ABSTRACT
When I was a high school student, I performed dramatic readings of James Weldon Johnson’s The Creation and entered a scene from Raisin in the Sun in oratory contests. Noting this interest, my father gave me an article from the Sunday New York Times, announcing Ellen Stewart’s new theatrical idea, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club. This article changed my life. It showed me that a black woman theatre artist in America could break new ground, chart a new course, ride her own railroad. As a Howard Player I studied, with Owen Dodson and James Butcher, the plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare. Later, when I joined the Howard University faculty, I was the “young lion” James V.Hatch mentions (see Chapter 14) who staged N.R.Davidson’s El Hajj Malik. In 1972, I conceived and directed the gospel musical Jesus Christ Lawd Today at the Black American Theater in Washington, DC. Later still I had a brief directorial connection to the Hecksher production of Vy Higgensen’s Mama, I Want To Sing. More recently, I spent five years chairing the drama department at Spelman College, heir to Baldwin Burrough’s crystalline vision and keeper of Anne Cooke’s flame. It is out of this swirling cauldron of influences and images that I approach the task of introducing this section.
