R.I.P. Lloyd Richards

[Reza]

NY Times July 1, 2006

Lloyd Richards, Theater Director and Cultivator of Playwrights, Is Dead at 87

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Lloyd Richards, one of the most influential figures in modern American theater and a pioneering director who brought the plays of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson to Broadway and championed several generations of young playwrights, died on Thursday in Manhattan. It was his 87th birthday.

The cause was heart failure, said his son Scott Davenport Richards.

In the 1980's, as dean of the Yale School of Drama, as artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater and of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, and as a director of commercial theater on Broadway, Mr. Richards was in a position of rare power in American theater, rarer still for an African-American.

Though he was a writer's director, for the most part avoiding a conspicuous directorial thumbprint on his productions, his mark on the dramatic landscape was tremendous, starting as far back as 1957, when he was offered the job of directing a play called "A Raisin in the Sun," about the Youngers, a black family struggling to get out of poverty in Chicago, by an unknown playwright named Lorraine Hansberry.

At the time, the chances for success seemed slim. The play was almost exclusively about black characters, written by a black woman, and Mr. Richards was a black director with no experience directing on Broadway. Indeed, one of the producers, Philip Rose, who was also inexperienced, titled his 2001 memoir "You Can't Do That on Broadway!"

"The odds were pretty stacked against us," Mr. Rose recalled yesterday.

But when the play opened to a cheering, standing ovation at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on March 11, 1959, it was a landmark moment in American theater and social history.

"Never before," James Baldwin later wrote, "in the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage."

The play ran for 530 performances. It would not be the only time that Mr. Richards, a small, compact, bespectacled man, brought a new and reverberating voice into the dramatic landscape.

In 1981, as head of the National Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Center in Waterford, a place where playwrights can work among colleagues and have their plays staged, Mr. Richards selected a submission ­ one script out of more than a thousand ­ from another young unknown writer, in this case a poet named August Wilson. The play was "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," one of the plays in Mr. Wilson's 10-part cycle on the African-American experience in the 20th century. By the time Mr. Richards had refined it and ushered it through the Yale Rep, where he was then artistic director, to Broadway's Cort Theater in 1984, Mr. Wilson's standing as a major figure in American literature had been established.

Mr. Richards and Mr. Wilson, who died last year, would form one of the most successful artistic partnerships in American theater, as Mr. Richards directed and collaborated on five other plays by Mr. Wilson ­"Fences," "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," "The Piano Lesson," "Two Trains Running" and "Seven Guitars." The two refined and developed them in a long pre-Broadway tryout process at nonprofit theaters around the country that was a trademark of their creative process. Mr. Richards won the 1987 Tony Award for best director for "Fences."

The team parted ways after "Seven Guitars" in 1996, after Mr. Wilson formed a production partnership with Benjamin Mordecai, who was managing director at Yale with Mr. Richards. They selected Marion McClinton to direct Mr. Wilson's next production, "Jitney," which played off Broadway. Though they stayed on civil terms, Mr. Wilson's professional association with Mr. Richards was over.

But Mr. Wilson was only one of Mr. Richards's protégés during his more than three decades as head of the Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Center. There he helped develop the careers of writers like Wendy Wasserstein, Christopher Durang, Lee Blessing and David Henry Hwang, who came to the center right out of college.

"Lloyd was a consummate teacher, but when it really comes down to it, when you look at his legacy, it's new playwrights," George C. White, the founder of the O'Neill Center, said yesterday. "I can't think of anybody who has been more of a force for developing playwrights since the 1960's."

In 1979, during Mr. Richards's first season as artistic director of the Yale Rep, James Earl Jones gave him the script for the South African playwright Athol Fugard's "Lesson From Aloes." After Mr. Richards's successful production of that play, which later moved to Broadway, Yale Rep would go on to present several of Mr. Fugard's plays, including the world premieres of " 'Master Harold' ... and the Boys" and "The Road to Mecca."

"Lloyd was just a reservoir of wisdom," said Charles S. Dutton, who was cast by Mr. Richards in "Ma Rainey" when he was a student at the Yale School of Drama. He said he used to tell Mr. Wilson, "You've got a man who's lived almost every decade of your 10 plays."

Lloyd George Richards was born on June 29, 1919, in Toronto. His father, a Jamaican carpenter and follower of the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, moved the family to Detroit for a job in the auto industry. When Mr. Richards was 9, his father died of diphtheria; a few years after that, his mother lost her eyesight.

