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A Home of Their Own
"If any hope, outside of chance individual fortune, exists for Negro playwrights as a group - or for that matter Negro actors and other craftsmen - the most immediate, pressing, practical, absolutely minimally essential active first step is the development of a permanent Negro repertory company of at least Off-Broadway size and dimension. Not in the future but now."
Douglas Turner Ward wrote these words in 1966 in an editorial printed in The New York Times, who had asked Ward, an actor and playwright, to write about the state of African-American theatre. Ward's editorial, "American Theater: For Whites Only?," attacked the current theatre establishment as "essentially a theater of the Bourgeois, by the Bourgeois, about the Bourgeois, and for the Bourgeois" with no room for African-American theatre artists - specifically playwrights - because they lacked empathetic audiences of other African-Americans. He called for the immediate establishment of a theatre by, for and about African-Americans: "A theatre concentrating primarily on themes of Negro life, but also resilient enough to incorporate and interpret the best of world drama." With this demand Ward's editorial became a manifesto that would change American theatre history.
The groundwork for such a theatre had already been laid by Ward and another actor, Robert Hooks. Ward and Hooks had met as actors in 1959 when both appeared in the national touring company of Lorraine Hansberry's landmark play, A Raisin in the Sun. In 1965 Hooks produced Ward's satirical play, Happy Ending, and his reverse minstrel show, Day of Absence, in a successful commercial run Off-Broadway at the St. Marks Playhouse in 1965. Ward also appeared in the plays and received an Obie Award for Distinguished Performance and a Drama Desk Award for writing.
"Everything that we learned from that production gave me the initial blueprint for fleshing out what became the Negro Ensemble Company: a professional theatre group combined with a large scale, tuition-free training program," Ward told Signature Edition as preparations were underway for the 2008-2009 Negro Ensemble Company Season. "I didn't want to create a training program that anybody would pay for because it would restrict the amount of people that you could consider. I just wanted to consider talent." Some of the first students in this training program included acting luminaries such as Mary Alice and Richard Roundtree.
Ward's challenge in The New York Times was answered by the Ford Foundation, who invited Ward, Hooks and theatre manager Gerald S. Krone to apply for a grant to establish such a company. In 1967 Ford awarded them with a three-year grant of $434,000. The Negro Ensemble Company set up offices in the St. Marks Playhouse with Ward as Artistic Director, Hooks as Executive Director, and Krone as Administrative Director. In addition to producing a full season of work, the company enrolled 125 students in beginning and advanced workshop classes in acting, voice, dance, design, and administration. They also employed thirteen actors in a resident acting company: Norman Bush, Rosalind Cash, David Downing, Frances Foster, Arthur French, Moses Gunn, William Jay, Judyann Jonsson, Denise Nicholas, Esther Rolle, Clarice Taylor, Hattie Winston, and Allie Woods.
From the beginning the NEC attracted controversy. They were accused of cultural separatism and self-segregation as well as criticized for establishing their base of operations in the East Village rather than Harlem. Their first play was also a risky choice: German playwright Peter Weiss's anti-colonialist, agit-prop drama, The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey. "They didn't know what to make of it," recalled Ward of the initial critical response to Lusitanian Bogey. "And those who knew what to make of it, it wasn't their cup of tea. But the one thing that they almost unanimously said was that they were startled by the expertise and the impact of the company. It was like, where did these people come from? How could they be so good?"
Over the years the Negro Ensemble Company would become known for its sterling acting company, which debuted some of the most lauded and prominent African-American actors working today. Other actors who passed through its doors include Angela Bassett, Charles Brown, Adolph Caesar, Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson, S. Epatha Merkerson, James Pickens, Jr., Phylicia Rashad, Roxie Roker, and Denzel Washington.
As well as casting some of the finest actors of their day, Ward programmed an expansive body of work from as diverse an array of playwrights as possible. "My eclecticism was off-putting," says Ward of reactions from the critics. "They wanted to put us in a niche, in a groove. The so-called 'family drama' was their preference; those plays were what they identified with and would get rave reviews. But that was only a minor part of our season output. Because I consciously made myself be eclectic in trying to recognize plays of worth from a wide range of genres, points-of-view, styles and forms." The company also programmed playwright-driven works, steering away from a collaboratively devised, experimental style of creation, as seen in other Off-Broadway companies of the time, such as The Living Theatre, La Mama Experimental Theatre Company, or works such as Amiri Baraka's Slave Ship (1969) and Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (1975). "My interest was in texts," says Ward. "Not necessarily a well-made play, but a play completed as a text. I was not interested in the auteur [director] process. Excellent directors would say, 'Doug, why didn't you invite me?' and I would say, 'I didn't invite you because it wasn't your thing.'"
