Black Theatre--The Way it is: An Interview with Woodie King, Jr.

Abstract

Woodie King, Jr., was born in Alabama in 1937 and, from the age of 9, reared in Detroit. In Detroit, he co-founded Concept East Theatre in 1960 and began working in New York in 1964, where he quickly became the premier producer of Black theatre. He founded the New Federal Theatre in 1970 and went on to produce Broadway plays, films, and recordings; publish anthologies; teach; and mentor literally hundreds of Black actors, playwrights, and theatre professionals as well as found the National Black Touring Circuit. Over a twenty-seven-year period at the New Federal Theatre, King produced and, in numerous cases, provided the launching pad to Broadway for productions such as Black Girl by J. E. Franklin; What The Wine Sellers Buy and Checkmates, both by Ron Milner; The Taking of Miss Janie and other plays by Ed Bullins; Slaveship by Amiri Baraka; for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf by ntozake shange; The Dance and the Railroad by David Henry Hwang; Champeen by Melvin Van Peebles; and Mr. Universe by Jim Grimnsley. As a filmmaker, King's list of credits includes directing and co-producing The Long Night, the only American film selected as part of the New Directors/New Films show at the Museum of Modem Art in New York; directing Death of a Prophet, a feature film on Malcolm X starring Morgan Freeman, and Torture of Mothers, starring Ruby Dee; and producing Right On, an award-winning feature on the Last Poets. He has also produced spoken-word recordings for Motown, and his publications include numerous fiction, drama, and poetry anthologies. Often called a renaissance man, Woodie King, Jr., has excelled as a producer, a director for stage and film, a writer and editor, a teacher and mentor, and a founder and artistic director of theatrical institutions. In the far-ranging and frank interview that follows, Woodie King, Jr., reviews his history and offers his views on the future of Black theatre. Salaam: How did you break into the theatre scene in New York? King: I came to New York at the height of the Black Power Movement. I worked in and around New York for maybe eight or nine months, then became associated with the anti-poverty program. They were setting up cultural arts programs in Harlem, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and Brooklyn as part of larger anti-poverty agencies. I became the director of the one in Manhattan. It was called Mobilization for Youth. We set up training programs for young Blacks, Latinos, and Asians between the ages of 16 and 21 down on the Lower East Side. We paid them to take classes. It was supposed to be a program designed for failure, but we made it something viable and meaningful in that Lower East Side community. We brought in a lot of fantastic musicians and artists to work with the participants. In jazz, for example, we brought in Kenny Dorham and Jackie McLean. We brought in poet Diane Wakowski and people like Baraka. In dance, we had people like Rod Rogers. In play-wrighting, Lonne Elder, III, and J. E. Franklin. Work that came out of there captured the imagination of a New York critical, mid-'60s kind of establishment. Beyond all of that, what was happening in the city was a whole new movement: Black Power, Black empowerment, social awareness, Black is Beautiful. We operated on the Lower East Side, but we were very close to the sister organizations, Haryou-Act in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant Redevelopment Corporation in Brooklyn, so we would be traversing among all of these. What was happening around the world was that this new, young Black art was impressing itself on world culture. We ended up taking young people to Rome, Italy, to the Hemisphere in San Antonio, Texas, to the Montreal Expo '67. These young artists, then 18 and 19 years old, are now some of the major artists working in the American performing arts: people like Gary Bolding, Maurice Sneed, Bostic Bearfelder, and Ronnie Clanton, who starred in movies like The Cool World. …