It was up to Mr. Richards and his brother, Allan, to keep the family afloat, shining shoes and working in a barbershop, an experience to which he would later refer when talking of his immediate reaction to Mr. Wilson's work.

Mr. Richards went to Wayne State University (Wayne University at the time) to study law, but he had become interested in theater in a class about Shakespeare in high school. 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 he moved to New York to work in the theater, staying at the Y.M.C.A., waiting on tables and acting in Off Broadway productions. He met the director Paul Mann when he auditioned for a one-act play that Mr. Mann was directing at the Equity Library Theater, and soon he was studying and later teaching with Mr. Mann at his actors' workshop.

There he met Sidney Poitier, at the time a struggling actor, and a dancer named Barbara Davenport.

Mr. Richards married Ms. Davenport in 1957, and they moved 11 years later into a brownstone on the Upper West Side, where she still lives. In addition to their son Scott, who lives in Montclair, N.J., they had another son, Thomas, who lives in Pontedera, Italy.

Mr. Poitier told Mr. Richards that if he ever found a play he wanted to act in, he would ask Mr. Richards to direct. In 1957 he found it. Mr. Poitier encouraged Mr. Richards to read "A Raisin in the Sun," and encouraged Mr. Rose to hire him as its director.

"He was able to deal with all these people and get the best out of them," Mr. Rose said about Mr. Richards. "He directed it as though we had a group of stars, which, of course, they all turned to be."

Over the next year Mr. Richards worked with Ms. Hansberry, Mr. Poitier and the other actors in the play, including Claudia McNeil, Diana Sands, Louis Gossett and Ruby Dee.

"Lorraine was such a young, young person, and she and Lloyd seemed to connect to one another," Ms. Dee, who played the role of Ruth, the wife of Walter Lee Younger (Mr. Poitier), in the original production, recalled yesterday. Ms. Hansberry would die of cancer in 1965 at 34.

"Lloyd was an intense director even though he was light-footed," Ms. Dee said. "I think he knew exactly what the music was here."

For Mr. Richards, the historic significance of the production was only secondary to his desire to direct.

"There are many moments, or incidents, in my career when I was discovered the first black person to do whatever," he said in a 2005 interview with N. Graham Nesmith in African American Review. "I never did anything that I did in order to receive that designation ­ it happened because I was attempting to do the things I wanted to do, and someone gave me an opportunity."

Indeed, after "A Raisin in the Sun," Mr. Richards was asked to direct a Buddy Hackett musical called "I Had a Ball" in 1964 and another commercial musical, "The Yearling," the next year, rare assignments for a black director at the time.

In 1966 Mr. Richards joined the staff of the actor training program at New York University, one of the first in the country. The same year, Mr. White, of the O'Neill Center, asked Mr. Richards to come to Waterford and direct a play about the Civil War. In 1968 he was offered the job as artistic director of the Playwrights Conference, a position he would hold until 1999.

There, Mr. Richards made changes in the way plays were developed, encouraging staged readings and postperformance critiques and emphasizing the role of the dramaturge as a kind of mediator between playwright and director.

He also resisted the received theater wisdom that the playwright should keep away from the actors, Mr. White said, and encouraged writers to be involved in their productions.

But characteristically, he kept his own interference to a minimum.

"He was someone who hired people and then trusted them," said Mr. Durang, who worked on his first successful play, "A History of American Film," at the O'Neill Center.

In 1979 Mr. Richards replaced Robert Brustein as dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater. Mr. Brustein had developed a reputation as a director who made a strong imprint on his productions; Mr. Richards was of the opposite inclination, involving himself in the refining and editing of plays, nurturing the plays on their route to Broadway and elsewhere, but staging them without necessarily leaving a conspicuous personal stamp.

"I try to permit the actor to arrive where I want him to arrive, without telling him where I want him to be," Mr. Richards said in a 1989 interview with The New York Times. "You feed them the right things, and keep stimulating them to the point where they make choices. I would rather an actor discover it for himself than me tell him ­ it's his then."

Mr. Dutton, who was also in "The Piano Lesson," said that despite Mr. Richards's lack of intrusiveness, he carefully steered his productions.

"He'd say one word or one sentence, and it would just open the door to a whole world in approaching the character," Mr. Dutton said. "His nuances had nuances."

Mr. Richards retired from Yale in 1991, and from the O'Neill Center in 1999, after discovering, teaching and nurturing some of the most significant playwrights of his time.

"Lloyd had only two sons," Mr. Dutton said, "but he had a lot of children."