The NEC's wide-ranging repertoire varied from gritty, contemporary urban dramas to lyrical ritual theatre to wild musical vaudevilles. The company did not stick to strictly American writers either, but programmed works by playwrights from the world over, including Nobel Prize-winners Wole Soyinka of Nigeria and Derek Walcott of Trinidad. In Lonne Elder III's 1969 play Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, a man and his sons make a Faustian bargain with a local gangster to use their Harlem barbershop as a front for bootleg liquor and numbers running. Walcott's The Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970) is a surreal dream play and meditation on Western imperialism and colonization. Paul Carter Harrison's The Great MacDaddy (1974) is a phantasmagorical musical inspired by the Yoruban folk tale traditions of Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola's novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Steve Carter's 1975 play Eden, set in the San Juan Hill section of Manhattan in the 1920s, follows the cultural clash of two families when a star-crossed romance develops between a young Caribbean woman and a young African-American man from the rural South. Charles Fuller's five-part cycle of plays, the We series (1988-1990) were historical and political explorations of African-American life following the Civil War. Many plays also emerged from the Negro Ensemble Company's prolific Playwrights' Unit, a developmental workshop which according to Ward, "was almost a mini production unit." A complete list of the over two hundred plays the Negro Ensemble Company has produced over the course of its forty year history can be found on their website: www.necinc.org.
For Signature Associate Artist Ruben Santiago-Hudson, acting with the NEC in the 1980s was an empowering experience: "What was important to Doug, Gerald Krone and Robert Hooks was that they celebrated that part of our culture where we mattered, where we counted," he says.
Santiago-Hudson arrived in New York in 1983, set on becoming an actor in the Negro Ensemble Company. He joined the cast of A Soldier's Play as a replacement actor and later went on to play Theopolis Parker in NEC's 1985 revival of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. "All kinds of people were going to the NEC from all over New York," recalls Santiago-Hudson of the NEC audiences. "White, black, Hispanic, Asian, it was the thing to do. Because of the chances they were taking on some of the work, how dynamic that work was, and the actors who were coming out of there."
The NEC's reputation extended outside of New York as well. From their inception they toured the United States and abroad, appearing in 1969 at the Aldwych Theatre in London (The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey); the 1972 Olympics in Munich (The Dream on Monkey Mountain and Philip Hayes Dean's The Sty of the Blind Pig); Dublin, East Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand (Home); and the Edinburgh Festival (A Soldier's Play), to name a few. Santiago-Hudson remembers the national tour of A Soldier's Play: "I loved the fact that we would come into towns and everyone would know we were there because we were ambassadors. And the mayor would come out and give us a key to the city and we would have a day, A Soldier's Play Day."
One of the NEC's most celebrated works, Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Play, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982, making Fuller the second Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American playwright in the award's history. The film adaptation, A Soldier's Story, was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, and Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Adolph Caesar). Between 1973 and 1980 the NEC also transferred three plays to Broadway: Joseph A. Walker's The River Niger (1972), Leslie Lee's The First Breeze of Summer (1975), and Samm-Art Williams' Home (1979). All three plays were nominated for Tony Awards with Joseph A. Walker becoming the first African-American to receive a Tony Award for Best Play. To this day that honor is only held by one other African-American playwright: August Wilson for Fences in 1987. The company has also received numerous Obie Awards, including special citations in 1967-68 and 1978-79, and an award for Sustained Achievement in 1980-81.
Ward stepped down as Artistic Director of the Negro Ensemble Company in 1987, staying on as company President and Consulting Director into the mid-1990s. The current NEC remains active, continuing to produce new work as well as providing a training ground for African-American playwrights and other theatre artists. Signature Theatre Company looks forward to celebrating the legacy of the historic Negro Ensemble Company, and their immeasurable impact on the American theatre.
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