Lloyd Richards

Lloyd Richards is an acclaimed director, teacher and past dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. He served as the president of TCG from 1984 to 1988.

Beginnings

I was born in Toronto, Canada, and later, at the age of three going on four, I moved to Detroit, Mich. All of my schooling was in Detroit and in Michigan.

My father was Albert George Richards. You can tell from his name and my name, Lloyd George, that somehow there’s a British influence. Albert George was named after the King of England. He was a master carpenter and born and raised in Jamaica, and migrated to Canada.

My mother, Rose, was born in Jamaica and also migrated to Toronto. That’s where people went in those days, in the days of ships, not to New York and to Brooklyn. They went to Canada.

They met in Canada, in Toronto. They were married there. My mother’s brothers were not happy that she’d met a man in Canada to marry, and offered her a ticket to go back to Jamaica. Instead, she married Albert George Richards, and they began having children in Canada. I was the second. Allen was my elder brother, and I was born, then my sister Joyce, who was the only girl, and then William.

And after that, they decided, enough of Canada, because Henry Ford had sent out those flyers around the country. I cannot remember whether it was five or seven dollars a day that a worker could make, and my father took off and went to Detroit and we followed shortly after.

We came to Detroit and we lived on the East Side in those days. We lived there for quite a while. My uncles were there, and I seem to remember a house where a great deal of the family lived or certainly congregated in those days, and we began that process of growing up.

Before too long we moved to the West Side of Detroit, and my parents began buying a home on Beachwood Avenue. I went to Sampson School, which was about a 10-minute walk from the house. We all went to Sampson. Sampson School was a dividing line between the developing black community and the white community, which was to a great extent Polish in those days. We did meet in the school and we went to classes together, but after classes or on weekends, if you went across the dividing line of the school street and went into the next neighborhood, you were subject to get your head whipped. Or, if they came our way, the same was likely to happen.

I graduated finally from Sampson School. Went to McMichael Intermediate School, and from there to Northwestern High. After Northwestern High, I made application for Wayne University, which was not Wayne State then. It was simply Wayne University. Went there for my college education.

On His Father

My father had died when I was nine. That was a very hard experience for all of us. We had just begun purchasing a home, or they had just begun, in north Detroit, which was a new area that was building up, and we had moved out there. Then my father came down with an illness–diphtheria, paralysis of the throat–from which he didn’t recover. We took him in the middle of winter to the cemetery and put him in the ground.

I remember at that time I was determined to be stoic. I remember standing in the room with the coffin. The coffin came into the house in those days; it didn’t go to a funeral home. There were all these people around, crying, and I, as a young nine-year-old boy, determined that I would not cry. It had nothing to do with loving my father or not, which I did, certainly. But I could not cry and would not cry. And so I did not cry at my father’s funeral.

We stayed in north Detroit for a while after that. Of course we lost the house because our income became significantly reduced. We moved back into the West Side of Detroit.

First Employment Opportunities

At that time, as a nine-year-old kid, I worked; we all worked. We all did something. You worked around the house. You had responsibilities, either with the washing, the ironing, the cleaning around the house. My brother and I, we had paper routes and I also sold the Ladies’ Home Journal, delivered them around Detroit. Wasn’t terribly good at it, I don’t think. I didn’t make a lot of money.

Later when I was in high school, I got a job at a barbershop as a shoeshine boy. I would shine shoes and try and learn how to pop the rags, because you got bigger tips if you popped the rag. I did that and various other odd jobs and whatever could help out the family. By then we had no support other than my mother, who went out and worked in people’s kitchens or in people’s homes, and came back in the evening and fixed dinner for us. We learned to cook and fix the dinner, so when she came home there would be dinner. We learned to do all the work around the house.

She also would take in washing, and I can remember our kitchen being filled with white shirts hanging up all over our kitchen to dry. My mother evidently had a client who wore a lot of white shirts, and she would wash and iron those shirts. They would be picked up. I never remember seeing the person who wore those shirts. They were like gigantic butterflies or moths all over the kitchen, hanging there, and my mother stood underneath them, ironing them and getting them ready to be taken out.

Yes, we worked. We were always working, for who and for what I don’t remember, but we worked.

On College

When I graduated from high school, I couldn’t afford university. I guess I have the unique distinction–it’s an embarrassing one–of my mother going to the university and trying to get me a job there, to pay a little bit of my tuition, which she managed to do. It was embarrassing because nobody else’s mother took them to college, for heaven’s sakes. They gave me a job a couple of hours a day working, running the elevator in the main building.

