Black male playwrights are making waves in the theater world with provocative, untold stories. Meet the standouts who are bringing their own colorful and unique experiences to the stage.
By Karu F. Daniels
True theater buffs consider the late, great August Wilson to be the gold standard when it comes to black male playwrights.
The legendary scribe holds the distinction of being the only black man to have an entire body of work produced on Broadway and beyond. As many as ten plays (from his acclaimed Pittsburgh Cycle or Century Cycle, exploring the life of African Americans in and around the Pennsylvania steel town throughout 10 decades) have become theater eminence since he first debuted in 1984 with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. His two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays Fences and The Piano Lesson, respectively, are considered American classics, and the critically-acclaimed Two Trains Running, Seven Guitars and Jitney remain audience favorites.
Starting out as a poet, Wilson (who succumbed to liver cancer at the age of 60 in 2005) can easily be considered Black America’s answer to a modern day Shakespeare. He is the most celebrated playwright of his generation and he is widely considered as one of the best American playwrights in history.
Fortunately, there are young brothers following in his footsteps and standing in his shadow. Throughout history, there has been a very short list of Black male writers examining the black male experience on the stage. Some notables include Charles Fuller for 1981’s A Soldier’s Play, George C. Wolfe for 1986’s The Colored Museum, Charles Randolph Wright for 2000’s Blue and Ruben Santiago Hudson for 2001’s Lackawanna Blues, respectively.
“We must tell our stories because they are our stories,” says Wright, who directed Broadway’s box-office jukebox juggernaut Motown The Musical. “We have as many stories as there are colors. Unfortunately, we see limited representations and we see [our] experience co-opted. We must take ownership of our journeys.”
In recent years, new works by Colman Domingo, Daniel Beaty, Harrison David Rivers, Billy Porter, Robert O’Hara and Tarell Alvin McCraney have been a welcomed reprieve for the theater community thirsting for untold stories by black male playwrights.
COLMAN DOMINGO
Though he may be one of the most dynamic theatrical performers of his generation, Colman Domingo, a two-time Tony Award nominee for his acting work in the Broadway musicals Passing Strange and The Scottsboro Boys experienced great success with his play-writing endeavors, A Boy & His Soul and Wild With Happy. The latter is a semi-biographical work of art entailing a tightly-wound gay man’s touching and zany journey of laying his newly deceased mother to rest. Happy had its world premiere at New York City’s Public Theatre in the fall of 2012 and after electrifying audiences went on to play San Francisco the next year.
“With this work, I was exploring many composites of African American gay men and their relationships to their mothers,” Domingo, who starred in Lee Daniels’ The Butler and was recently cast in AMC’s hit show Fear of The Walking Dead and will star in the upcoming film, The Birth of a Nation, directed by fellow actor Nate Parker. “I wanted to examine religion, sexuality and the surreal that surrounds extraordinary circumstances such as death and eventual healing. It [was] an amalgamation of many stories that have been shared over coffee, [as well as] my first trip to Disney World given to me by a Disney princess: Anika Noni Rose (star of The Princess and the Frog) provided. “She actually gave me the title as we walked down Main Street in The Magic Kingdom. She casually said, ‘Look at all these people … they are just wild with happy!’ For the work, the Philadelphia native took home the prize for Best Playwright at the 41st Annual Vivian Robinson/AUDELCO Recognition Awards, which has honored excellence in black theater since 1973. “Colman is one of the most talented brothers I know,” says Wright. “He is hysterical, brilliant, generous, and surprising. I never know what to expect from him, and I always am blown away.”
BILLY PORTER
While he’s been renowned as a musical theater powerhouse for the better part of two decades, Billy Porter tested his creative writing mettle with the play While I Yet Live, which premiered Off Broadway in 2014, starring fellow Tony Award winner Lillias White and Emmy Award winner S. Epatha Merkerson. This was on the heels of him winning the long coveted Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for Kinky Boots. Like August Wilson, Porter is a Pittsburgh native and both their works depict a different side of African American life. Porter’s semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age story Live, directed by Sheryl Kaller, tackles homosexuality, religion, and dark family secrets. Porter says his incarnation as a full-fledged playwright was born out of a need to create new work opportunities for himself—and because of the absence of his likeness in Wilson’s storied pantheon of plays, which are widely regarded as the greatest exploration of African-American life in contemporary theater.
