First Black Broadway Director Lloyd Richards

Through the years, Mr. Richards directed his share of repertory classics -- Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw -- but he saw the stage as a particularly effective way to address the joys, triumphs and sorrows of black life.

"The theater, in its own way, has been one of the most forward-thinking places relative to race," he said last year in an interview with the African American Review. "Art is the creation of the imagination, and the imagination is not noted by color of the skin."

Lloyd George Richards was born to Jamaican parents in Toronto and moved as a boy to Detroit. He was 9 when his father died, and his mother lost her sight when he was 13. He then took a job sweeping the floor of a barbershop.

"You're listening in the barbershop, and you hear poetry, philosophy, sports," he said. "You're hearing history; you're hearing the elders speak."

His interest in drama was formed in his teens, when he discovered Shakespeare. As a student at Detroit's Wayne State University, he planned to study law but was instead drawn to the theater department, graduating in 1944. After serving in the Army Air Forces, he returned to Detroit after World War II and worked as a radio announcer and as an actor in radio dramas and regional theater.

He moved to New York in 1948 and took jobs as a cook and waiter while finding small acting parts off-Broadway and on soap operas. By the early 1950s, he was teaching acting, which led Poitier to call him one of the best drama coaches of his time. Later, as Mr. Richards moved toward directing, he worked a full year with Hansberry, refining the script for "A Raisin in the Sun," which brought him a Tony nomination for best director.

In the 1960s, he taught at Hunter College, New York University and Boston University. When he took over the O'Neill theater's playwriting workshops in 1966, he molded a generation of playwrights through intensive tutorials in which actors and critics helped playwrights sharpen their scripts.

He directed one episode of ABC television's "Roots: The Next Generations" in the late 1970s, but Mr. Richards was never comfortable outside the theater. In 1979, he was named director of Yale University's School of Drama and its repertory theater, making them a major proving ground of stage talent.

He stepped down from Yale in 1991 and from the O'Neill theater in 1998, but Mr. Richards continued to teach sporadically and to entertain new projects until his death. In 1993, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him the National Medal of the Arts.

Survivors include his wife of 48 years, actress and playwright Barbara Davenport Richards of New York; two sons; and two grandchildren.

"Someone once asked me, 'What's the difference between acting and directing?' " Mr. Richards told the African American Review last year. "I said that as a director it is as if you are preparing a bird to fly. You are teaching, nurturing, caring for it. And one day the bird is ready to fly."