LA Theatre Works, a company that produces and distributes radio plays performed in front of a live audience, has made six plays written by African-American playwrights available for free listening through the end of August. All titles can be found on LA Theatre Works’ website.
Each of the six titles represent plays that have received extensive productions worldwide. Amongst the playwrights are Obie Award and Pulitzer Prize winners and an Oscar nominee. In several of the LATW productions original cast members and creators return to the roles they originated.
Here are the six plays LA Theatre Works is making available for free listening:
A Huey P. Newton Story – Roger Guenveur Smith
A Huey P. Newton Story was performed at the Public Theatre in 1997. Smith starred and directed the show which he also wrote. He received a Special Citation from the Obie Awards for this play and his performance in it.
Smith’s play is structured as a series of improvisations that were based on Newton’s own writings and words.
Newton was one of the founders of the Black Panther Party. One of their primary goals was to monitor the behavior and practices of the police in Oakland, California. The organization was active for approximately 16 years with Newton serving as the Minister of Defense.
A 1967 shooting that lead to the death of police officer John Frey also injured Newton. He was tried and convicted of manslaughter, but that conviction was overturned. Newton later faced two re-trials and was also tried twice for the murder of a seventeen-year-old girl and was implicated in another murder. In 1989 he was murdered in West Oakland.
Smith is perhaps best known for his performances in six Spike Lee movies including School Daze, Do the Right Thing and Malcom X. He’s also appeared in such films as Eve’s Bayou and Poetic Justice. Lee made a film version of A Huey P. Newton Play.
The LATW recording of A Huey P. Newton Story features Smith performing his play. He also directed.
Ceremonies in Dark Old Men – Lonnie Elder III
Elder’s play began its life in 1969 when it was produced by the Negro Ensemble Company at New York’s St. Mark’s Playhouse. It later transferred to the Pocket Theatre. Ceremonies in Dark Old Men was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but lost to The Great White Hope.
The setting is a barber shop in Harlem. Russell B. Parker, a man who dreams of fame as a dancer, runs the failing barber shop.
He is haunted by the ghost of his wife who passed away working herself to the bone to keep the family afloat.
That responsibility now falls on Russell’s daughter, Adele, who is tired of doing everything. She threatens to shut down the barber shop unless her father and her two brothers start making themselves useful and bringing money into the house. It is when they think they’ve found the perfect solution to their problems that things go from bad to worse.
Rocky Carroll and Glynn Turman (most recently seen in the film The Way Back) star in LATW’s radio play version of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. Turman played Parker in a 2007 production at Atlanta’s True Colors Theatre in 2007. That production was directed by Tony Award-winner Kenny Leon.
Elder, who appeared in the original Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun, was also the first African American man to be nominated for an Academy Award for writing. He and Suzanne de Passe made history when they each received and Oscar nominations in 1973. He for Sounder and she for Lady Sings the Blues.
Judyann Elder directed LATW’s production of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. She appeared in the 1969 production of the play. She is the ex-wife of the playwright who died in 1996.
Fabulation – Lynn Nottage
The full title of Nottage’s 2004 play is Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine. The play had its premiere Off-Broadway at Playwright’s Horizon with Charlayne Woodard in the role of Undine, a very successful publicist who is forced to leave her job after her husband has run off with all her money.
Undine has no choice but to go back to her Brooklyn home. Not only is she broke, but she’s also pregnant. The only people she can hope to count on are her working-class relatives she left behind to be a success in Manhattan.
Joining Woodard in the LATW production are Daniel Breaker and Saidah Arrika Ekulona, both of whom were part of the 2004 production. Stuart K. Robinson directed for LATW.
In Ben Brantley’s New York Times review he said, “But while Fabulation may follow a much-traveled route to a guaranteed destination, the view along the way is far less predictable. In charting the social fall and moral rise of Undine Barnes Calles, nee Sharona Watkins, Fabulation subverts its comic and sentimental glibness with punchy social insights and the firecracker snap of unexpected humor.
Nottage won the Obie Award for Best New American Play for Fabulation. She is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for her plays Sweat and Ruined.
Woodard, most recently seen in the feature film Glass and on television in Pose, was a Tony Award nominee for her performance in Ain’t Misbehavin’. She’s also a two-time Obie Award winner. Amongst her five plays is The Night Watcher, which is also part of the radio plays LATW is making available. Details on that show are below.
The Mountaintop – Katori Hall
Little is known about the last night Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spent at the Lorraine Motel in Atlanta before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Katori Hall has reimagined those events for her award-winning play.
This two-character play finds King having a conversation with a mysterious maid who ultimately reveals to him that she is an angel who has come to take King to heaven.
For a story about an American icon like King, it was surprising that Hall’s play had its world premiere in 2009 in London at a 65-seat theatre. The Mountaintop then transferred to the Trafalgar Studios on the West End where it was awarded the Olivier for Best New Play.
Two years later the play had its Broadway premiere with Angela Bassett and Samuel L. Jackson. Kenny Leon directed the production.
LATW recorded the production being made available in 2016. It stars Aja Naomi King and Larry Powell. Roger Guenveur Smith directed the production.
In 2018 they toured a production of The Mountaintop starring Gilbert Glenn Brown and Karen Malina White to 38 cities in America.
The Night Watcher – Charlayne Woodard
Charlayne Woodard wrote and stars in her one-person show The Night Watcher. In essence this is a story about a woman who chooses to live her life without having children. Over the course of the play she finds herself playing a mother role to several youngsters who are all having struggles of their own. This includes a pregnant teenager; a possibly racist niece; a child abused by her mother; a teenager girl who finds much older men paying attention to her and a nephew with problems with law enforcement.
The Night Watcher opened off-Broadway in a Primary Stages production in 2009. Daniel Sullivan directed the show.
Charles Isherwood in his New York Times review said of Woodard, “Ms. Woodard moves among the personalities in her stories with an ease born of experience, changing up the many colors in her rich voice and using her elegant limbs to add filigreed physical detail to the various portraits.”
For the LATW radio play Stuart K. Robinson directed.
Stick Fly – Lydia Diamond
Lydia Diamond’s Stick Fly appeared on Broadway in 2011 and was directed by Kenny Leon. The cast featured Dulé Hill, Condola Rashad, Tracie Thomas, Mekhi Phifer, Ruben Santiago-Hudson and Rosie Benton.
Stick Fly tells the story of the LeVay family. They have done well in their lives and have become the first African-American family to live on Martha’s Vineyard. Money and success, however, cannot protect them from either issues of race and class nor family troubles.
Diamond’s comedy-drama received positive reviews. Amongst them was Christopher Isherwood in the New York Times. He said of the play:
“Stick Fly, a juicy family drama by Lydia R. Diamond, supplies enough simmering conflict, steamy romance and gasp-worthy revelations to satisfy just about anyone suffering withdrawal symptoms from the merciless soap slaughter that’s taken place over the last couple of years.
“And yet this overstuffed but lively comedy-drama, which opened on Thursday night at the Cort Theater, also signifies a departure for Broadway in its depiction of generational conflict and sexual sparks among a well-to-do contemporary African-American family and friends. Pointed discussions of race and class erupt as often as testy personality clashes in Ms. Diamond’s play, set in an imposing manse on Martha’s Vineyard over a few fractious summer days.”
For the LATW production, Hill returns and is joined by Justine Bateman, Tinashe Kajese, Carl Lumbly, Terrell Tilford and Michole Briana White. Shirley Jo Finney directed.
Main photo: Dulé Hill and Michole Briana White (Photo by Derek Hutchison/Courtesy of LA Theatre Works)