I had a notebook. In the process of running the elevator, I decided to use the time for working on a play. When people couldn’t get the elevator, I was usually stopped between the floors, because I had a paragraph that I was still working on or something like that.

The other elevator was driven by Howard Morrison in the evening. He was also going to school, but he had the job through the city, so he was a city employee and made more money than I did as a college student who was doing a few hours to make some bucks. I applied and got a job through the city, which made me a city employee working an eight-hour shift.

Well, that was a big thing, because of what we used to do, what Howard and I would do. We took the evening shift, which meant we worked until 11 p.m. or something like that. He had gotten a room allocated to him, a little closet down in the cellar of the university, where he could go and change his clothes, and he had put up a little cot for himself. I took a cot and my clothes down there, so I could do the elevator till 11 p.m. and work as a janitor, because I additionally did the floors and waxed and mopped. We had a reputation. We worked together as a team, Howard and I, and we could do a floor faster than any other team in the university. We’d get the hallway mopped and waxed–because you had to wax it, too–and then get to bed. We tried to stay up all night working–get the work done and then get into our little cubbyhole and get a little sleep before classes the next day.

On Discovering Theatre

I intended to be a pre-law student, but certain things in my life began to bring a question to that decision; I had been introduced to William Shakespeare. I had been introduced to him by a teacher who thought it was not just important to read or memorize Shakespeare, but it was also part of the understanding of Shakespeare to recite it, to say it. Some of us were selected to recite, and I was one. That was a very important 10 minutes for me. I was in front of a group of people, speaking important thoughts in beautiful language and seeing people listening and being affected by what I had to say. There was a power involved in that. You could say things of value that would in some way alter people’s lives.

Then it happened again. I was the youngest lay reader in my church, the youngest vestryman, which meant that on a Sunday I would be given the privilege of reading the lesson for the day, a story from the Bible. I would do that, and again there was an eager audience. There were beautiful words and phrases, meaningful thoughts and a connection between you and a group of people. You knew that in some respect you were affecting their lives.

On Working in the Theatre

I had been working in radio, because the voice is not necessarily a reflection of the color of your face, whereas, in other media that was an immediate consideration. I’d gone to school to get a profession in order to find security. And what was security? Is it money in the bank? Is it owning property? Or, is it getting up in the morning and not counting the hours, because you have a way of life and not just a job?

In the middle of my college experience, I made a decision about what security was and what I was going to go for. Of course, my parents couldn’t point to any person of color making a living in the theatre. (We were colored then. We changed; we became Negroes; we became blacks; we became, whatever. But we were always niggers, no matter how you looked at it, and that meant that you had a certain place in society.)

I guess there were only two people of color I could point to who were actually making a living in the theatre at that time–Paul Robeson and Canada Lee.

Army Life

The Army was, in itself, an experience. I volunteered. My older brother was drafted in the first draft of the Second World War. I volunteered because I volunteered for the Air Force, for pilot training, and that had just begun. The government was just accepting Negroes into flight training, pilot training. When I volunteered for that, I understood and knew that that was a 20-some-thousand-dollar education that I would be getting, so why not go for that? It would also take them the better part of a year to train me, so that would keep me out of combat for that long. If I was drafted, I might be in combat the next week. So, I volunteered for cadet training.

I went through many diversions and experiences; I went through the training to the end of the war. I was still in training, and they made me an offer. They said that I could stay in the Army, sign up for another two years, get my wings and get my commission, or I could get an immediate discharge. I was to make a choice. So I said, "What’s the choice? You’ve offered me two things. I don’t see any choice to be made. I’m getting out if you’re offering me to get out."

So, I came out of the Army. It could kill you being in the Army. I came back to Detroit, and I had one more year of school to do, but in the meantime I needed a job. I looked in the paper and I looked for work, and there was an advertisement: they needed social workers, so I said, "Okay, I should apply for that. I’m not qualified for that, I’m not trained for that, but the city needs social workers, so I may apply for that." So I did.

From Detroit to New York

In the meantime, I had gone back to school and was working on my degree. We had started a theatre. Summer came and those of us who were involved in theatre wanted to stay together. We banded together. There were 20 of us. We called ourselves "These Twenty People," and we applied to the city of Detroit. They had a large mansion in the middle of a park, River Rouge Park, and we decided to do Hedda Gabler. They let us use the mansion, and you could seat 60, 75 people around the living room on three sides and perform in it. We did Hedda Gabler there and had a wonderful summer doing that.

