Duke took over as artistic director in 2002. His tenure was short lived, as he died in an auto accident in 2004. Charles Weldon, an NEC member since 1970 and a veteran of stage and screen, was selected as the new artistic director. Under his direction, the NEC had diversified into a more full-service theater. The company took on an aura of a school or academy by adding several components to its overall program. In addition to their long-standing curriculum of acting, playwriting, and technical theater, the NEC also offered courses in video production, commercial theater management, producing, advertising, and a public school training component. It was one of the more diversified theaters in the country.
The NEC still takes pride in its playwrights’ workshop that has developed so many fine writers over the years and exposed their work to thousands of people, but it is no longer a producing entity grinding out five to six productions a year. Instead, Artistic Director Weldon has opted to produce one play each year to keep a firm hand on overall operations. In 2006, Weldon chose Jimmy Barden’s Offspring, a play that explores the insidious ways in which racial prejudice nearly always triumphs over racial solutions. In 2007, the NEC welcomed back NEC alumnus Samm-Art Williams and his new play The Waiting Room. The play is a dramedy set in a hospital waiting room where strange things happen when friends and relatives gather around a loved one who appears to be at death’s door.
The NEC has also changed its fund-raising approach, staying away from the troubles of “soft money” that plagued them so much in the past. Aside from tuition fees and touring production money, they have been successful in attracting funding from a variety of sources on an ongoing and long-range basis. At this writing, the NEC seems to have found a formula that augurs well for the long-term success of the company. But it is a far cry from its storied, checkered past, when they reigned as the premier black play–producing entity in the land, staging such classics as A Soldier’s Play, The River Niger, Sty of the Blind Pig, Dream on Monkey Mountain, The Great MacDaddy, and God Is a (Guess What?). Whether it will once again become a producing entity is difficult to foresee, but here in the 21st century, it has its two feet on the ground, stable funding, and a richly deserved reputation for turning out grounded, knowledgeable, and talented people in every area of the theater.
NELSON, MARCUS. A black theater director and playwright, Nelson was executive director of the New Concept Theatre (NCT) in Chicago, now defunct. His play of note was The Essence of Pathos (1975), a drama about Richard Wright, short-story writer, playwright, and author of Native Son (1940) who fled America to become an expatriate in France. The NCT produced it in 1975.
NELSON, NOVELLA. Functioning as an actor, administrator, director, and cabaret singer, Nelson has had a broad and diverse career in the arts. In a lengthy 30-year career, she has made numerous appearances onstage, in nightclubs, on television, and in movies. Born in Brooklyn, Nelson began her career as a vocalist but soon became interested in the theater. Joseph Papp of the New York Shakespeare Festival saw a production of Nigger Nightmare by Walter Jones, a play Nelson had directed, and was so impressed that he hired her as his artistic consultant. She wore many hats, serving as a conduit to the black community, as Papp’s personal assistant, and as producer of the “Sundays at the Public” Program. This was during the volatile civil rights period of the 1970s, when she also directed several plays, including Richard Wesley’s Black Terror and Edgar White’s Les Femmes Noires.
Since then, Nelson has worked primarily as an actor and director, with an occasional cabaret performance in between. Between 1970 and 1995, she appeared on Broadway 11 times, either as a producing consultant, actor, director, or understudy. She has performed in several regional theaters across the country. They include the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and Lincoln Center in New York City. Her list of television and movie credits includes The Starter Wife, Antwone Fischer, Bailey’s Café, Preaching to the Choir, Girl 6, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, 100 Centre Street, The West Wing, Head of State, The Littlest Victim, and The Cotton Club. Nelson remains a working professional actor, an icon of the American theater.
NEW FEDERAL THEATRE (NFT). The NFT was formed by Woodie King Jr. in 1971. A few years earlier, he had helped to organize Concept East Theatre in Detroit with Ron Milner. For over 35 years, the NFT accomplished an unparalleled record of excellence with over 180 theatrical productions, encompassing 5,000 performances with some of the finest performers and playwrights in the country. It was named after the Hallie Flannigan Federal Theatre that was active during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The NFT was housed at the Henry Street Settlement on New York’s Lower East Side. It was not a black theater per se but rather a multicultural institution that served a diverse, low-income community in lower Manhattan. It had a number of programs and components to serve the community.
