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Black History Month Legend – Lloyd Richards – Black Theater Matters - 360WISE MEDIA
Born in Toronto, Canada – but raised in Detroit, Michigan – by Jamaican parents, Lloyd Richards was some of the vital figures in American theater within the second half of the twentieth century. He was the primary African American to direct a play on Broadway, a champion of greater than three generations of young actors, directors and playwrights, including the discovering playwright August Wilson. Richards helped develop the Pulitzer Prize winner’s voice by collaborating on Wilson’s significant early stage works and directed their acclaimed Broadway performances. Wilson’s stories chronicling the struggle of African Americans for dignity and respect, giving a voice to the boys and girls Richards and Wilson knew all too well from their humble pasts.
When he was 4 years old, Richards moved his family across the Canadian border to Detroit. There, his carpenter father found a job in one in every of the automotive factories. Richards was only nine years old when his father died, leaving his mother to boost five children alone within the depths of the Great Depression. The remainder of his youth was marked by poverty and hardship: his mother worked as a domestic employee to support her five children. Life became even harder for the Richards family when, two years later, Mrs. Richards became blind as a consequence of her doctor’s negligence. Lloyd, at just 13 years old, went to work shining shoes and sweeping floors at a barbershop to assist put food on the table. Later, as a student at Wayne State University in Detroit, Richards earned money as an elevator operator, taking his classmates to classes on the 4 floors of the Old Main Building.
The Richards family believed within the importance of education, and despite their difficult circumstances, he and his siblings were encouraged to check hard and go to varsity. He became involved in theater as a youngster and majored in it at Wayne State University. His studies were interrupted by World War II. He volunteered for a segregated division of U.S. Army fighter pilots often called the Tuskegee Airmen. After the tip of the war in 1945, he was in training.
After returning to Detroit, he sought out stage roles, working as a disc jockey, and helped start a theater company. With limited options for motion, Richards moved to New York in 1947. It was difficult to search out roles for African-American actors, but Richards found several roles on Broadway. In particular, he found employment within the dramas “Freight” and “The Egghead”. In the Nineteen Fifties, he found a job in radio, nevertheless it was more “secret”. Although Richards had a well-trained voice that conformed to the common Midwestern speech standard, radio productions took a risk in hiring him. If it were discovered that his radio work was handled by a black actor, programs throughout the South could be faraway from the air. The
From left to right: Sidney Pointier, Paul Mann and Richards
In between off-Broadway roles, Richards waited tables and located a gentle job as an acting teacher at Paul Mann Studios. It was at this class that he met one other struggling actor, Sidney Poitier. Sharing their Jamaican heritage, Richards and Poitier formed a lifelong friendship. Poitier eventually introduced him to playwright Lorraine Hansberry, which led to Richards’ first exposure to directing. The play was titled “A Raisin in the Sun” and was a groundbreaking, original production that premiered on March 11, 1959 on the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway. The show was nominated for several Tony Awards, including Best Director, and Richards received the excellence of being the primary African American to ever direct a play on Broadway.
Despite the success of “A Raisin in the Sun”, Richards found it difficult to provide one other hit. He directed the stage adaptation of Richard Wright’s novels “The Long Sleep” and “The Moon under Siege.” Both shows closed of their first week of performances. He then ventured into works that didn’t focus exclusively on African-American themes, equivalent to the 1965 musical adaptation of “The Yearling,” only to shut it the evening after opening. He was hired to direct a staged adaptation of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, but bumped into problems with the producers and was fired from the series.
Left to right: Richards and playwright Lorraine Hansberry on the Ethel Barrymoore Theatre
Once again, Lloyd Richards has leaned on his past as a couch potato actor. In 1966, he became director of the actor training program on the School of the Arts at New York University. In 1968, he became director of the National Playwrights Conference on the O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. The conference, held annually as a part of summer workshops, brings together a bunch of playwrights – some well-known, others emerging – to bring their latest work to its final version with the assistance of residents, a director and a playwright. Under his direction, O’Neill developed latest works by John Guare, Arthur Kopit, Wendy Wasserstein, Christopher Durang, and David Henry Hwang. African or African-American playwrights who created plays include Derek Wolcott, Wole Soyinka, Charles OyamO Gordon, Richard Wesley, Philip Hayes Dean, and most famously August Wilson.
