DOUGLAS TURNER WARD
“GODFATHER OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN THEATER”
91ST BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION
Author
* Day of Absence / Happy Ending * The Reckoning * Brotherhood * The Redeemer * Billy Ebony * The Tom-azz Plays * The Haitian Chronicles
Co-founder
The Negro Ensemble Company
Director
The River Niger * Home * Living Fat * A Soldier’s Play * The We Plays * Zooman and the Sign *
Actor
The Iceman Cometh * A Raisin in the Sun * East Side/West Side * Man and Boy * Day of Absence * Ceremonies in Dark Old Men * The First Breeze of Summer * Go Tell It on the Mountain * The Cosby Show * The Women of Brewster Place * Law and Order * For Love of Olivia *
Douglas Turner Ward, an actor, playwright and director who co-founded the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company, a New York theater group that supported Black writers and actors at a time when there were few opportunities for them.
Mr. Ward was establishing his own career as an actor in 1966 when he wrote an opinion article in The New York Times with the headline “American Theater: For Whites Only?”
If any hope, outside of chance individual fortune, exists for Negro playwrights as a group — or, for that matter, Negro actors and other theater craftsman — the most immediate, pressing, practical, absolutely minimally essential active first step is the development of a permanent Negro repertory company of at least Off-Broadway size and dimension,” he wrote. “Not in the future … but now!
The Negro Ensemble Company became a training ground for Black actors, playwrights, directors, designers and technicians. Many of the troupe’s actors over the years went on to become stars, among them, in addition to Mr. Washington and Mr. Jackson, Angela Bassett, Louis Gossett Jr. and Phylicia Rashad.
The article got the attention of W. McNeil Lowry, the Ford Foundation’s vice president of humanities and the arts, who arranged a $434,000 grant to create precisely the kind of company that Mr. Ward was proposing. Thus the Negro Ensemble Company was born, in 1967, with Mr. Ward as artistic director, Robert Hooks as executive director and Gerald S. Krone as administrative director.
The company went on to produce critically acclaimed productions, among them Joseph A. Walker’s The River Niger (1972), which won the Tony Award for best play in 1974 and was adapted for film in 1976. Mr. Ward not only directed the play but also acted in it, earning a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a play.
Other notable productions by the company included Samm-Art Williams’s Home (1979) and Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama A Soldier’s Play (1981), about a Black officer investigating the murder of a Black sergeant at a Louisiana Army base during World War II, when the armed forces were segregated. The cast included Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. (It, too, was adapted for film, as “A Soldier’s Story,” in 1984.)
Frank Rich of The Times called the production, directed by Mr. Ward, “superlative.” (The play was revived last January on Broadway, starring Blair Underwood, before being forced to close because of the pandemic.)