The theater was a godsend for performers and playwrights. Among the array of performers whose careers were launched at the NFT are Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Phylicia Allen-Rashad, and Laurence Fishburne. Playwrights too were afforded opportunities to workshop their plays at the NFT, such as J. E. Franklin’s Black Girl; Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf; James de Jongh’s Do Lord, Remember Me; Ron Milner’s What the Winesellers Buy; and David Henry Hwang’s The Dance and the Railroad. Aside from productions, the NFT also offered vocational training workshops in all phases of theater, dance, and film. The emphasis was to provide the tools necessary for low-income and minority students to compete in the workplace for employment in the arts or related areas.
Almost from the beginning, the theater prospered because of the plays King selected for production. The NFT won Audience Development Committee Awards, Obie Awards, Drama Desk Awards, Tony Awards, and a host of others. Milner’s What the Winesellers Buy attracted the interest of Joseph Papp of the New York Shakespeare Festival NYSF/Public Theatre. In collaboration with King, they moved the play to Lincoln Center. It was the first black play to be presented there. The team of King and Papp also took Shange’s Colored Girls to Broadway, where it played for over a year. After the Broadway run, it toured nationally and recouped its investment three times over. It was also presented on television via American Playhouse. David Henry Hwang’s The Dance and the Railroad was moved to the NYSF/Public Theatre, where it ran for six months, winning three Obie Awards. In addition, Damien Leake’s Child of the Sun won the coveted Richard Rodgers Production Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
NEW HERITAGE REPERTORY THEATRE COMPANY (NHRTC). Two significant factors within the Black Theatre Alliance have been the NHRTC and its founding artistic director, Roger Furman. When Furman formulated the NHRTC in 1964, he had already established himself as a moving force in black theater. Furman’s involvement in black community theater goes back to the 1940s, when as a very young artist he designed sets for the American Negro Theatre. Even before the dynamic 1960s, this artist, writer, set designer, producer, and director had responded to the needs of black theater by organizing the Negro Art Players in 1952. Furman’s purpose was to bring summer stock to Harlem. This modest venture was undertaken ambitiously with little money and few convinced backers. Despite obstacles, Furman was successful in negotiating with the Elks Community Theatre to present three one-act plays in July 1952. This bill included Tennessee Williams’s Mooney’s Kid Don’t Cry, Furman’s The Quiet Laughter, and Charles Griffin’s The Oklahoma Bearcat. Furman’s contributions during this time are even more noteworthy because they were several years in advance of the events and personages credited with launching the black theater movement. Furthermore, in 1964, Furman served as field supervisor of the Harlem Youth Opportunity Unlimited, a Harlem-based arts and cultural program that funded Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones) epoch-making Black Arts Repertory Theatre School.
Furman originally called the group the New Heritage Players but later renamed it the NHTRC. Being somewhat older than most of the theater artists he worked with during the 1960s, Furman felt no inner pressure to conform to the philosophy of the black arts movement. Denying any inspiration from that sector, he declared his own purpose to be the production of quality plays as a means of communicating with the masses of black people in the New York City area. Although the NHTRC was seriously involved in street theater as a medium serving the liberation struggle, Furman objected to overly rhetorical, didactic theater. He believed that to preach to people in deprived communities about injustice and inequality is to be redundant and that street theater should emerge out of the communities by using the language and experiences of the people who live there. Furman also believed theater of the street required a special program of actor training with emphasis on discipline and that plays should be short and fast and deal with such problems as housing, drugs, police–community relations, and welfare.
