Lloyd Richards, Broadway Director, Yale Educator, Playwright dies at 87

[itzamirakul]

From the NY Times


The New York Times
July 1, 2006
Lloyd Richards, Theater Director and Cultivator of Playwrights, Is Dead at 87
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Lloyd Richards, one of the most influential figures in modern American theater and a pioneering director who brought the plays of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson to Broadway and championed several generations of young playwrights, died on Thursday in Manhattan. It was his 87th birthday.

In the 1980's, as dean of the Yale School of Drama, as artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater and of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, and as a director of commercial theater on Broadway, Mr. Richards was in a position of rare power in American theater, rarer still for an African-American.

Though he was a writer's director, for the most part avoiding a conspicuous directorial thumbprint on his productions, his mark on the dramatic landscape was tremendous, starting as far back as 1957, when he was offered the job of directing a play called "A Raisin in the Sun," about the Youngers, a black family struggling to get out of poverty in Chicago, by an unknown playwright named Lorraine Hansberry.


<snip>

In 1981, as head of the National Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Center in Waterford, a place where playwrights can work among colleagues and have their plays staged, Mr. Richards selected a submission — one script out of more than a thousand — from another young unknown writer, in this case a poet named August Wilson. The play was "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," one of the plays in Mr. Wilson's 10-part cycle on the African-American experience in the 20th century. By the time Mr. Richards had refined it and ushered it through the Yale Rep, where he was then artistic director, to Broadway's Cort Theater in 1984, Mr. Wilson's standing as a major figure in American literature had been established.

Mr. Richards and Mr. Wilson, who died last year, would form one of the most successful artistic partnerships in American theater, as Mr. Richards directed and collaborated on five other plays by Mr. Wilson —"Fences," "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," "The Piano Lesson," "Two Trains Running" and "Seven Guitars." The two refined and developed them in a long pre-Broadway tryout process at nonprofit theaters around the country that was a trademark of their creative process. Mr. Richards won the 1987 Tony Award for best director for "Fences."

[itzamirakul]

1. Link to NY Times article

www.nytimes.com/2006/07/01/theater/01richards.html

[Swamp Rat]

2. I loved "A Raisin in the Sun" n/t