Lloyd Richards

The Innovators Ar tists whose wor k shap ed our t h eatre

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A director, a gentleman, and foster father to generations of American playwrights

By Jeffrey sweet

“disaster after disaster,” is how playwright Ron Cowen remembered the 1968 National Playwrights Conference in an article for The New York Times. “People were going crazy, screaming, leaving, coming back, leaving. Everybody was mean.”

Though valuable work was introduced (including Lanford Wilson’s Lemon Sky, a play that more than forty years later still has the power to shake and move), competition and over-production that summer threatened to sink the whole enterprise, just when the world was starting to pay attention.

Until then, founder George C. White had run the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theater Center by himself. But now, after four years, he realized that it was time to appoint an artistic director specifically to oversee the National Playwrights Conference, the Connecticut center’s main event. White asked Lloyd Richards to take the job.

But Richards’s place in American theatre history would be secure even if White hadn’t made this offer.

‘I want you to direct it’ To go into the theatre was an unlikely career choice for a young black man who came of age during the Depression. Born in 1919 in Toronto but raised in Detroit, he attended Wayne State University, initially contemplating a career in law or the ministry, but Facing page: Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee on Broadway in A Raisin in the Sun, written by Lorraine Hansberry and directed

by Lloyd Richards, 1959. Top of this page: Richards at his desk at Yale University.

the campus theatre scene led him to switch his ambitions to acting. There weren’t a lot of African-American actors to inspire him as role models.

Two of the most prominent, Canada Lee and Paul Robeson, lived difficult lives, plagued by controversy and harassment as a result of their outspokenness on civil rights issues.

Nonetheless, Richards knew that the theatre was where his heart was, and, since professional theatre in those days required living in New York, he made the move east.

He struggled to find work in New York, but he had the good fortune to catch the eye of Paul Mann, one of the city’s most respected acting teachers. (You might be familiar with Mann from his performance as Lazar Wolf in the film version of Fiddler on the Roof.) Mann sensed that Richards had the makings of a good teacher and asked him to join him in an acting studio he had opened. It was there that Richards encountered a student who blazed with potential.

The student’s name was Sidney Poitier. The two became friends. In an interview, Richards said, “I recall sharing a hot dog with Sidney, because neither one of us could afford to have a whole one by himself....

He said to me one day, ‘If I ever do a major Broadway show, I want you to direct it.’ ” Some years later, when Poitier was an established movie star, he was offered the lead in a script written by an unknown African-American writer.

Poitier told the producer, Philip Rose, he would do the play if Richards were hired to direct. Rose agreed. While

Gerry Goodstein

LLOYD RICHARDS

Rose labored to find investors willing to gamble on a very risky proposition (it took him over a year to raise the money), Richards met regularly with the young author, asking her detailed questions which helped her refine and tighten her script. When the play opened on Broadway in 1959, it became the surprise hit of the season. The author was Lorraine Hansberry and the play was A Raisin in the Sun, the story of a black family confronting society and each other as they fought to escape a Chicago ghetto. Lloyd Richards became the first African-American director to be nominated for a Tony Award. (The play, Poitier, and co-star Claudia McNeil were also nominated for Tonys, but The Miracle Worker took most of the top prizes that year.) It was the birth of a great American play and the beginning of a major directing career.

Aside from his dramaturgical skills, a look at the cast list of Raisin suggests that early on Richards had an eye for talent. In addition to Poitier and McNeil, the ensemble featured Ruby Dee, Diana Sands, Louis Gossett and Ivan Dixon, all of whom became

About this series “The Innovators” is a series of profiles of the men and women whose groundbreaking work has shaped the way we think about, make, and experience theatre. Previous subjects include Orson Welles, Hallie Flanagan, Joseph Papp, Harold Clurman, and Viola Spolin.

Jeffrey Sweet is an editorial advisor.