Because actors are subordinate to the community that is both the source of and the actual milieu for their action, Furman initiated a system of on-the-job training that permitted NHRTC actors to receive training through public performances. The company began in 1964 with a rigorous schedule of daily workshops and rehearsals that culminated in street theater productions. Three Shades of Harlem, coauthored by Furman and Don Brunson, was presented in June 1965. It was performed at the YWCA on 125th Street and was the company’s formal stage debut. Though the staging of the play was more conventional, this work was said to reflect Furman’s concept of street theater. It was a moving, humorous panorama of the community and told of the community’s problems, hopes, and dreams. Before finally settling down in one place, the NHRTC was forced into a peripatetic existence. This journey began in the fall of 1965, when the company accepted an invitation to use space in Public School 125 on 127th Street. Two years later, another move took the company to East Harlem and a larger space at Intermediate School 201. In late 1969, the NHRTC moved to the location that became its permanent residence: 43 East 125th Street. Furman turned what was a veritable wasteland in the form of an empty, dilapidated loft into a well-designed intimate amphitheater. The company presented plays that were either written or directed by Furman, including Three Shades of Harlem, with Doris Brunson (1965); Hip, Black and Angry, an original company production directed by Furman (1967); Renegade Theatre (1968); The Gimmick, To Kill a Devil (1970); Another Shade of Harlem (1970); and The Long Binck Block (1972).
Furman’s version of street theater was the Grass Roots Players, the name he gave to these performers who appeared regularly in NHRTC productions. True to his goal, Furman went directly to the community to find audiences for his company’s productions. Word of new productions was spread primarily through a grassroots grapevine because limited funds prohibited commercially bought publicity. The group also got notice through organs dedicated to serving the black theater movement, such as Black 46 Black Theatre. Furman’s method of interviewing the audience after each performance was an effective way of acquiring empirical, on-the-spot feedback without relying on analyses from interpretative critics. This way he could assess the success of the production from the point of view of the audience itself. Direct audience contact, moreover, allowed him to personally promote black theater and black culture and solicit community support.
NEW HORIZON THEATRE (NHT). Located in Pittsburgh, PA, the NHT was established in 1992. Its goals, according to Ernie McCarthy, the artistic director, were to bring high-quality cultural events that glorify and reflect the African American aesthetic and to provide a professional venue for their development. It has been a godsend for local writers, performers, directors, and technicians. It evolved from its humble beginnings in a church community center to its current home, the majestic Kelly Strayhorn Theatre in East Liberty. The play offerings for the 2005–6 season attest to the variety of themes: A Soldier’s Play by Charles Fuller (September–October 2005), readings and excerpts from My One Good Nerve by Ruby Dee (February 2006), Purlie Victorious by Ossie Davis (February 2006), and American Menu by Don Wilson Glenn (May–June 2006).
NEW LAFAYETTE THEATRE (NLT). Established in 1966, the NLT reflected the aesthetic and social philosophy of its founder and director, Robert MacBeth. During its six-year existence (1967–73), the NLT was a prolific and resourceful black theater company in Harlem. MacBeth attended Morehouse College in Atlanta and served in the armed forces before studying at the Actor’s Studio. There he met another young director, Adam Miller, and they decided to form a regional theater in which plays about blacks written primarily by black playwrights would be presented. This was in the late 1960s, and MacBeth was averse to the proposition of integration in the theater merely for the sake of integration. He believed that too many plays by black playwrights had been inordinately concerned with black–white social problems. What was needed, he felt, was a community of artists and a community of audience that are equal participants in the theatrical event. MacBeth also criticized the missionary syndrome prevalent in American society that takes an “outside to inside” approach to social, political, educational, and cultural matters in the black community. He sensed something distasteful and even destructive in the posture of “advantaged” outsiders bringing educational and cultural enlightenment to the “disadvantaged.” Deprived minorities faced problems in the inner city, but MacBeth proposed techniques, methods, and concepts that were organic to the body politic.
Consciously reflected in the theater’s name, the NLT was an attempt to bridge history and recreate conditions of the past. The old Lafayette Theatre of the early decade of the 1900s had served the Harlem community and in turn was served by it. MacBeth intended to bring black artists into closer contact with the black community so they could be reoriented to black life. He viewed the black community in a national rather than a local sense. There were black artists and black communities all over the United States, but there was no point at which they could converge and commune.
The NLT, according to MacBeth, would become a Mecca to be visited by artists from across the country, who would take back to their communities the inspiration and knowledge gained from their experience. This way, the NLT proposed to serve as a “national community theater.” The infrastructure for this cultural nerve center was composed of 40 participating black artists who were actors, musicians, designers, and technicians. Their singular purpose was to perform at the highest possible level of excellence.
