Douglas Turner Ward, who understudied Sidney Poitier in the historical play and took over the role as Walter Lee Younger in the show’s national tour, penned a manifesto published in The New York Times that addressed the color barriers in American theatre. His opinion piece, titled “American Theatre: For Whites Only,” published just a few years after the Supreme Court declared segregation of public schools and thereby public facilities, unconstitutional– shed light on the non-existent space for African-American theatre artists.  

A theatre evolving not out of negative need, but positive potential; better equipped to employ existing talents and spur the development of future ones. A theatre whose justification is not the gap it fills, but the achievement it aspires towards— no less high than any other comparable theatre company of present or past world fame.

The article caught the attention of W. McNeil Lowery at the Ford Foundation, who encouraged Ward to apply for a grant to build the type of theatre he described in his essay. Ward was awarded $434,000 and along with fellow castmate, Robert Hook and theatre manager Gerald Krone the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) was founded in the summer of 1967. Ward and other black writers would now have a platform to showcase their work and young black actors, like the ones who worked with Hooks, were given the opportunity to play complex characters with depth and originality.   

The inaugural season opened with Peter Weiss’ Song of the Lusitanian Bogey in 1968. NEC received criticism on both sides of the racial spectrum. Members of the black community were critical of the NEC employing white staff, playwrights, and funders. NEC continued to serve the African-American theatre talent pool, mentoring the likes of Louis Gossett Jr., Sherman Hemsley, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburne, Phylicia Rashad, Delroy Lindo and Angela Bassett.

Brent Jennings, Steven Anthony Jones, Eugene Lee, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, James Pickens and Peter Friedman in the 1981 Negro Ensemble Company production of A Soldier’s Play.

Even though the NEC broke barriers for many Black actors, directors and playwrights, box-office sales suffered. In the 1972-73 season the resident company was disbanded and major cut-backs of training programs, salaries and productions occurred. The NEC would now only produce one play a year.

In 1974 NEC made its Broadway debut with The River Niger by Joseph Walker that took home a Tony Award for Best Play and went on a national tour. The success of The River Niger bought the NEC more time, and in 1981 A Soldier’s Play by Charles Fuller won the Outer Critics’ Circle Best Off-Broadway Play, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play, the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was later turned into a three-time Academy Award nominated movie.

Ward left the company in 2002. O.L. Duke took his place from 2002-2004 and now Charles Weldon stands at the helm of the historic landmark. Weldon expanded the theatre’s education programs by offering video production, commercial theatre management, producing, advertising and public school training. NEC currently offers workshops in basic acting, actors intensive, playwriting, dance and movement and more.
In January 2015 Weldon was quoted in an article published in Newsweek explaining why he continues to persevere and maintain the company. For him, it means that he gets “to hold on to history. A history that was great. A history that so many great people were a part of.”

The post The Negro Ensemble Company Blazed Trails for Black Theatre appeared first on Broadway Black.

In 1958, he moved from his Philadelphia, P.A. hometown to California where he studied at Los Angeles City College and San Francisco State College. While there, he encountered his first career critics. One professor told him that he would never make it as a writer and another all but ousted him from the Contemporary Literature Club because of the color of his skin. Nevertheless, he was determined to become a writer.

San Francisco became the birthing place for Bullins the playwright. In 1965 Robert Hartman of the San Francisco Drama Circle produced Bullins’ one-act plays How Do You Do?, Dialect Determinism and Clara’s Ole Man at the Firehouse Repertory Theater.

Black Arts/West was also founded in 1965 by revolutionary and poet Marvin X along with Ed Bullins, Ethna Wyatt, Duncan Barber, Hillary Broadous, and Carl Brossiere. Black Arts/West was a conglomerate of black artists in the Black Arts Movement of the 1950s on the west coast. Members of Black Arts/West convinced Eldridge Cleaver to convert a large Victorian house into what Samuel Hays, author of Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography, refers to as the “birthing place of revolutionary thought and activities in Northern California.”

Marvin X facilitated the connection between Cleaver and Black Panther Party Leaders and, together, the group opened Black House at 1711 Broderick Street. Black House served dual functions, as an outlet for Black revolutionary artists and the headquarters of the party. Bullins became the party’s Minister of Culture but by late 1966 ideological differences between party leader Huey Newton and members of Black Arts/West polarized Black House. Bullins left the party and joined Robert Macbeth at the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem in 1967.

While Bullins was delving into the world of African American theater on the west coast, Macbeth— a product of Charleston, S.C., embarked a parallel journey on the east. He was inspired by the beat of the South. The sit-in movement, bus integration rides and protests awakened Macbeth the artist. As an actor, he understudied the likes of James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett and Billy Dee Williams but the heart breaking images of four little black girls, murdered in a fiery Birmingham church on a Sunday morning motivated him to want to do more. Macbeth set out for meaningful contribution in the 1960s and as he began developing his own theater, a colleague sent him Goin’ a Buffalo written by Bullins. He instantly knew that Bullins was the writer he was in search of.  

“I need something Ray Charles-Mahalia Jackson-Miles Davis-Aretha Franklin-Nina Simone-Curtis Mayfield-Jimi Hendrix-John Coltrane, arranged by Duke Ellington or Sun Ra. I was searching for a creative inspiration. I might not be able to describe it clearly, but I knew I would feel it when I read it,” Macbeth recalled in his commentary Bullins and Me a Remembrance of Past Times.

Macbeth contacted Bullins who then sent him In The Wine Time— the first of his Twentieth Century Cycle. Soon Bullins was contracted and settling into the New York scene with Macbeth and the New Lafayette Theater. Bullins served as playwright-in-residence until 1972 and in 1968 he received the Drama Desk-Vernon Rice Award for The Electronic Nigger. During this time he founded and edited Black Theatre Magazine and later formed the Surviving Theatre in the Bronx.

To understand the importance of Bullins in the Black Arts Movement you have to acknowledge the severity of the times. Macbeth explains working with actors and planning for the New Lafayette Theater on the same day, merely 20 blocks away, when Malcolm X was murdered. In 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and the Vietnam War claimed hundreds of young American lives each week. Artists of the movement took on the responsibility of transcribing the Black narrative, investigating and reflecting on aspects of the revolution and informing the masses. While Marvin Gaye wrote What’s Going On, Bullins produced We Righteous Bombers under the name Kinsgley B. Bass, Jr.

His recognition grew in the 1970s. The Fabulous Miss Marie (1971) and In New England Winter (1971) received Obie Awards and The Taking of Miss Janie (1975) won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Bullins assisted young writers as writing coordinator for the New York Shakespeare Festival from 1975 to 1982 and served as playwright-in-residence at the American Place Theatre.

In addition to the Obie and New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, he also received three Rockefeller Foundation playwriting grants, a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, a Visionary Leadership Award from the Theatre Communications Group and an honorary doctor of letters from Columbia College. He taught at several colleges and universities including Northeastern University in Boston, M.A.

Bullins has written over 50 plays. His commitment to exploring the complexities of what it is like to be Black and engulfed by racism, family, music, religion, drugs, violence and everything else in America earned him recognition as one of the best American dramatists of all time.

The post Ed Bullins: A Pioneer of the Black Arts Movement appeared first on Broadway Black.