THE AFRICAN COMPANY PRESENTS RICHARD III Begins At The Shakespeare Tavern Playhouse In March

The Atlanta Shakespeare Company will present Carlyle Brown's The African Company Presents Richard III, based on a true story. Directed by J.L. Reed, running March 8-30, 2025.

Forty years before the abolition of slavery, William Henry Brown, a free Black American, organized a production of Shakespeare's Richard III under his company, African Grove Theatre. At the same time, the leading producer of New York City, Stephen Price, has secured the famous English actor Junius Brutus Booth to play Richard III at his Park Theatre. Threatened by the potential success of Brown's Richard III, Price is intent on shutting them down. While Brown fights to get his production to opening night, he must also contend with his company of African American actors who aren't sure of their place in English drama, or if they're even prepared for the consequences of presenting Shakespeare in their own way.

Originally produced in 1987 by Penumbra Theatre Company

Cast

William Henry Brown - Tre' Whitley

Ann Johnson - Destiny Danielle

James Hewlitt - Tyren Duncan

Sarah - Vallea E. Woodbury

Papa Shakespeare - Greg Hunter

Stephen Price - Eric Lang

The Constable Man - Jake West

Earning their bread with satires of white high society, the African Company came to be known for debunking the sacred status of the English classics (which many politically and racially motivated critics said were beyond the scope of black actors). Inside the Company's ranks, similar debates raged about whether to mimic the English tongue, or to provide a more lively interpretation of white theater by acknowledging the vibrancy of the black experience (in the words of the African Company's manager: “Say ya Shakespeare like ya want"). Shakespeare is the chosen cultural battleground in this inventive retelling of a little known, yet pivotal event in the African Company's history. Knowing they are always under prejudicial pressures from white society, and facing their own internal shakeups, the African Company battles for time, space, audiences and togetherness. Their competition, Stephen Price, an uptown, Broadway-type impresario, is producing Richard III at the same time as the African Company's production is in full swing. Price has promised a famous English actor overflowing audiences if he plays Richard in Price's theatre. Fearing the competition of the African Company's production, which is garnering large white audiences, Price manipulates the law and closes down the theatre. The Company rebounds and finds a space right next door to Price's theatre. At the rise of curtain of the next performance, Price causes the arrest of some of the actors in a trumped-up riot charge. The play ends with the Company, surviving, its integrity intact, and about to launch an equally progressive new chapter in the American theatre: They'll soon be producing the first black plays written by black Americans of their day.

Carlyle Brown is a writer/performer and artistic director of Carlyle Brown & Company, based in Minneapolis, which has produced The Masks of Othello: A Theatrical Essay, The Fula From America: An African Journey, Talking Masks, Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been…, and Therapy and Resistance. His plays include The African Company Presents Richard III, The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show, Buffalo Hair, The Beggars' Strike, The Negro of Peter the Great, Pure Confidence, A Big Blue Nail, Dartmoor Prison, and others.

He has received commissions from Arena Stage, the Houston Grand Opera, the Children's Theatre Company, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Goodman Theater, Miami University of Ohio, and the University of Louisville. He is recipient of playwriting fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, Jerome Foundation, Theatre Communications Group and the Pew Charitable Trust. Mr. Brown has been artist-in-residence at New York University School of the Arts Graduate Acting Program, The James Thurber House in Columbus, and Ohio State University Theater Department where he directed his music drama, Yellow Moon Rising.

He has been a teacher of expository writing at New York University, African-American literature at the University of Minnesota, playwriting at Ohio State University and Antioch College, African-American theater and dramatic literature at Carlton College as the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Artist, and "Creation and Collaboration" at the University of Minnesota Department of Theater. He has worked as a museum exhibit writer and story consultant for the Charles Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, and the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage in Louisville, Kentucky.

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