The NLT added another philosophical and creative dimension to its structure. MacBeth avowed that plays by white playwrights would be accepted as long as they depicted the playwright’s experiences with blacks. Also, plays by socially conscious white writers, such as Bertolt Brecht, were acceptable if they portrayed the experiences of blacks honestly. Under no circumstances would plays by whites about blacks be welcomed. Ed Bullins was in complete agreement with MacBeth on the purposes and goals of a black theater, and he quickly became a spokesman for the NLT. Bullins’s vision for the NLT and black theater was for artists to learn how to come together and form their own institutions and their own vehicles and corporations, to take their talents and give them to the people, and to have something to build upon. Bullins also saw the need for black publishing, film, radio companies, and black communications so that a black person would never have an excuse to go someplace else to work.
Bullins’s vision was realized, but a suspicious calamity befell the NLT before it could make its most impressive accomplishments. On 31 January 1968, a fire destroyed the first theater, which had opened in October 1967 at 132nd Street and 7th Avenue. This site had sentimental value because it was the original location of the old Lafayette Theatre of the 1920s and 1930s. But in December 1968, the company opened a new theater at 137th Street and 7th Avenue. After this, a succession of events occurred. From December 1968 through January 1969, Bullins’s In the Wine Time was presented. This was followed in by a revival of Who’s Got His Own by Ron Milner (February 1969). We Righteous Bombers by Bullins under his pseudonym Kingsley B. Bass Jr. was produced (April–June 1969). The first of a series of black rituals began (August 1969) with A Ritual to Bind Together and Strengthen Black People So That They Can Survive the Long Struggle That Is to Come. In the middle of all this production activity, in September 1969, the NLT launched the New Lafayette Theatre Agency, a nonprofit play service that handled the plays of NLT playwrights. Two plays by Bullins were also presented, Goin’ a Buffalo (October–December 1969) and To Raise the Dead and Foretell the Future, a black ritual (March 1970). Bullins’s The Duplex ran from May through July 1970. That August, the NLT presented a play without words, A Black Time for Black Folk. Described as a “New Lafayette creation,” The Devil Catchers ran from November 1970 through January 1971. While awaiting the opening of their new theater, the NLT had not been idle. With members of the NFT, MacBeth directed three of Bullins’s plays off Broadway at the American Place Theatre (March 1968). They were A Son, Come Home; The Electronic Nigger; and Clara’s Ole Man.
In September 1968, the NLT issued its first publication, Black Theatre: A Periodical of the Black Theatre Movement. Several members of the company’s playwriting corps achieved name recognition, especially Richard Wesley, Sonia Sanchez, Sonny Jim Gaines, Ben Caldwell, Marvin X, Sharon Stockard (Martin), and Martie Evans-Charles. Whitman Mayo and Roscoe Orman were two of the company’s stand-out actors. The NLT also offered free acting classes for children aged 8 to 12 and provided free theater tickets to the community and general public, graciously funded by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Foundation, and individual patrons.
Although the NLT began with the promise that black theater should draw upon the community it serves for talent and material, critics have alleged that in some ways the organization, rather than living up to its promises to the community, became exclusive and sectarian. Some of the critics even charged that the addition of Bullins as playwright-in-residence made the theater a virtual showcase for his plays. Critic Ron Neal seemed convinced that the NLT’s rituals could not have been done at the Apollo Theatre, where the tastes of the black masses prevail. In Neal’s opinion, these rituals wasted creative and artistic energy. He found the rituals to be pretentious and self-consciously pedantic when compared with the National Black Theatre’s rituals, which were reportedly grand, highly energized, and functional. The NLT was also criticized for wasteful expenditures, for not using the best talent available, and for letting the artistic level of its productions drop considerably. For whatever reasons, the NLT in the winter of 1972 voted itself out of existence. For some people, this was the end of a glorious epoch of black theater that began in the mid-1960s.
NEW YORK DRAMA CRITICS’ CIRCLE AWARDS. On 22 September 1935, a prominent group of theater critics of the New York City newspapers, magazines, and wire services (except the New York Times) met at the Algonquin Hotel and formalized the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards. They established an annual award for the best new play produced in New York City by an American playwright. The winners would be awarded the Poor Plaque, named after and designed by artist Henry Varnum Poor. It became the second major drama award in that city; the Toast of New York (Tony) Awards being the first.