Then we decided to stay together, and we called ourselves "The Actors Company." We didn’t have any money. A theatre-lover who had graduated a year ahead of us was a successful lawyer now, and he gave us $2,000 and we rented a large ballroom that had a platform at the end of it, and we built a proscenium stage and got gray cloth and put it up. We couldn’t afford lights, so we put 150-watt light bulbs in Number 10 tin cans, and those were our lights at the beginning. We put five plays into repertory that year, in one year–the classics. I was the only black in the company at that time. I also directed Oedipus there.

There were wonderful people in that program at Wayne who came out and made a name in the theatre in New York. Many of them worked in radio and began to do a lot of good work.

But I stayed in Detroit for that time because I had been hired by the welfare department.

When I came to New York, I was assisted in coming by Jimmy Lipton, who I had gone to school with. Jimmy, as a matter of fact, had called me in Detroit and told me it was time to come because he had a friend who was directing a show on Broadway, and I was pretty well a character man in Detroit, and he was looking for character men for this play. I managed to quit all of my jobs in Detroit. I quit my job as a social worker and with the theatre. And I had two radio shows that I was doing, a disc jockey show and a Christian show on Sunday mornings.

I came to New York and I went to audition for this director who had just begun rehearsal, and I walked into the theatre and they were on stage, and after a while they broke and the director was across the theatre and I started over toward him and he just started to shake his head. I kept going, because I’d come too far now to stop going, and he kept shaking his head. He said, "I’m looking for old men."

I said, "Well, I have played old men pretty well in Detroit," and I started naming all the roles that I had played: Tiresius, Judge Brack, this, that, and the other.

He said, "I’m looking for old men."

And I went on. He said it a third time, he said, "I’m looking for old men," and he pointed to the stage, and there sitting on stage was a group of old men. Welcome to the professional theatre. All the work that I had done in Detroit, he was telling me, made no difference. I was now in the professional theatre, and that’s the way they did things.

I started the usual thing of really looking for work–learning how to accept "no" and not let it be a debilitating thing. I got a lot of "no," because there were not many roles for young black character men in those days on Broadway. Still aren’t. All of these things that I’d prepared for and prepared with that I could do, all the classics that I could do, were useless to me in terms of what I could immediately do in New York. I was taught by my friends where to get pictures, what agents to go around and see, and how to make out a schedule of doing that.

Well, I did that and I worked Off-Broadway. I became a relatively well-known Off-Broadway actor, again doing character parts and occasionally a role my own age. I did a play at Equity Library Theatre called Plant in the Sun, and Paul Mann, was directing it. Paul Mann had been in the Group Theatre, and after the play was over, he came to me; he said, "I would like you to come and teach with me."

I said, "When I left the university, I determined I wouldn’t teach."

He said, "I’m going to be taking professional classes, and I’d like you to come and teach with me." He was laudatory. So, I did go to teach with Paul. I taught with him for many years. I brought him a lot of students who I worked with Off-Broadway and who thought they might like to study with me, and I brought them to Paul, who taught.

Sidney Poitier and A Raisin in the Sun

It was there that I met Sidney Poitier. Sidney was a young talented actor who was pounding the streets like the rest of us, and Paul took him in to class. He [Poitier] couldn’t afford it. Paul gave him a scholarship. I would teach Sidney’s class from time to time, and we developed a friendship. We used to go to After Class together. After Class was a meeting or a gathering after the class of students who were in the class, where you discussed everything that had gone on in class.

Well, at one of those After Class meetings, we were sharing a hot dog because neither one of us could afford a whole hot dog, and Sidney said, "You know, if I ever do anything on Broadway, I would like you to direct it."

I said, "Fine, yes," and I made compliments to him. It’s that kind of thing that people do, theatre people, in the middle of the night, either over a few drinks or, it doesn’t matter, coffee or anything else. You gather and you’re sharing and you make promises.

It was years later that I got a call from Sidney. He said, "I found it."

I said, "What?"

He said, "I found the play that I want to do on Broadway, and I’d like you to direct it. Read the play if you like, but I will introduce you to the producer and to the playwright, and I hope you can direct it for me."