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William B. Carter

Theresa Merritt in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, directed by Lloyd Richards at Yale Repertory Theatre in 1984. Facing page: with Wilson, his opposite number in “the great collaboration of the twentieth century,” at a discussion after the National Playwrights Conference reading of Seven Guitars in 1994. Left to right: dramaturg Ernest Schier, Richards, Wilson, director Amy Saltz.

stars (as did Ossie Davis, who took over the role from Poitier). Glynn Turman, who played the young son, moved from a successful career as an actor to directing. Cast in smaller parts, Lonnie Elder III became an important writer, and Douglas Turner Ward, in addition to finding success as a writer, founded the hugely influential Negro Ensemble Company.

‘A place I had never heard of’ The success of Raisin led Richards to other directing opportunities on Broadway. As was common practice at the time, some of his projects played runs in New Haven before moving to New York. It is unclear which of these Joel Oliansky saw during the time he was studying playwriting at Yale, but when, in 1966, George White asked Oliansky if he had any ideas for a director for his play, Bedford Forrest, Oliansky asked for Richards.

White had founded the O’Neill Center in 1964 in Waterford, Connect-

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icut, on a chunk of land overlooking Long Island Sound. In 1965, he had invited a number of playwrights to gather there for several days to talk about the needs of the new American dramatist. Responding to these conversations, White decided that in the summer of 1965 he would offer two full productions of new plays as well as a series of readings of works-indevelopment. One of the plays White chose was Bedford Forrest.

Following Oliansky’s recommendation, White got in touch with Richards. As Richards later described it, “I got a call from a man I never heard of named George White, asking me to come to a place I had never heard of to direct a play I had never heard of... in a theatre that was yet to be built. And this would all happen in a couple of weeks.” Racing time, with skimpy resources and a huge cast, Richards directed the show, an epic about a Confederate general and a former slave who was obsessed with killing him.

Few people make claims that Bedford Forrest itself was a successful play, though its author, Oliansky would later prove his talent by writing admired scripts for TV and film in Hollywood. But the project had been a complex one, and White was impressed by the cool-headedness with which Richards managed it.

In the meantime, the staged readings at the center had gone very well, and White decided to shift the Playwrights Conference over entirely to readings. Richards was invited to direct and continued to impress. One of the plays Richards directed in 1967, Ron Cowen’s Summertree, moved to a successful run at Lincoln Center, though with a different director. In the article mentioned above, Cowen wrote at length about Richards’s skill at helping him cut, shape, and rewrite an ungainly text.

Richards and Cowen worked together again the next summer. The presentations had become more elaborate, some featuring complex lighting plots and actors who, despite very limited time, attempted to play off-book. This was the season Cowen described as “disaster after disaster.”

White asked Richards to be the conference’s first artistic director and reset the course. Richards turned out to be the exactly right choice.

Key to bringing order to the situation was his insistence on a spartan approach to the presentations: no more elaborate technical cues, and scenic elements were to be suggested by steel modules braced together. The focus was to be on the text. To ensure the playwrights’ ability to change material up to the last minute—and indeed between the two scheduled

‘He had to learn more’ Though occasionally a project was brought to the conference from an alum or someone with connections to the O’Neill Center, the vast majority of the plays and writers were found through an open submission policy.

Anybody could apply. The submissions cascaded in, often a thousand or more. Those works that the initial readers thought offered something particularly interesting were passed to the next level of evaluation, and eventually these were winnowed to the short list of a final few dozen or so. Then Richards and some trusted advisors would discuss their way to the final selections.

This process plucked some extraordinary talents out of obscurity.

As David Henry Hwang recalls, “I was a senior in college and I had written

Provided by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center

performances—the actors remained on book.

“I reshaped the conference into something that I thought was important, the development of playwrights,” he told N. Graham Nesmith in a 2005 interview for African-American Review. “In order to help and guide them in their thinking, I gave each a very knowledgeable cast, talented professionals, and I gave them an opportunity to live with playwrights who were going through the same thing. This access is a rare opportunity for working playwrights. Here it is two o’clock in the morning, in the dorm that they stay in, and everybody is working.... The person whose play was coming up next—you and other playwrights brought him coffee, took care of him. You didn’t come to the O’Neill just to get your play done.

You came to the O’Neill and you made yourself available to other playwrights—as did directors, designers, actors—everybody was available to the people involved with their work.

And that created this productive, wonderful community.”