The founding members comprised New York’s finest critics, George Jean Nathan (Vanity Fair, Esquire, Newsweek, Scribner’s, and Life), Burns Mantle (New York Daily News), Percy Hammond (New York Herald Tribune), John Mason Brown (New York Post), Robert Benchley (The New Yorker), Walter Winchell (New York Mirror), Stark Young (The New Republic), Gilbert Gabriel (New York American), John Anderson (New York Evening Journal), Whitney Bolton (New York Morning Telegraph), and Joseph Wood Krutch (The Nation), along with New York theater critics Robert Garland, Kelcey Allen, Richard Lockridge, Rowland Field, and Arthur Pollack. As the first order of business, the group elected Atkinson as president and mandated that the award winner must receive a three-quarters simple majority vote from the organization. For the 1937–38 season, the group voted to expand the best American play category to include a best new foreign play category.
The first African American to win the Best New Play Award was Lorraine Hansberry during the 1958–59 season for A Raisin in the Sun; she was also the youngest winner at age 28. Other plays by black writers to receive citations for this award were Ain’t Misbehavin’ for best musical (1977–78), A Soldier’s Play (1981–82), and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984–85). Ma Rainey was August Wilson’s first award and the first of his eight plays the group honored with this award. The others were Fences (1986–87), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1987–88), The Piano Lesson (1989–90), Two Trains Running (1991–92), Seven Guitars (1995–96), Jitney (1999–2000), and Radio Golf (2005–6). In between the Wilson cycle of plays, writer/actress Anna Deavere Smith won this award for her unique contribution to the theatrical form (1993–94).
NEWTON, VALERIE CURTIS. Newton is a working director whose home base is the University of Washington, where she is an associate professor in acting and directing and head of directing. She is also the artistic director of the Hansberry Project, an African American theater lab—an adjunct of A Contemporary Theatre (ACT), one of Seattle’s three professional theaters. She has directed plays or been involved in new play development with the Southern Repertory Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, New York Theatre Workshop, Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Women Playwrights Festival, and the Mark Taper Forum. Among the plays she has directed are Stevedore; Stop Kiss; Wine in the Wilderness; Mojo and the Sayso; Yellowman; Flight; Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992; Wedding Band; and To Be Young, Gifted, and Black.
Newton’s father was in the military and finally settled down long enough to guide her studies at Holy Cross University in 1981. She accepted a scholarship by the University of Washington, which included managing its Ethnic Cultural Theatre. That experience and her previous stint as artistic director for the Performing Ensemble of Hartford paved the way for her appointment to the Drama School at the University of Washington. Newton worked in the 1997–98 National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Career Development Program for directors, assisting Tina Landau, Gordon Edelstein, Douglas Hughes, and Sharon Ott, among others. Newton is also the recipient of the prestigious Sir John Gielgud directing fellowship, awarded by the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation.
NO PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY: A BLACK–BLACK COMEDY (1967). A drama in three acts by Charles Gordone, No Place to Be Somebody was the first African American play to be awarded the esteemed Pulitzer Prize. Set in a New York City bar, it focuses on characters whose lives intersect with barkeeper Johnny Williams, a gangster, and black and white prostitutes, an ex-convict, politicians, and idealists. Inflicted with the “Charlie fever,” Johnny is trying to gain control of the local rackets from the area syndicate by enlisting a number of his associates in his scheme. For over 15 years, No Place was the most produced African American play both professionally and at institutions of higher education. First staged off Broadway, it soon drew critical and popular attention. Productions were mounted at the Sheridan Square Playhouse in New York City, where it was first presented (November 1967); the Richard Barr’s Playwrights Unit in New York City (December 1967); off Broadway by Joseph Papp at the Other Stage (April 1969); and at the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Public Theatre (May 1969–October 1970) for a total run of 312 performances. This run was interrupted for a special engagement presented on Broadway by American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) at the ANTA Theatre for 16 performances (1970). Under the direction of the author, the show was produced again on Broadway at the Promenade Theatre (1970–72) and at theaters throughout the country with the National Touring Company (1970–74) headed by a cast of Philip Thomas and Terry Alexander. Following the national tour, the production returned to the Morosco Theatre on Broadway for a limited run (1974). In addition to the aforementioned honors, Gordone also won a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and a Drama Desk Award (Vernon Rice Award), all for No Place.
