Ed Smith Guest Directs 'A Lesson Before Dying'

The Black Theatre Troupe of Phoenix, Arizona, continues their 2009-2010 season with Romulus Linney's A Lesson Before Dying, and Jubilee Theatre Artistic Director Ed Smith is the guest director for this intense stage play. Smith directed the drama to acclaim in Jubilee's 2007-2008 season. Accompanying Smith to the Phoenix stage is Jubilee actor Aaron Petit. Petit was last seen onstage at Jubilee Theatre alongside Major Attaway in Music Director Joe Roger's Sam Shade: A Detective Musical. Petit, known for his work in Jubilee comedies, will play the title character, Jefferson, who is wrongly accused of a crime and sentenced to die.

This has been a big year for Ed Smith, who received The Black Theatre Festival's first annual Lloyd Richards' Director's Award in August in Winston-Salem, NC.

According to their website, The Black Theatre Troupe has promoted excellence in the performing arts with an emphasis on people of color. From its proud but humble beginnings as a grassroots, creative outlet for restless, talented youth in the 70's, the Black Theatre Troupe is now a highly recognized theatre producing quality plays which reflect the heart and soul of the African-American experience.

The Black Theatre Troupe enhances the cultural and artistic awareness in Phoenix, the 5th largest city in the country, by producing plays and musicals that illuminate the African-American experience and culture. The Black Theatre Troupe's production of A Lesson Before Dying opens February 18, and it runs through February 28, 2010.

Ed Smith is an award-winning director whose productions of Fences, Our Town, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Piano Lesson, I'm Not Rappaport, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and most recently, The Bluest Eye, have all received critical praise. Smith has directed over ninety plays at many of the country's professional and university theatres, as well as in Canada and the West Indies.

In the late 1960's, he founded his first theatre, the now-defunct Buffalo Black Drama Workshop. In the 1970's, he also helped to start Black Canada in Toronto. Then in the 1980's, he served as Founder/Artistic Director of Buffalo Black Dinner Theatre.

In 1989, Ed created the original staging and direction for Endesha Ida Mae Holland's From the Mississippi Delta.

From 1993 to 1996, he served as Associate Artistic Director of the acclaimed Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery, Alabama. While there, his duties included directing many of the main stage productions, as well as directing and conducting a reading series for the Southern Writers Project.

In 2002, Ed was recommended by the notable and distinguished director Lloyd Richards to direct Ossie Davis's last play, A Last Dance for Sybil, featuring Ruby Dee, Earl Hyman, and Arthur French. Ed acknowledges this production as one of his best experiences in American Theatre.

Ed was a full professor at State University of New York at Buffalo and at Florida State University. He also taught at the University of California in Los Angeles, and while at Wayne State University he taught in the Hilberry graduate program and was director of the Black Theatre Program.

Ed is the author of Black Theatre: Ethnic Theatre in the United States (Greenwood Press). He has fed his love of traditional/jazz recordings by working as a radio jazz announcer for almost 20 years. Currently, Smith acts as Jubilee Theatre's Artistic Director.

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