First Black Broadway Director Lloyd Richards

Lloyd Richards, a Tony Award-winning theatrical director who formed a powerful dramatic team with playwright August Wilson, died June 29 of a heart ailment at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. He was often guarded about his age, but a friend and colleague, Skip Mercier, said Mr. Richards died on his 87th birthday.

Often considered the most prominent African American of the stage, Mr. Richards had an influence that transcended race and extended throughout the theatrical world. He was director of the Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre and led the influential summer playwrights' conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn.

In 1959, he became the first African American to direct a play on Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun." The critical and box office hit made his one-time acting student Sidney Poitier an international star.

As a director, teacher and discoverer of talent, Mr. Richards had an illustrious cast of proteges, including playwrights John Guare, Athol Fugard, Charles Fuller, Lanford Wilson, Lee Blessing and Wendy Wasserstein.

Mr. Richards's most notable partnership, forged in the 1980s, was with August Wilson, who wrote a 10-play cycle about black life in the United States before his death last year. Wilson was a theater novice in 1982 when Mr. Richards selected his play "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" for a reading at the playwrights' conference at the O'Neill theater.

Mr. Richards, who led the summer workshop for 32 years, later premiered Wilson's play at the Yale Repertory Theatre and directed its Broadway debut in fall 1984. In the ensuing years, he directed five more of Wilson's plays, including "Fences," which earned Mr. Richards a Tony Award for best director in 1987.

He was drawn to the world of Wilson's plays, set mostly in Pittsburgh, because it reminded him of his youth in Detroit.

"I knew the people in that play," Mr. Richards told the Chicago Tribune of his first reading of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom."

"I had lived among them; I heard their voices and the rhythms of their speech. There was such an authenticity of character; they were articulating my feeling, my thoughts. August's concerns were my own; they were about my life."

Besides "Ma Rainey" and "Fences," Mr. Richards directed Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," "The Piano Lesson," "Two Trains Running" and "Seven Guitars." Together, they formed one of the most enduring and inspired alliances of playwright and director in U.S. theatrical history.

Wilson, who called Mr. Richards a surrogate father, said the director had an uncanny sense of when a play needed to be trimmed or filled out. Describing their working arrangement to the Los Angeles Times in 1989, Wilson said Mr. Richards told him "The Piano Lesson" had one scene too many.

"I found a scene that I thought was expendable," Wilson said. "I told him I took it out, he said, 'good,' and to this day, I don't know if we were both talking about the same scene."