That’s what happened. The play was A Raisin in the Sun.

I got the play; I read the play; I loved the play. I was introduced to Lorraine Hansberry and to Phil Rose, and we hit it off. We were all naive enough to think that we could do this play on Broadway. And that started the story: How do you get to Broadway with a play about a black family? That’s what we were told again and again, that Broadway was not ready for that, that there was no possibility of that.

From the time that I joined up, it took a year before we were in rehearsal, and in the process of that year the play was rewritten because in the initial play, by the second act, the family was in the new house in the new neighborhood, and it was a play about the problems that they had in the new neighborhood. It was suggested to Lorraine that her play was in her first act, that that was where the important values of the play were. She accepted that and she started to rewrite in those terms: A very difficult rewrite.

We did work to rewrite it, to make the character that Poitier played the central character in the play, and to make his transformation the important event of the play. Lorraine had written a very strong matriarchal character, Mama, who had been the center of the play, so to transform material into a play where Sidney was the center was difficult.

When we ultimately got into rehearsal after a year of trying to raise money, A Raisin in the Sun had more investors than any play that had previously been to Broadway. The investments were small, $250, $200, little monies from little people. The big money did not consider it a wise investment at all.

When we went into rehearsal, all we had was a half a week out of town in New Haven, Conn. and a full week in Philadelphia, Pa., and after that there was nothing. There was no New York theatre. We didn’t have a New York theatre for a year, couldn’t get one.

We opened in Philadelphia to half a house. By the time mid-week came, it was a full house and half of it was black, at least half of it, and that number kept growing.

It was then that I again found out why I am in the theatre–I was in the lobby of the theatre and I was amazed. There was a line of people out there, and I saw up at the window this very small, frail black woman. She was carrying a paper satchel, and I knew what was in it because my mother used to carry one. I knew she was coming from work. I knew her shoes were in it, her easy shoes that she could work in. I knew possibly some food was in it that she had brought from her employer’s house. But she was there.

She got to the window and she put up a dollar, and the ticket seller said, "That’ll be three dollars and 95 cents."

She said, "Three dollars and 95 cents? I can see Sidney Poitier around the corner for 95 cents."

"Well, it’s three dollars and 95 cents."

She went to her pocketbook and she got out the rest of the money, and she put it up there and she got a ticket and she started into the theatre.

He said, "You can’t go in there."

She said, "I have a ticket."

He said, "You can’t go in there. You have to come back tonight at 8:30."

She said, "Oh," and she started out.

And I stopped her, and I said, "Why are you paying $3.95 to see Sidney Poitier when you can see him around the corner for 95 cents?"

And she said, "Well, the word’s going around in my neighborhood that there is something going on down here that concerns me, so I had to come find out what it was all about."

And that reaffirmed for me why I was in the theatre. Important things being said, that could be communicated in theatre. The fact that that audience had grown in three or four days from practically no black faces on opening night to at least half the house being black. That’s where it was for me. That’s what it was about, communicating important ideas under circumstances like that. That was a part of the reaffirmation of my reason for being there.

The Second Out-of-Town Trial for Raisin

We still didn’t have a theatre in New York. We were in the middle of a run in Philadelphia, and at the end of the week we would all go home. The word began to get back to New York that something was happening with the play, and so the money guys began to come down to see the show. The Shuberts came down and said they would like to bring the play into New York, but they couldn’t bring it in because they didn’t have a theatre. If we would go to Chicago for eight weeks, they would underwrite the play against loss and then bring it in.

What could we say but yes, joyfully? And off we went to Chicago for the coldest winter of a lot of winters in Chicago. It seems like the only time they could bring a show I was involved with to Chicago was during January, February, when that wind off Lake Michigan would really awaken you.

We played the Blackstone. In that process things happened because the play wasn’t–in terms of what we were trying to do with it–wasn’t right yet. Sidney was the star. He had the last curtain call. Claudia McNeil was the first featured. At the curtain call, she got an ovation, and when it came Sidney’s time to take his curtain call, the applause level dropped a little bit, and that told us we really hadn’t completed the work that we were doing on the play. But the day after we opened in Chicago, Lorraine came to me and she said, "I have to go to New York."

I said, "Fine. When will you be back?"

She said, "I won’t."

I said, "What do you mean, you won’t? How are we going to do the work? We’ve still got work to do here. We’ve got eight weeks here to do this work, and it’s not done."

