Black History Month Day 3 ~ Lloyd Richards

In 1959, Lloyd Richards became the first African American to direct a play on Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun." The critical and box office hit made his one-time acting student Sidney Poitier an international star.

As a director, teacher and discoverer of talent, Mr. Richards had an illustrious cast of proteges, including playwrights John Guare, Athol Fugard, Charles Fuller, Lanford Wilson, Lee Blessing and Wendy Wasserstein.

Mr. Richards's most notable partnership, forged in the 1980s, was with August Wilson. Wilson was a theater novice in 1982 when Mr. Richards selected Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" for a reading at the influential summer playwrights' conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford(CT), a conference he ran for 32 years; he later premiered Wilson's play at the Yale Repertory Theatre and directed its Broadway debut in fall 1984. In the ensuing years, he directed five more of Wilson's plays, including "Fences," which earned Mr. Richards a Tony Award for best director in 1987.

Richards, always guarded about his age, died on his 87th birthday in 2006.

(Source: Lloyd Richards' Washington Post obituary (7/1/06))

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Updated On: 2/3/11 at 04:18 PM

to be honest, i just kind of (unilaterally!) picked up the baton because i think it's a really cool idea, too, and i realized that if i wanted it to continue i probably needed to put my money where my mouth was, so to speak ...

if anyone feels similarly inspired, i hope they'll do what i did and jump in! this idea didn't originate with me, and imho the "project" has a better chance of success with a variety of contributors.

if this works out, i'll consolidate all the posts into a master thread at the end of the month. that way, people who want to comment on a particular topic (like Treemonisha yesterday) can do so, and people who want a handy archive will have it.

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