Richards also decided his focus should be on running the conference, so he stopped directing plays there.

this play to be done in my dorm, F.O.B.” He was advised by a friend to send the play to the O’Neill. “So I did. And we opened the play in my dorm in March of ’79 and then, a few weeks after, I got a mailgram at Stanford saying that I was on the short list for the O’Neill. And then I was actually selected.” He was twentyone when he went to Waterford. After its presentation there, F.O.B. was picked up by Joseph Papp (another Innovators series subject, profiled in January, 2010), for full production at the New York Public Theater and won an Obie in 1980. And that was the beginning of Hwang’s remarkable career.

A few years earlier, the O’Neill had similarly given Wendy Wasserstein the boost that propelled her to stardom when Uncommon Women and Others was selected, and similar stories could be told of the center’s importance to John Patrick Shanley, John Guare, Christopher Durang, and dozens of others.

Few, though, would dispute that the most significant discovery was made in 1982. Though the script reminded one of the readers of a

telephone book because of its bulk, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom made it to the selection committee. The play wasn’t elegantly crafted, but it had a vital voice, and Richards extended the Conference invitation to August Wilson.

Wilson had submitted plays to the O’Neill before, as Richards describes in an interview on the website of the Academy of Achievement. “[He was] a poet who was in the process of teaching himself to become a playwright at the suggestion of some friends. He was rejected by us five times. It was on the fifth try that he was selected.

He even tells the story that once he didn’t believe that we had really read his play, so he submitted the same play the next year, and it was also rejected. He thought, maybe these people have a point.... [T]he important part of that is the fact that August Wilson did not arrive full blown. He was a person who did not, in getting rejected, turn around and say, ‘Aw, there is something wrong with you,’ the rejector. He ultimately accepted the fact that he was in process, and there may have been something wrong with what he was doing, and April 2013 • Dramatics

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As an educator at Yale, he was able to help train young talent. At the O’Neill, he was able to give many of his students their first professional seasoning. At Yale Rep, he was able to offer them their first professional credits in full productions. And then, he sometimes took them to Broadway.

There was still work to do on Wilson’s play, and, as he had with Lorraine Hansberry, Richards guided the fledgling writer through revisions.

A refined Ma Rainey leapfrogged to Broadway, earning Tony nominations for the play and for Charles Dutton, an actor Richards had found studying at Yale.

‘You want to please Pop’ The following summer Wilson returned with a new play, Fences.

Again, Richards assigned William Partlan to direct the O’Neill incarnation, and again Fences received its premiere at Yale Rep under Richards’s direction. The play was an even bigger hit than Ma Rainey, winning the Tony and the Pulitzer, and winning Richards a Tony Award. Writer and director continued to work together on a series of extraordinary plays—

Provided by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center

he had to learn more and he had to do more. He did, and he finally got to that point where his work was accepted for work. Finally, that was when he came to the Playwrights Conference and our relationship began.”

Wilson arrived, shy and unsophisticated about the world of the professional theatre. Richards assigned him William Partlan as a director and Michael Feingold as a dramaturg (a kind of literary advisor), and they helped him find the story inside the telephone book. The two performances went over in a big way. The question after this was where the play would go next.

Lloyd Richards had an answer for that. At the suggestion of George White, Yale University had hired Richards to be the new dean of the School of Drama in 1979, which also meant that he became artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater. Yale Rep would offer the first full production of Ma Rainey, and Lloyd Richards would direct.

By holding three posts—dean and the artistic directorship of two major institutions—Richards was able to practice vertical integration in the theatre to an unprecedented degree.

Edward Albee and Richards addressing the National Playwrights Conference, 1979.

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Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running and Seven Guitars—premiering them at Yale after initial workshops at the O’Neill, then continuing to shape them through engagements at various regional theatres before arriving in New York. The rule of thumb was that at every step along the way, the plays lost ten or fifteen minutes until they were in fighting trim for Broadway.

John Lahr, longtime theatre critic for The New Yorker, says, “I think Lloyd’s collaboration with August is, along with [director Elia] Kazan’s with Tennessee [Williams], the great collaboration of the twentieth century.

Lloyd nursed him and taught him.