She said, "Well, we have to work out a way because I can’t stay in Chicago."

There were warrants out for Lorraine, because her father was a real estate man in Chicago who had really been concerned about restrictive covenants and had fought the real estate interest to the Supreme Court to try and get that law declared illegal, and in that process had created a lot of enemies. It was Lorraine’s feeling that the pressure that was brought on him by those major interests were what had killed him. That’s why her play had been written the way it was in the first place.

Now she had inherited a number of the buildings that her father owned, and they had found flaws or things wrong in the buildings, and there was a warrant out for her. So, she had to leave Chicago, which she did.

We developed a way of working. Every evening I would watch the show. After the show was over, I would go and call Lorraine and tell her what I still thought needed to be done, pinpoint areas and ideas that we might work with, and Lorraine would–overnight–tackle certain parts of the play. And in the morning we would talk again on the phone and she would give me rewrites, and I would put them into the show that day and try them out that night to see what worked, what didn’t work.

In that eight-week period, gradually, very gradually, the level of Sidney Poitier’s applause at his curtain call drew level with Claudia’s, and in the last few days actually did top it, so we had the sense that the work that we had been there to do was completed, and we could come into New York.

The New York opening is its own thing. It happened. It was one of those phenomenal openings where I was called to the stage and ultimately Sidney had to jump off the stage and carry Lorraine to the stage. It was a great evening and an achievement.

On the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center

Getting the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference was a very important step in my life. It was a commitment to a way of life. As many things have happened in my life, it happened in a strange way. I received a phone call from a man I’d never met, called George White, asking me to come to a place I’d never heard of, Waterford, Conn., and direct a play, an epic play of the Civil War, in a theatre that was yet to be built, and it should all take place in two weeks. That said adventure. I did do that, and it’s a long story about my getting up there in the rain and them taking me to various places to avoid taking me to the O’Neill Center, to this mansion.

It was raining, oh, horribly, and the water was coming through the ceiling of the mansion, and I’m asking, "Where is this theatre going to be?" and I walked under an umbrella down a pathway, and they point me to a hole in the ground that had about four feet of water in it, this mammoth hole, and said, "That’s the theatre." I said, "We start in two weeks?" And they said, "Yes." And that was my introduction.

We did go in two weeks. And the community had been wonderful. They had really brought playwrights in, because George White was very concerned about the fact that there was no place where playwrights were being developed in this country, in the totality of the country. There were only about four or five places where new work was being done at all. La MaMa, Caffe Cino, there were maybe a couple of places out of town, but they weren’t there. So he had gathered playwrights–young, new playwrights–from New York to come up there and stay in people’s houses for a week and gather under this 400-year-old tree, and talk about what they needed. And they needed a place where the theatre as a profession would pay attention to their work and their development, and that’s what the O’Neill came out of, and that’s what George was trying to create.

And that’s what I was brought in to help do, and ultimately–a couple of years later–I was asked to be artistic director, which I accepted, and I had to revise things. Because George is a wonderful guy. He has a philosophy, and the philosophy is, if it’s worth doing, you do it. Now, that did not include "if you can afford it, you do it."

He had been the head of the Playwrights Conference, but he didn’t know how to be an artistic director. Anything that anybody asked him for, he said, "Okay," and we did it. So the work was all over the place, and I was invited in to really bring order and develop the Playwrights Conference, which is what I did.

On the Selection Process at the O’Neill

The plays were selected because, in my view and the view of the selection committee, there was a talent there. You can’t teach talent. You can teach craft but not talent. The process began with the playwright reading his play to all the other playwrights and all the directors; from that you got a sense of what works, what doesn’t work–and that’s a first lesson, in a way, about what to do with one’s own material.

On Dramaturgy

I used to seek out the best dramaturgs I could find–I think this new dramaturgy impulse in the American theatre really began at the O’Neill. Prior to my time as artistic director, critics would be invited up to see the plays, and 20 minutes after the play ended, they would come on stage and deliver their criticism [of the play] to the audience, which became another performance, in a sense. It wasn’t exactly dramaturgy; it was a critic’s show. Then the audience would engage the critic in a discussion, sometimes heated, sometimes not, and that became another entertainment.

When I committed to Yale School of Drama, they asked me to come and talk to the directors and dramaturgs, who had a class together. I went into a room into which this group was to be assembled, and the chairs were in a circle. As people began to come in, it became obvious that the directors were on one side of the circle and the dramaturgs were on the other. These people, I was given to understand, did not talk to one another; directors were putting dramaturgs out of their rehearsals. How to get these two groups together became a question for me and a question for the theatre.