He was a professor of theater and cinema at Hunter College in New York before becoming dean of the distinguished Yale University School of Drama in 1979. At the identical time, he became artistic director of the hugely influential Yale Repertory Theater.
Throughout his profession, Lloyd Richards sought to find and develop latest plays and playwrights, as a member of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Playwrights selection committee and the Ford Foundation’s New American Plays program, and as artistic director of the National Conference of Playwrights on the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theater Center since 1968 until 1999. Richards’ long seek for a brand new, vital American playwright resulted within the 1984 production of August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” In the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, Richards directed productions of August Wilson’s multi-part chronicle of African American life at Yale Rep and New York. Shows on this series include “Fences,” Joe Turner’s “Come and Gone,” “The Piano Lesson,” “Two Trains Going” and “Seven Guitars.” They ended their skilled relationship in 1996 after the production of “Seven Guitars” on Broadway.
Richards’ television credits included segments on “Roots: The Next Generation,” “Bill Moyers’ Journal” and “Robeson,” a take a look at the lifetime of African-American actor and activist Paul Robeson, who was an early inspiration for the young Lloyd Richards. Richards also tackled Robeson’s life and legacy within the 1977 stage play “Paul Robeson.” Richards was the recipient of the Pioneer Award of AUDELCO, the Frederick Douglass Award, and in 1993 received the National Medal of Arts. He also served as president of the Association of Directors and Choreographers.
Richards retired from Yale in 1991 and from the O’Neill Center in 1999. He suffered from heart problems in his later years and died of heart failure on June 29, 2006, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. It was his 87th birthday. Survivors include his wife, Barbara Davenport Richards, a former Broadway dancer whom he married in 1957, and their sons, Scott and Thomas.
This article was originally published on : blacktheatrematters.org
National Black Theatre, founded by the late Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, is now accepting applications for its 2020-2021 Soul Producing Residency.
First launched in 2015, the Soul Producing Residency is a training ground for Black artists whose mission is to “empower the next generation of producers, CEOs and curators of the future.” The eight-month program recognizes one Black producer who will receive a minimum stipend of $10,000, administrative support and access to office space, skilled development opportunities and real-time skilled experience culminating in a self-produced one-day event.
Applications can be accepted until July 1 at 11:59 p.m. Click here to use.
This article was originally published on : blacktheatrematters.org
The Apollo Theater is an iconic, legendary place in New York. Many great black artists, equivalent to Ella Fitzgerald and Stevie Wonder, began their careers in its hallowed halls.
And yet, so much for the director, Oscar and Emmy winner Roger Ross Williams“Amazingly, despite 85 years of history, knowledge and power built into these partitions, there has never been a definitive document about this famous theater.
“For me, Apollo embodies what it means to be black in America. It’s a hub, kind of a nucleus of black culture, black music, black art and 85 years of history,” Williams explained to ESSENCE in a telephone interview.
Williams felt he had no selection but to share this vital piece of Black history with others. And so the documentary premieres on HBO on November 6 at 9 p.m. EST.
It’s show time
Williams, the first black director to win an Oscar, skillfully wove the unique history of the Music Hall, with particular attention to the iconic Amateur Nights, with hope for the future and legacy of Apollo, using the stage adaptation of Ta- Nehisi Coats’s award-winning book confirms this thesis.
“Amateur Nights began in 1934 and for the first time the public had the opportunity to choose the winner. That’s saying a lot because there’s nothing better than a Harlem audience. Black audiences are responding,” Williams emphasized. “There is a call and response of the artist and the audience that is based in the Black church, so when you were an artist there, when you were at the Apollo, it felt like you were going to church.”
But the film just isn’t only about what was happening at the Apollo, but in addition about what was happening in Harlem and across the country at the time – highlighted by Billie Holiday’s mournful voice shouting “” or when James Brown loudly announced: from his “I’m Black and I’m Proud” scenes.
“Apollo is the town hall. “It is much more than a house of music and entertainment,” Williams said. “It is a home where we have expressed who we are as a people, where we are in this country, where we want to be and where we are going, and the struggles that we face.”
