 | Lloyd Richards |
Lloyd Richards, the former dean of the School of Drama and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre who earned international acclaim for introducing white theater audiences to plays portraying the experience of blacks, died on June 29 in Manhattan on his 87th birthday. The cause was heart failure, according to his family.
Richards, who headed the drama school and Yale Rep from 1979 to 1991, is especially noted for his partnership with playwright August Wilson, who died in October. The Yale dean brought the work of the then-unknown playwright to the Yale Rep and, subsequently, Broadway. Richards directed six of Wilson's plays on Broadway, including "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" (1984), "Fences" (1987), "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" (1988), "The Piano Lesson" (1990), "Two Trains Running" (1992) and "Seven Guitars" (1996). Richards won a Tony Award for his direction of "Fences."
Through his work at Yale and during a 30-year career as artistic director of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, Richards also nurtured the careers of such playwrights as Wendy Wasserstein, Christopher During, Lee Blessing and David Henry Hwang, among others. He also ushered numerous black actors to prominence on the stage, sometimes late in their careers.
At the Yale Rep, Richards championed the work of Athol Fugard and directed several of the South African playwright's dramas on Broadway, including "A Lesson From Aloes" (1980), "Master Harold ... and the Boys" (1982) and "Blood Knot" (1985).
"He was the most important African-American presence on Broadway," Oscar Eustiss, artistic director of the Public Theater, told the Associated Press upon learning of Richards' death. "He broke a barrier that no one thought possible."
As a director, Richards was known for being a quiet influence, allowing actors to "discover" their characters for themselves. Ruby Dee, who starred in Richards' groundbreaking original Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun" in 1959, recently described the director's style on the National Public Radio program "All Things Considered" by saying: "You would not suspect on meeting him that he was as fierce a director. He had a way of conveying the fierceness gently ... He asked you the right questions to lead you to the passion of the character."
"Lloyd was just a reservoir of wisdom," Yale School of Drama alumnus Charles S. Dutton is quoted as saying in Richards' obituary in The New York Times. Dutton was cast by Richards in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom."
Lloyd George Richards was born on June 29, 1919, in Toronto, Canada. His father, a Jamaican carpenter and a follower of the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, moved the family to Detroit for a job in the automobile industry. He died of diphtheria when Richards was just nine. A few years later, Richards' mother lost her eyesight. Richards and his brother, Allan, helped support the family by shining shoes and working in a barbershop, among other odd jobs.
Richards went to Wayne State University to study law, but he had already become interested in theater during a high school class about Shakespeare. During World War II, he volunteered for the Army Air Corps, and was training with Tuskegee's flight program for black soldiers when the war ended.
In 1947, Richards moved to New York to work in the theater, acting in off-Broadway productions. He met the director Paul Mann when he auditioned for a one-act play that Mann was directing. He then began studying with Mann at his actors' workshop.
In New York City, Richards met Sidney Poitier, then a struggling actor. Poitier told him that if he ever found a play he wanted to act in, he would want Richards to direct it. In 1957, Poitier encouraged Richards to read "A Raisin in the Sun." Richards chose to direct it at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, with an original cast that included Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Diana Sands, Louis Gossett and Dee.
Describing the landmark production, the author James Baldwin wrote, "Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage."
After "A Raisin in the Sun," Richards went on to direct a Buddy Hackett musical titled "I Had a Ball" in 1964 and the musical "The Yearling" the next year. In 1966, he joined the staff of the actor training program at New York University. That same year, he was invited to direct a play about the Civil War at the O'Neill Center in Waterford, and two years later, he was offered the job as artistic director of the Playwrights Conference. There, Richards encouraged playwrights to be involved in the productions of their work.
By the time he was offered the job of dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of the Yale Rep, Richards was noted for his work as a nurturer of new playwrights and young actors. At Yale, he expanded the curriculum and the number of faculty at the drama school and inaugurated Winterfest, an annual new play festival. He also pioneered the technique of "production sharing" in order to allow a play's collaborating artists to continue to develop a new play through subsequent productions at other theaters. During Richards' reign, the Yale Rep received a special 1991 Tony Award as an outstanding regional theater. Richards also oversaw the budgetary growth of the drama school from $2 million to more than $5 million.
Richards was also passionate about staging productions of theater classics at Yale. In 1990, he described to a reporter from The Boston Globe his excitement once over reciting Shakespeare's "Macbeth," saying, "That sense that in being someone else you are permitted the full utilization of yourself, that I could put myself together in so many different ways and that someone else is composed of the different aspects of me ... That's when [acting] took off, but only as the thing that gave me satisfaction, not necessarily as the job that I was going to do."
In that same article, Richards described his commitment to his work as a director and administrator: "All my life, I've been trying to break new ground, not simply get hired," he explained. "There is a social and political conscience to everything I do. I don't do things politically, but they are political. I don't even have to think about it, it's just where my head goes."
When close to his Yale retirement, Richards told Connecticut magazine,
For his contributions to the theater, Richards received numerous honors, including a National Medal of the Arts in 1993. A year later Yale established the Lloyd Richards Adjunct Professorship of Drama in his honor.
Richards leaves his wife of 48 years, the actress and playwright Davenport Richards of New York City; two sons, Scott of Montclair, New Jersey, and Thomas of Pontedera, Italy; and two grandchildren.
T H I S
In Memoriam: Lloyd Richards
"... I've done really what I wanted to do. Some things could have been better. There were all kinds of constraints -- of time, of money and of space -- but not the constraints of thought, imagination or artistry. I've been able to follow through on impulse."
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