In our dramaturgy program, I wanted to educate developing dramaturgs to the varying artistic accomplishments, achievements, properties that make up the American theatre. What, ultimately, is the American theatre? It’s not warmed-over Western European theatre. American theatre consists of everything that has come here, come together and interacted; as these influences have melded with one another, a theatre has been created that is truly representative of this country.

The Audience as Teacher

I try to teach playwrights that some of the greatest learning is right there in the theatre–watching the play.

There’s that impulse to be at the back of the theatre walking up and down or heading out or back in. I said, "No. You sit in the middle of the audience. You sit there and you experience with them what they are experiencing," because if you talk to an audience sometimes, they will tell you what’s wrong, what they perceive to be wrong. But if you sit there with them and they are reacting and responding, you will know when you lost them. The guy right next to you, you’ll know when he goes out or when he leans back or when he is not engaged by your material. And that is the most honest comment that they can make to you. The rest is a comment made after they’ve sifted through what was wrong, what did they think. The thing that is wrong may not be where they pinpoint it.

Yale Drama School–and the Yale Rep

The connection was close between Yale [School of Drama] and Yale Rep. Actually, when Robert Brustein went to Yale, he began Yale Repertory Theatre as a professional institution connected with the School of Drama. We were approaching in that concept what had been most successful and utilized in Europe in terms of training. Training was generally connected with major professional theatre. It wasn’t called professional theatre in Europe, but the major theatres had training components, and so it was a part of trying to tie up a professional standard company with a training institution. So what you’re training for is there in front of you, and you can move into that. I think Bob Brustein did a great deal toward that. There were a few other institutions around the country who began to do that.

I was a part of the theatre panel on the National Endowment for the Arts, and so it was something that I strongly encouraged and became a part of an evaluating panel that would go out and examine these efforts as to whether they ought to be funded by the National Endowment or not. That and funding the development of playwrights were two major things that I think were accomplished during that time. The National Endowment for the Arts was a very important spur in that.

When Yale and Brustein came together and were developing a theatre, I think that that was an important component. I was very conscious of what was going on there because as a member of the National Endowment theatre panel I was involved with the development of granting for that kind of a program, and so I was one of the few people they considered, I think, when they began looking for someone to replace Bob Brustein. I was one of the few people who had experience as a teacher, a master teacher (I had been at New York University and Hunter College, so I knew the educational systems) and had also been involved in the professional theatre for some time, and so I was one person who had had experiences in all the areas that were being touched. I don’t know how many people they interviewed for the position, but ultimately they offered it to me.

I looked at it as a very important component in the other things that I was doing. At Yale, I started a thing called WinterFest: a festival of new plays that we would bring into the program done under a combination of the school and the Rep. I always considered, when I went to Yale, that the Yale Repertory Theatre was the master teacher of the school, that that was ultimately where everyone was geared to go, that the repertory theatre should really demonstrate the things that we wanted students to grow into and to understand. It was a very important component in theatre training for me when I was dean of the school.

Also the development of the relationship between directors and dramaturgs–that was one of the things that happened when I went to Yale. I had a lot of experience in this. I was considered one of the more experienced people in the country in the interaction between dramaturgs and directors in the development of a play.

America’s Ignorance of Its Theatre

I don’t think we’ve had American theatre yet. I think we’ve had some wonderful playwrights who have written of the American experience, and they are hardly acknowledged, certainly not sufficiently acknowledged. Are we aware of the fact that Eugene O’Neill, who is considered one of the greatest playwrights that this country has produced, had a 100th anniversary two or three years ago? There was a 100th anniversary of his birth. Do you know that that was acknowledged and celebrated in two places in the United States? Two places. In Japan, fifty. In Europe and in Eastern Europe, all kinds of celebration of this playwright. Our own understanding of our own contribution to the theatre, to this wonderful thing of which we are all a part, is not fully realized, which is too bad.

August Wilson

August submitted to the O’Neill Center National Playwrights Conference five times. Four times he was rejected and his plays were returned to him. The fifth time he submitted a play and my readers read it and they recommended it to me and recommended that I read it, and I did. And immediately I loved his voice, the voice of the writer. August had been a poet before having transformed himself into a playwright, and he had been learning to be a playwright while he was submitting to the Playwrights Conference.