NORTH CAROLINA BLACK REPERTORY THEATRE (NCBRT). The NCBRT, founded by the mercurial Larry Leon Hamlin, the dominating force behind the success of the theater, has been in existence since 1979. Though the NCBRT is one of the more successful black theaters in the country, it is perhaps known best as the home of the National Black Theatre Festival, an event held every other year that attracts the crème de la crème of black theater from all over the world. The event is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the state of North Carolina.
Hamlin, who has a business degree from Johnson and Wales University, also studied theater at Brown University under the late George Houston Bass. Hamlin started the NCBRT in an innovative way, by selling memberships ranging from $10 to $100. Over $2,000 was raised to underwrite the first production, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, which was held at Winston-Salem State University. Hamlin used grassroots techniques in selling theater to the community by performing excerpts and monologues in living rooms, churches, sorority and fraternity houses, libraries, and other establishments of note. Excerpts from such plays as Joseph White’s Ol Judge Mose Is Dead and Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones) Great Goodness of Life were then later performed in full at various venues around the city. Building his base further in 1981, Hamlin created the theater’s own Theatre Guild, a kind of reverse subscription base to support the theater on a long-range basis. Support continued to grow through the years but escalated when the NCBRT attained nonprofit 501(c)3 status in 1984. They not only attracted funding from the Winston-Salem Arts Council but also from corporate sponsors like the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and Sara Lee.
The NCBRT has continued producing theater at venues like the Arts Council and at four other locations in the Winston-Salem area. They have continued apace, producing such plays and musicals as Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope by Micki Grant; Who’s Got His Own by Ron Milner; And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou; The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill, Black Nativity by Langston Hughes; and Fences by August Wilson. In 2004, the NCBRT celebrated its 21st anniversary. Unfortunately, three years later on 8 June 2007, its founder Larry Leon Hamlin died. The fate of the NCBRT remains uncertain.
NOTTAGE, LYNN. A playwright and educator, Nottage has emerged as one of the finest playwrights of the 21st century. Her play Intimate Apparel (2004) received unanimous praise and two prestigious awards for best play from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle and the Outer Critics Circle. Another play, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, also garnered praise from critics and audiences across the nation. Nottage, a native of Brooklyn, had already written her first play at age eight. She received a B.A. from Brown University (1987) and an M.F.A. in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama (1989), where she was also a visiting lecturer in playwriting. Immediately thereafter, she spent four years working for Amnesty International. Her first play, Poof, was entered in the short play competition at the Actors Theatre in Louisville and won the Heideman Award. It was subsequently mounted at the Human Festival and was a rousing success. Poof and subsequent plays have been produced all over the country by such theaters as Playwrights Horizons, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Center Stage, and Yale Repertory Theatre. They have also been performed in Europe, China, and Ireland. Despite taking a seven-year break from writing, Nottage has produced a representative number of plays, including Por’ Knockers; Mud, River, Stone; A Walk through Time, A Children’s Musical; A Stone’s Throw/The Antigone Project; Snapshot; Las Meninas; and Fabulation; or, The Re-Education of Undine. Nottage received numerous honors and awards. They include the Laura Pels Award, New Dramatists fellowship, Manhattan Theatre Club fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group grant for a year-long residency at Freedom Theatre, Francesca Primus Award for emerging female playwright, and Guggenheim fellowship.
NUBIAN THEATRE COMPANY (NCT). Based in Memphis, TN, the NTC is a vibrant professional musical theater company with members in Washington, DC; Texas; and New York. The talented company began in 1980 in Washington, DC, under the creative leadership of Ayubu Bakari. Two years later, Deborah Adero Ferguson brought the company to Memphis, where their animated performances have delighted audiences of all ages throughout the Mid-South. The NCT is the only folkloric musical theater company in the region that specializes in presenting folklore and dance in Africa and African American cultures. Their performances have taken them from the John F. Kennedy performing center in Washington, DC, to the Isle of Bermuda and throughout the East Coast and the Mid-South. Instrumental in the development of the “Arts in the School” Program in the Memphis City Schools, the educational and entertaining performance ensemble is one of Memphis’s and the world’s most delightful treasures.