American Theatre March 2019

IT WAS NEARLY 20 YEARS AGO THAT I SAT ON THE PLAZA of Los Angeles’s Music Center, chatting and smoking with the greatest of American playwrights, August Wilson, for an interview for Back Stage West. A key theme emerged as we spoke, as it did throughout his work and in his iconic speech at Theatre Communications Group’s 1996 conference, “The Ground on Which I Stand”: Black life in the U.S. is sufficient unto itself by every measure that matters: culturally, intellectually, morally, even to an extent materially. All it lacked then, as now, was respect and resources. As Wilson put it, “Black theatre in America is alive, it is vibrant, it is vital…it just isn’t funded.” In this issue we attempt to take stock of the state of both Black…

When scholar-artist Monica White Ndounou helped convene last fall’s 2018 International Black Theatre Summit, she was recalling a 1998 summit led by August Wilson, while rooting the conversation in the present-day ascendance of Black cultures and looking for ways to build on that success. “Everyone I spoke with confirmed my belief that it is possible and necessary to build an African diasporic network,” Ndounou marvels as she looks back on the inspirational gathering, captured on p. 28. A key takeway: “The future of our creative freedom is tied to our economic freedom.” Micah Danney, a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, says he wasn’t expecting to do a story about actors when he visited the site of an Israeli airstrike in Gaza last summer. “It was surreal,” Danney recalls. “The rubble…

COLLECTIVE MEMORY IS FLUID AND COMPLEX, and with the ever-churning news (and fake news) cycles, the distractions of our handheld screens, and deficiencies in school curricula, we can lose or be deprived of our connection with historical events that continue to shape today’s realities and lived experiences. One of the important civic roles our arts institutions can fill is to create awareness of and reflection on the oppressive moments and eras that continue to pulsate in our everyday lives. This year there are a number of ways to engage in marking and remembering our history. THE 400 YEARS OF INEQUALITY PROJECT: 2019 marks 400 years since the arrival of Africans in Virginia. In 2017 Congress passed the 400 Years of African-American History Commission Act (H.R. 1242) establishing a commission to…

FEW WORKING IN THEATRE DON’T KNOW HIS NAME. Kenny Leon has directed shows at almost every major U.S. theatre, including on Broadway, served as artistic director at the Tony-winning Alliance Theatre for more than a decade, and co-founded his own theatre company, True Colors, in the predominantly African American middle-class neighborhood of Atlanta’s College Park, home to rapper 2Chainz, the city’s mayor, and playwright Pearl Cleage. Leon opened his latest Broadway play, American Son, last November, shortly after announcing he would step down from True Colors (American Son will be filmed by Netflix with Leon directing). His replacement is his associate artistic director, Jamil Jude. With a number of film and TV projects slated for this year, Leon is not slowing down any time soon. What motivated you to start…

80 YEARS AGO (1939) Established the previous year by community volunteers with funding from the American Association of University Women & Junior League, Lexington Children’s Theatre of Kentucky offers its first show, Noah’s Flood. This begins a history marked by educational programs and tours. The company will be named the official children’s theatre of Kentucky in 1986 and go on to be one of the oldest continuously operating theatres in the U.S. 60 YEARS AGO (1959) Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play A Raisin in the Sun makes its Broadway debut at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, in a staging directed by Lloyd Richards, with a cast led by Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil. The play, which examines the challenges of a Black family in Chicago, will inspire Bruce Norris’s 2010 play Clybourne…

▪ Melia Bensussen has been chosen to be the next artistic director of Connecticut’s Hartford Stage. Bensussen will be the company’s sixth artistic director, as well as the first woman, to lead the theatre in its 55-year history. She will succeed Darko Tresnjak, who has served as artistic director since 2011. She will assume the role in June. ▪ Arkansas Repertory Theatre has selected William Trice to be its executive artistic director, a newly created position. Trice has served as a consultant for the theatre since December, and succeeds former producing artistic director John Miller-Stephany, who stepped down in May. Trice will assume his new role in August. ▪ The PEN/Faulkner Foundation in Washington, D.C., has welcomed Gwydion Suilebhan as its new executive director. Suilebhan, who most recently served as…