So I found in the work, which was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a new writer. He wasn’t the greatest yet in terms of structure, as he was in character. So I read the play and the selection committee selected it for that year. He came to the Playwrights Conference. I had never seen him before, never seen a picture, didn’t know him, and there were a lot of playwrights I didn’t know. I heard the voice and I knew what the voice was, but I didn’t know what the playwright looked like.

August is a very fair person, so he does not look, or did not necessarily look immediately Negroid, so when all of the playwrights assembled at the Playwrights Conference, I said to myself, "Now, which one is August Wilson?" I didn’t know until I heard his voice. His voice tied with the voice that was in the play.

From that point, well, it’s history. His first play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was a wonderful play, but there was a lot of work to be done on it, which was done during the conference. Work was done, but not completed.

Now, I used to have a rule at the National Playwrights Conference that I would not permit anyone to negotiate on the grounds during the conference. Anybody could come. Agents could come, whatever, are welcome to it, delighted, but during the conference, no one could say to a writer, "I would like to do your play," or, "I would like to option your play." Why? That’s chaotic. Can you imagine, 15 playwrights who are working together, supporting one another, helping one another, and they’re all up at 12 o’clock writing and one of them says, "So and so is interested in my play"? And what that will do to 14 other playwrights no one has said that to? It destroys completely that interaction that I’d been trying to build up.

I would not permit that. And if I ever heard of an agent or anyone saying that to a playwright, they were invited to leave the grounds and not come back. They were striking at the core of the conference. After the conference was over, yes, fine.

Now, with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom another thing happened that shouldn’t have happened. The critic for the New York Times was up there and saw the play. I’d invited critics, theatre reviewers, on the condition that no one writes a review. They could write about the conference and about things and people there, but not a review of any of the plays. Well, a review was written. It purported not to be a review, but it was a review of August’s play, and it was a good review.

I also had a rule that I would abide by myself, that although I was producing plays at the Rep, wherever, I would not indicate to any playwright that I was interested in his work for production until after the conference was over. The same rules applied to me that I imposed on everyone else.

When that conference was over, I gave it a week, I think, and I approached August and said, "I’m interested in doing your play at Yale Rep."

And he said, "Oh, that’s why I came here." But someone else, another producer, had spoken to him and wanted to option the play, and they were in discussion about it. Well, it turned out it was a very top producer and he had done a lot of work, and good work, and he was also a member of the supporters and the trustees of the conference. So I said to myself, "Well, I missed that one," but I’ve missed a lot of plays that I wanted to do. Anyhow, that was in August after the conference.

Later on that year, in December, I guess, I got a call from August and he said that negotiations had broken down between him and the producers, and was I still interested? I said, "Yes, I am interested in the play, certainly am interested in it, want to do it," but the producers were that close to us that I would have to ascertain from them that they were also finished with the negotiations. I called the producer and they said no, they were not finished negotiating. This was December. Well, I told that to August.

In February I got a call from August. He said, "The negotiations are finished. They will not go on. Do you still want the play?"

I said, "Yes." So that’s the beginning of our relationship really as producer/developer/playwright, and I brought the play to Yale Rep and we did it there. As long as I was at Yale, all of the plays that he developed or wrote we worked on in that process, which was from the O’Neill to Yale to the commercial theatre. August loved the O’Neill because he got a lot out of that.

From Regional to Commercial Theatre

I guess I had at that time a very good system that worked for me. Through the O’Neill I could discover new work, new writers, and begin their work. I could continue it through Yale–either through the Yale Rep or through the WinterFest–and beyond that I began to develop a relationship with regional theatre.

When professional producers would come into the work, that was a startling thing. Because they don’t want to just bring what the money will permit you to do, they want a voice! And after working with something for three to four years, I am not ready necessarily to listen to that voice. Or to give it the kind of authority that it wants to have. And so, with my managing director, Ben Mordecai, I said: "I’ve gotta find a way where we can retain control, artistic control of the work, all the way through the professional theatre." And so we worked out a way where we could go to the regional theatres and in some way cut the regional theatres in on the–the work–in certain ways helping to produce the work. And retain control into the Broadway theatre. That we did manage to do. And it was very interesting. I was able to handle work that way, not only August’s work, but Athol Fugard’s and others’. And it was essential to develop some system where you did retain control of the work all the way through, from inception to its realization.

