Two Centuries of Black Actors on the New York Stage

A flyer from the African Company, the first professional Black theater troupe in America, started in 1820, and housed in the African Grove Theater in Greenwich Village. It produced Shakespeare’s plays and also original dramas, including one by founder William Alexander Brown, credited as the first play by a Black playwright produced in America: “The Drama of King Shotaway,” based on an insurrection by Black Caribbeans against the British in 1795 on the island of St. Vincent. (Somewhat confusingly, another playwright with a similar name, William Wells Brown, is credited with writing the first known play by a Black playwright to be published in the United States, in 1858: “The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom,” a combination comedy and melodrama about two slaves who secretly marry.)

Ira Aldridge, born in 1807, began his career at the African Grove. But his performance as Othello, in 1825, at the age of seventeen, was in England. He had emigrated from New York the previous year. Aldridge is said to be the first actor of African descent to have portrayed Othello, some two centuries after William Shakespeare had created the character. Over the next four decades, Aldridge toured widely and to great acclaim in Europe, (Adrian Lester portrayed him a decade ago in a play entitled “Red Velvet.“)

Many white actors have portrayed Othello, often in blackface. On Broadway, these have included Edwin Booth in the 1860s, and Walter Huston in the 1930s (father of director John Huston, granddaughter of actress Anjelica Huston.) But since the 1940s Broadway has seen a series of celebrated Black actors in the role, most famously Paul Robeson, then Moses Gunn in the 1970s, James Earl Jones in 1980s, and, Off-Broadway in 2016, David Oyelowo opposite Daniel Craig’s Iago.

In much of the 19th century, the most popular form of entertainment in New York, as well as the rest of the country, were minstrel shows, which involved white performers portraying Black characters in blackface. But the history of minstrel shows is complicated. As early as the 1840s, minstrel shows made stars out of such African-American entertainers as Thomas Dilward, and William Henry Lane, nicknamed Master Juba, who toured with the otherwise all-white Ethiopian Minstrels billed as the “Greatest Dancer in the World.” Lane is considered the father of tap dance.
Yes, the black minstrel show performers were required to wear blackface themselves. Did they consider this degrading? A clue is that several of the biggest stars followed Ira Aldridge’s lead moved to England.

The biggest star of African descent to emerge from minstrel shows was Bert Williams, who in 1911 launched a successful solo career that included becoming the only Black performer cast year after year in the Ziegfeld Follies. Williams was, according to his friend W.C. Fields, “the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.” Williams was probably the most popular African-American entertainer at the turn of the twentieth century, a man of many talents, and many firsts.He and his partner George Walker created four musicals on Broadway between 1901 and 1908, including “In Dahomey,” 1903-1904, Above, Hattie McIntosh, George Walker, Ada Overton Walker, Bert Williams, and Lottie Williams perform a cakewalk

Charles Gilpin in the stage production The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill, 1920, a role that Paul Robeson would play in the movie adaptation. (Gilpin’s career is the subject of a recent movie, The Black Emperor of Broadway.)

A publicity still from “Shuffle Along,” a 1921 Broadway musical created by four Black men — it was composed by Eubie Blake, with lyrics by Noble Sissel and a book by the comedy duo of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles — and featuring an all-Black cast, including the Broadway debut of Paul Robeson, at age 23. ( George C. Wolfe remade the musical on Broadway in 2016 )

Paul Robeson in the 1924 Broadway production of “All God’s Chilun Got Wings” by Eugene O’Neill, and in the title role of “Othello,” in 1943

Langston Hughes’ play “Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South, produced on Broadway in 1935, tells the story of a mixed-race boy’s self-acceptance after his white father rejects him. It is unclear whether the lead Hurst Amyx, was himself mixed race.

click on photographs to read the captions:

Rose McClendon, a Broadway actress and the founder of the Negro People’s Theatre, became a moving force behind the dozen Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project throughout the country, advising FTP director Hallie Flanagan, and supervising the establishment of the New York unit.