The stage adaptation element – which featured Angela Basset, Black Thought and lots of other well-known actors and artists – underscores how much has modified since then, not only in the Black experience, but in addition in Apollo.
“Ta-Nehisi says it, and I believe it, that Apollo is the only place he could have done it [the stage adaptation of] because of history and because Apollo continues to serve black audiences,” Williams said. “Apollo continues to be a unique place where Black artists can hear from and speak to their community.”
But perhaps most of all, it showcases the unique talent of Black people to create something beautiful, even out of pain, to specific their truths in wildly creative forms, in a shocking display of defiance and resilience.
“Through the arts, we have tremendous power as Black people to speak our truth, to connect and understand each other, and to highlight the realities, good and bad, of our place in American culture,” Williams said. “We have always used art, music and comedy to talk about our reality, and the rest of the world has always stuck to it and been inspired by it. We are resilient as Black people in America, and Apollo represents that resilience in an incredibly powerful way. We must continue to demonstrate resilience because we face incredible struggles and issues in America today.”
This article was originally published on : www.essence.com
Here’s a recap of today’s episode: In segment #1, I’ll answer last week’s query about Black Theater trivia and supply some historical context. So let me ask you this week’s query. In segment #2, I’ll present this week’s Black Thought. This week’s quote from Audre Lorde most closely fits the theme of the episode. Finally, in segment #3 now we have the interview.
Today we’ll devote a lot of the program to an interview with founders Reginald Edmund and Simeilia Hodge-Dallaway. is an International is an art movement spanning all countries and continents where Black narratives are told by Black Artists – and under their full control – with a mission to empower all audiences. They occur to be partners in each life and theater, as Reggie and Sim are married.
Additionally, Reggie is Playwright-in-Residence at Tamasha Theater in London, England and Playwright-in-Residence at Chicago Dramatists Theatre, Artistic Associate at Pegasus Theater-Chicago, Artistic Patriot at Merrimack Repertory Theater, and a 10-11 Many Voice Fellow with the Playwrights Center. His play Southbridge was a runner-up within the Kennedy Center’s Lorraine Hansberry and Rosa Parks National Playwriting Awards and was most recently the winner of the Southern Playwrights Competition, the Black Theater Alliance Award for Best New Play, and the Edgerton Foundation’s New American Play Award. His nine-play series titled “The City of the Bayou Collection”, including , and , has been performed at esteemed theaters including Pegasus Theater-Chicago, Deluxe Theatre, Actors Theater of Charlotte, Bush Theater (UK), Boston Court @ Theatre, Landing Theatre, Playwrights’ Center and National Theater (UK). Reginald Edmund earned a BFA in Theater Performance from Texas Southern University and an MFA in Playwriting from Ohio University.
Simeilia is the founder and CEO (www.adofthefuture.com), and Founder/CEO of Beyond The Canon (www.beyondthecanon.com), former problem solver and head of the Black Play archive on the National Theatre, editor of the primary anthology of monologues for Black Plays inspired by Black British Plays. She has been included within the Top 100 Acts list for 3 years in a row, and last yr she was included in The Progress 1000: London’s Most Influential People 2018 – Performance: Theater.
Other publications that Simeilia has edited include The Oberon Book of Monologues for Black Actors: followed by a second anthology of monologues published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama: interim associate producer at Theater Royal Stratford East and former board member of the Directors Guild of Great Britain and Company of the Theater Angels . She has also worked nationally and internationally as a theater director, producer, playwright, educator/guest lecturer, and audience development consultant. Simeilia is currently a member of the magazine’s editorial team (Routledge/UK).
NOTE: The interview audio is ideal for Reggie and Sim. But from ten feet away I sound like I’m talking through a can. Otherwise, it’s an ideal interview. Enjoy.
Black theater matters is a bi-weekly podcast exploring the intersection of culture, politics and blackness. Black theater matters explores various plays, people and topics vital to Black Theatre, elements of production, and the unique dynamics of Black Theater. In other words, Black Theater matters.
Plowshares Theater Company, BTM, is designed to be a liberal arts resource dedicated to supporting, documenting, and celebrating the achievements of Black theater artists throughout the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
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Ashe!
This article was originally published on : blacktheatrematters.org