On TCG and Regional Networking

When TCG was first talked about, it was talked about as a change, as a diversion, as an alternative to the commercial theatre. And what I saw happening was that the commercial theatre practices were permeating the regional theatre–that the regional theatre was not creating something new. In creating a new theatre, many of the practices from the old theatre were involved. As the regional theatre evolved, the first, and possibly most necessary thing was not the playwright, was not the artist, but the management support.

What you found instead of a company, was a management structure, and the artists became the hired persons. And it was going in a direction that was contrary to its initial impulse, as far as I was concerned. And that was too bad.

One of the things that had been said initially was that there should be a relationship between these theatre entities throughout the country, where they would share work and share artists. And when I was doing August’s work, I wanted the country to be conscious of this playwright’s work. If he got to New York, and New York was not happy with it, it could be ended in two weeks. But if the country experienced this work, at least there would be the beginnings of an audience out there that might come to New York or someplace else and see it. But they would know this playwright. That was also the way to begin to get the finances for bringing the show to New York and retaining control. It was my struggle to get the regional theatre usefully back to what I thought it was about.

On the NEA

The initial mandate of the NEA said that "while the government of the U.S. cannot call an artist into being, it is responsible for the support and the creation of the environment that nurtures them." I have quoted that many times. I consider it one of the finest pieces of legislation that I have ever seen come out of our legislative process. It is a great statement and should be posted in many places. The thing that the NEA has never been able to get away from is politics–not that the NEA sought it, but politicians have used the NEA as some kind of a whipping boy.

It was Solzhenitsyn who said that a great writer is "as a second government in his own country," which is an explanation of why politicians prefer to support mediocrity–that is true in so many respects. There are voices out there saying startling things in startling ways–and politicians sense it. They have gotten comedians under control. Comedians can tear a politician apart if they’re really sharp. Anyone who is really working creatively in the realm of ideas–as theatre should be, as all art should be–is a threat to those who attempt to keep things in control.

You expect that the NEA will always have that trouble. The more it follows its mandate, the more trouble it will have.

On the Digital Age

I’m very concerned about the way the digital age removes us from each other. The theatre is built on personal contact, dating from the time of storytelling. History was told through stories, through the history of tribes, through the history of thought and action, through tales of the battles. That always involved the personal; but in these times, technology has taken the place of personal interaction.

When you think of being in a theatre, the first thing that comes to mind is communication between the actor on stage and the audience. I don’t see that happening in the digital box, and I don’t see it happening between two people watching a movie. We say yes; we say no; we change our minds on the spot, and we change them again; and we change somebody else’s mind and he changes mine–that can happen in a theatre. It’s a dangerous place. You might find an idea there. I don’t think that you’ll find an idea in the same way in any of the other means of communication that we evolve, no matter how advanced it becomes.

Theatrical Heroes

I consider myself to be in a long line of people who have done this work, and they have all affected me, from the earliest time certainly through all the great writers that we have. The moment I think of one and start to name them, I think of another and I think of one other, and I’m going to miss them all.

Yes, certainly Paul Robeson and Canada Lee were important in my life. Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan. Tennessee Williams is important in my life.

I worked with genius at times. I consider Fugard a genius. I consider Lorraine Hansberry a genius, and in his own right, August Wilson. I’ve had the privilege of working with so many geniuses. You see that? I’ve named some names now and I’m going to curse myself at some point for all those that I didn’t name. I’ve worked with William Shakespeare. He wasn’t around, but he was there. I always considered him as a part of my "artists in residence." If I run a theatre, there are artists I consider artists in residence. Certainly O’Neill is in residence in my theatre. All those I didn’t mention, please forgive me.

On Teaching

I’ve worked with wonderful actors and I’ve taught and I have been a part of the lives and the development of many actors. I will always teach, because it is a continuing connection with the theatre, with lives that are committed and want to be committed, and you’re concerned with that commitment and how that shapes and develops. I will probably always teach. Right now I’m teaching at four different places in a week, and I’ll go on doing that.

On the Role of the Artist

There’s a wonderful saying in the Indian theatre that has never left me: The job of the performer is to affect the head, the heart and the spirit of the audience: the head, to make him think; the heart, to make him feel, to laugh, to cry; and the spirit, to help him to understand who he is and who he might become. I’ve always thought that was a wonderful delineation of the role of the artist in relation to his audience.