THE NEGRO ENSEMBLE COMPANY
On August 14, 1966, the Sunday New York Times ran an article by playwright Douglas Turner Ward, entitled “American Theatre: For Whites Only?” Ward had recently won a measure of acclaim and notoriety for his satires Day of Absence and Happy Ending, which ran for 15 months Off-Broadway. In response to the success of these plays, the Times commissioned Ward’s article, in which he indicted the contemporary theatre as being “of the Bourgeois, by the Bourgeois, about the Bourgeois, and for the Bourgeois.”
The article went on to point out that Black playwrights, when they were produced at all, were patronized by critics and encouraged to avoid writing “problem plays.” According to Ward, the vast majority of white theatergoers were ill-equipped to appreciate the expressions of these artists’ experiences. Ward made a case for the immediate establishment of a theatre “of at least off-Broadway size and dimension” that would present the work of Black playwrights for a primarily Black audience. Soon after the article’s publication, the Ford Foundation contacted Ward and solicited an application for a grant to establish just such a theater, resulting in a $434,000 award.
Ward teamed with theatre manager Gerald Krone and Robert Hooks—an actor and producer who had originated roles in A Raisin In the Sun and Dutchman—and founded the Group Theatre Workshop and DC Black Repertory Company. Together the trio established the Negro Ensemble Company in New York in 1967.
In its inaugural season, the Negro Ensemble Company produced new work from Black playwrights—including Wole Soyinka and Richard Wright—as well as work by white authors. Their first production was Songs of the Lusitanian Bogey, an anti-colonial play by Peter Weiss (author of Marat/Sade). Over the next 40 years the NEC would produce world premieres by Alice Childress, Derek Walcott, OyamO, Leslie Lee, and Charles Fuller, as well as Ward’s own work. NEC launched the careers of a pantheon of African American film and stage stars, including Paul Carter Harrison, Ossie Davis, Cicely Tyson, Samuel L. Jackson, Denzel Washington, and Phylicia Rashad.
The Negro Ensemble Company was one representative of a national Black arts movement that, while flourishing in urban centers since the 1920s, gained extraordinary momentum and visibility in the ‘60s. Along with its support of Black playwrights and its training program for young theater practitioners in every aspect of the art and business, the NEC made a commitment to expanding the repertoire of roles for Black actors. Frances Foster, who originated the role of Gremmar in the 1975 premiere of The First Breeze of Summer, reflects in a 1987 documentary about the NEC, “Young people nowadays can say, ‘I want to be an actress,’ which I could not say when I was a youngster. I was afraid and ashamed to admit that I wanted to be an actress…because being an actress at that time meant Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen.”
By 1972, despite wide critical acclaim, the NEC faced rapidly rising production costs. Though they continued to sell out houses in the 145-seat St. Marks Theater, the Ford Foundation grant was long gone and ticket revenue could not cover operating costs. The 1972-1973 Season saw the disbanding of the ensemble and cutbacks in staff and programming. The theatre scaled back to producing only one new production a year. That play in 1972 was The River Niger by Joe Walker. The River Niger moved to Broadway, won the Tony for Best Play, and brought the NEC enough revenue and renewed foundation interest to continue producing.
The Negro Ensemble Company is still active under the leadership of Charles Weldon (Artistic Director since 2004) and Freida Nerangis (Executive Director since 2002). The training program that turned out so many famous talents has been expanded, while the producing arm has gone back to the one show per year model. In 2005 the NEC premiered a new play by Leslie Lee, Blues in a Broken Tongue. The NEC continues to serve its mission, “to present live theatre performances by and about Black people to a culturally diverse audience that is often underserved by the theatrical community,” not only in its current season, but with the extraordinary body of work and family of artists it has given to the American theatre. Forty years later, the Negro Ensemble Company has definitively answered the question posed in Douglas Turner Ward’s headline.
-Jack Tamburri, Managment Assistant
*For more information about the NEC, visit www.necinc.org.