“I love August Wilson,” Porter, a Carnegie Mellon University alum, explains. “I grew up in Pittsburgh and I saw every play there of his from the time I was a teenager and never once did I see a representation of me on the stage. That pushed me to a place of [thinking], ‘If someone else is not going to talk about it, I can’t sit around and wait for other people to tell my story.'”
DANIEL BEATY
Another award-winning performer/playwright representing the black male narrative in today’s theater is Daniel Beaty, whose critically acclaimed show Emergence-SEE (now known as Emergency) is a one-act, one-man play about the pandemonium that breaks out when a slave ship emerges at the foot of the Statue of Liberty—in the present day. First directed by Kenny Leon, who recently helmed the live reworking of The Wiz on NBC, the play has been a success in Scotland, South Africa and all across America, since premiering at The Public Theater in 2006. “I was head over heels for him,” Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, told The New York Times during the show’s previews. “I thought: ‘This is theater that exists to serve something other than itself.'”
Beaty’s had several plays since—including the Charles Randolph Wright-directed Through The Night about six black men (ages 10 to 60) and the people who love them; and 2013’s The Tallest Tree in the Forest, a Paul Robeson biography that played at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum in 2014. “In my opinion, he is one of the greatest human beings to ever walk the planet,” Beaty said of the late entertainment legend and controversial civil rights activist. “He had contradictions and challenges like all people, but his commitment to all people having the opportunity to realize their full potential was extraordinary.”
“The black male experience is one that is often not shared with the complexity and humanity in which all people deserve to see themselves reflected,” the Dayton, Ohio native furthered. “There are so many urgent issues facing black males in particular like mass incarceration, fatherhood, and myriad others that I feel it is urgent that our stories are told with passion and compassion.”
Over the course of the last few years, Harlem’s New Heritage Theatre Group, a nonprofit organization geared towards cultivating the works of veteran and emerging artists, has produced five of Beaty’s plays. “Daniel’s works are spell-binding, celebratory, educational, exhilarating and enjoyable,” noted Voza Rivers, a music and theater industry veteran and head of New Heritage. “I attended a Beaty showcase produced by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee years ago and in their introduction of him, they referenced his acting ability on the level of Paul Robeson,” Rivers remembers. “When Daniel performed, I witnessed one extraordinary and talented actor portraying 40 compelling and spirited characters. I was mesmerized.”
ROBERT O’HARA
Cincinnati native Robert O’Hara cut his teeth at The Public Theater under the tutelage of its former artistic director George C. Wolfe, where his 1996 debut Insurrection: Holding History won the George Oppenheimer/New York Newsday Award for Best New American Play.
He credits Wolfe for bringing out the best in him. “He is one of the most brilliant individuals on earth,” O’Hara says. “I stand on his shoulders and at his feet at the same time. He taught me so much about how to be an artist in the world and in myself. He was one of the first openly gay black individuals of note who was running an artistic institution. With greatness comes difficulty. It was not always easy, but it was always rewarding.”
His own works, most notably the Playwrights Horizon 2014 production of Booty Candy, are often called subversive—a superlative he doesn’t shy away from. “I live by the motto: ‘Everyone is welcome and no one is safe.’ That’s how I write.”
To date, O’Hara has written screenplays for Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese and his playwright repertoire includes his plays Antebellum, Good Breeding and Etiquette of Vigilance. As a theater director, the Columbia University School of Art alum helmed the world premieres of Domingo’s Wild and McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays in 2009.
“Tarell is such a wonderful and giving and caring and funny and silly individual,” he says of McCraney, who won the prestigious McArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2013 and is considered a star in the play-writing profession. “I would see him openly dancing in the middle of the street on the way to rehearsal. He is quite a wonderful individual. We are friends. There was no sense of jealousy or I’m trying to make your work into my work. I am there in order for your work to be raised to the next level.”