Rex Ingram in “Haiti.” 1938, a play by William DuBois dramatizing the final year of the Haitian revolution in 1802. Ingram was a graduate of Northwestern University medical school when he was recruited by Hollywood, originally appearing in silent Tarzan movies, but going on to many memorable roles, such as The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn opposite Mickey Rooney. He was a veteran of more than a dozen Broadway plays and musicals, including Cabin in the Sky in 1940 with Ethel Waters, and Waiting for Godot in 1957.

Jack Carter played the title character in the 1936 all-Black production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, staged by Orson Welles, and set in the “Jungles of Mythical Island Resembling Haiti in the West Indies.”

Frauline Alvor and Maurice Ellis in “The Case of Philip Lawrence,” 1937, a play written by George MacEntee about a college graduate (Ellis) who is unable to find honest employment, goes to work in a numbers racket, and is framed for the murder of a white gangster.

Frances Smith, blues singer, in a scene from The Case of Philip Lawrence

From “Turpentine,” 1936, written by J. A. Smith and Peter Morell, about a rebellious collective of African American workers in the turpentine swamps of Florica. In this scene, a straw boss meets a delegation of turpentine workers who are demanding higher pay and better working conditions

Another scene from “Turpentine.” Shine Sommers, portrayed by Louis Sharp

Doe Doe Green, Lester Palmer, Sybil Moore, “Aggie”, and Clifton Davis in “Horse Play,” 1937 The play is a humorous fantasy by Dorothy Hailparn dealing with the adventures of one Hiram, an old farmer and his horse, “Aggie.” Doe Doe Green, the “Gabriel” in the original stage production of “The Green Pastures” portrays the leading role of Hiram. Perry Watkins designed the settings, and Byron Webb the lighting effects. Evelyn Ellis directed the play.

A Negro Unit production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Androcles and the Lion”

A poster of the production in San Francisco (“Sensational Success Hot From New York”)

Three of the performers from Swing Mikado, a jazz version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

Pinocchio, 1938

The Negro Unit’s production of George Kelly’s The Show Off, 1937

The Harlem Renaissance was a fertile time for Black theater, climaxing in the dozens of productions by the “Negro Unit” of the Federal Theatre Project in the 1930’s.

Theater during the Black Lives Matter explosion in 2020, available online then (since in-person theater was closed.)

Plays on Broadway featuring Black performers in the seasons since have been a mix of revivals and original works, many of them written by Black playwrights. Above:”Topdog/Underdog,” the revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize winning play; “The Piano Lesson,” the revival of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning play; “Ain’t No Mo’,” by Jordan E Cooper, marking the playwright’s Broadway debut at age 27; “Ohio State Murders” by Adrienne Kennedy, marking the playwright’s Broadway debut at age 91, in the James Earl Jones Theater, one of the three Broadway theaters (re)named after Black theater artists. “Fat Ham,” James Ijames’s modern-day adaptation of “Hamlet,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. a revival of Ossie Davis’s “Purlie Victorious,” which added the subtitle “A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cabbage Patch.” ,Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja African Hair Braiding,” about a group of West African immigrants to New York, was the first Broadway show to use “African” in its title in 120 years.

The 2024-2025 season began with “Home,” and has featured a revival of “Our Town” with one of the two main families portrayed by four Black actors. Current stars include  Tony-winning James Monroe Iglehart as Louis Armstrong in “A Wonderful World” and six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald as Madam Rose in “Gypsy,” the first Black Rose on Broadway (which sounds like a show title!)

Coming up in March: Denzel Washington in “Othello,” directed by Kenny Leon, and a new play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Phylicia Rashad. Last season, Jacobs-Jenkins won a Tony for his play “Appropriate,”  which featured an all-white cast to portray a dysfunctional family with secrets. This year “Purpose” features prominent actors as Kara Young, Harry Lennix, and Latanya Richardson Jackson to tell the story of a prominent Black family with secrets.