By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 1, 2006
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."
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."