The gestation period of those plays allowed August to find them and chisel them and make them more perfect. August had the talent, but he would have never realized that talent without Lloyd plugging him into the establishment.”

Wilson acknowledged a psychological aspect to their relationship. In an interview published in Vanity Fair in 1989, he was quoted as saying, “I’m a great boxing fan, and boxing is like writing. I look at Lloyd like he’s my trainer. Now, Lloyd is old enough to be my father. Having grown up without a father, that has a lot to do with my relationship with him. I always view him in a fatherly way. You know, you want to please Pop. You want Pop to be proud of you. I want to score a knockout.”

Father-son relationships are prone to conflict, though, when the son reaches a point when he feels he has to assert his own adulthood. That point may have been reached when they were collaborating on the television film version of The Piano Lesson that was produced for Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1995. Lahr, who wrote an in-depth piece about Wilson for The New Yorker, comments, “August threw an amazing scene because the designer had not really designed the sculpture on the piano in a way that made a proper statement. It insulted

Provided by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center

his sense of African-American sensibility. Lloyd took great offense at the kind of fury that came out of August at that point.” Wilson stopped bringing his plays to the O’Neill and thereafter worked with other directors.

‘A core set of values’ It is easy to imagine Richards being offended by Wilson’s explosion as virtually every description of Richards by colleagues and friends includes the words “soft-spoken,” “courtly” and “a gentleman.” His very presence brought out the better angels of others’ natures. Michael Feingold recalls working on a play at the O’Neill when the director and the writer were butting heads so violently over a problem in the second act that Feingold told them, “ ‘We must go to Lloyd.’ I herded them off to his office where he sat and was judicious. We found a way into the second act that was rational, viable, and somehow managed to please everybody. That was the first time I think it occurred to me that his role model was Abraham Lincoln.”

Richards would sometimes encounter those who didn’t understand the appeal of working as he did on new scripts. Director William Partlan tells a story of the internationally renowned South African dramatist, Athol Fugard, that illustrates a characteristic Richards response to such doubt.

“Fugard did several of his new works with Lloyd at Yale. And at one point, apparently, he said to Lloyd, ‘I don’t understand how any playwright works in the way that you do at the O’Neill.’ And Lloyd being Lloyd, said, ‘Then you’re going to have to come and be a dramaturg.’ So Athol came as a dramaturg to work with a Yale playwright, a young woman named Janeice Scarbrough, who had written a play called Trinity Site that I was assigned to direct. (Of course, Janeice was petrified when she found out that he was her dramaturg, but it turned out he was quite a good one.) I think he did come to understood how it could work for some playwrights,

Construction of the amphitheatre at the O’Neill Center, 1966.

though not that it would work for him necessarily. But again, that was Lloyd’s technique: if someone didn’t think that the process would work for them, then he would find a way to make them at least see the process and understand it.”

The success of the Playwrights Conference under Richards made it possible for George White to launch other programs at the O’Neill—the National Theater Institute, the National Critics Institute, the National Music Theater Conference, and the National Puppetry Conference, among others.

Richards directed NTI for a time and occasionally taught there and offered input on the other programs, but much of his energies were directed at maintaining the integrity of the Playwrights Conference amidst all the new activity. Partlan says, “Lloyd was really good at protecting the Playwrights Conference. I think that’s part of what George really wanted in an artistic director: someone with the inner kind of strength that Lloyd

brought to it to tame all of those egos and establish a core set of values.”

Richards continued in his position at Yale through 1991, and ran the Playwrights Conference through its 1999 session. In the years that followed, he was a frequent guest artist at schools and theatres.

Richards and Wilson reportedly made up before Wilson died in 2005.

Lloyd Richards died on June 29, 2006, on his eighty-seventh birthday.

The obituaries tended to focus on his having directed the premieres of America’s two iconic African-American playwrights, Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson. Writers of all races, though, have benefitted from the pioneering work he did at the O’Neill Center. When George White asked Richards to take on the artistic directorship of the Playwrights Conference, staged readings and playwright development were young ideas. Now his methods have been adopted by theatres and programs around the country and the world. t April 2013 • Dramatics

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