O’Hara’s 2011 screenwriting and directorial debut, The Inheritance, won top prize at the American Black Film Festival. And in 2013, O’Hara won a $185,000 playwright residency grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funded his position at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.
He’s quick to note that neither the accolades nor the prizes have gone to his head; he remains as grounded just as the sky is blue—and sometimes black.
“Oh honey, there is no such thing as being on top. I am still climbing. And my foot is slipping, so I’m holding on as much as I can,” he quipped. “I believe in longevity, maintaining a respect for the art and also being happy without it. If I don’t get the grant, the production, or the publication then I’m back where I was before. If I’m happy before then I will be happy regardless.”
[Image: Zack Dezon]
HARRISON DAVID RIVERS
Harrison David Rivers is a young playwright also exploring the pursuit of freedom—sort of. At 34 years old, he already has become a brazen, black voice in the LGBT community. In 2010, the Columbia University grad won raves and many accolades for his seminal libretto When Last We Flew, a coming of age story about a gay black teen from the Midwest obsessed with Tony Kushner’s Angels In America play.
His play Look Upon Our Lowliness, a spoken word elegy for a chorus of male voices, played to sold out audiences at Harlem’s School of Arts in 2012. A daring and delectable production, the smartly designed work told the story of a group of gay black men dealing with the death of their close friend—and their own relationship dynamics.
Calling the show “a gift from beginning to end,” Rivers—the recepient of The 2015 McKnight Fellowship in Playwriting—credits his team of producers who supported the vision from ideation to completion. But he’s most grateful to the audience: “What’s the saying? If you build it, they will come? Well, we built it. They came and laughed, cried and talked back to the characters on stage. They stayed after the show to talk to the actors, to the producers and to each other. Connections were made. New relationships were forged. It was an exercise in community building.”
TARELL MCCRANEY
The works of Tarell Alvin McCraney, a native of the rough and tumble Liberty City section of Miami, have included The Brothers Size, In the Red and Brown Water, Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet, Wig Out!, a reworking of Antony & Cleopatra and the acclaimed Choir Boy, which centered on a gay teen grappling with acceptance and bigotry at a historically black prep school for boys.
“I wanted to write a piece about different avenues for African American boys becoming men,” McCraney said of the compelling play, which starred Tony Award winner Chuck Cooper alongside Jeremy Pope, Wallace Smith, Grantham Coleman, Nicholas L. Ashe, and Kyle Beltran. “It was an important inner-story for me.”
With more than 10 plays under his belt, a wealth of prizes and grants (some cash totaling upwards to $1 million) have been bestowed upon the DePaul University and Yale School of Drama alumnae, who received an honorary doctorate from the University of Warwick in England last year.
Though McCraney, 35, is one of the most decorated and awarded playwrights of his generation—black or white—he shies away from the fanfare and instead focuses on the work. “I think in the normal way in which I’ve [always] operated,” says McCraney. “I always try to create the best work possible. The awards have been such a blessing. But, contrary to popular belief, nobody treats you that differently.”
Once an assistant to August Wilson—during the production of the elder playwright’s final production Radio Golf at Yale—the once-aspiring actor learned the craft of dramaturgy from the master.
“Personally, his generosity to people and to the people who were immediately around him, I will always cherish,” McCraney reflects. “He was always so open, so generous. If you were there with him, he would talk to you for hours, sometimes to the chagrin of stage managers. I think his ability to be open-handed and his ability to be generous and share and really allow you into that intimate process, [made him] a great collaborator. He sort of raised a village of people, who fortunately for me, helped launch my work into existence.”
His newest work, Head Of Passes, starring Phylicia Rashad, will have its New York premiere at The Public Theater. McCraney—who grew weary of attending auditions with the same group of black men spanning 40 years in age for the same roles offered—said he became a playwright to create new opportunities.
“I only hope that artists are surrounded in conversation with my work in the way I am inspired by August’s,” says McCraney. I want to make sure that the community is having as inclusive a conversation as possible.”
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