Black Theatre United Launches BTU Collective; Appoints New Board Members

Playbill: Black Theatre United (BTU) has launched a new collective, The BTU Collective; and has also appointed a number of new board members. The organization, founded in 2020, aims to educate, empower, and inspire through activism in the pursuit of justice and equality.

A Look at Black Broadway, 1820 – 2026

New York Theater: For every well-known showcase of Black Broadway – “Porgy and Bess,” 1935; “A Raisin in the Sun” 1959; last year’s “Purpose,” winner of both the Tony and Pulitzer — there are little-remembered milestones ranging over the past two centuries. The gallery below, in honor of Black History Month (which several federal agencies now have banned employees from celebrating), samples the history of theater by, for and with Black Americans, taken from collections at the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the Museum of the City of New York

Local Black actors transcend racial barriers in stellar performances as Ebenezer Scrooge in holiday classic, ‘A Christmas Carol’

AFRO American Newspapers: For those who are diehard fans of the stage and anxiously await the holiday season every December, enjoying a production of the Charles Dickens classic, “A Christmas Carol”: counts as a family tradition.

The space between Julius Caesar and Malcolm X

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a play steeped in the classical canon, laden and layered with both HISTORY and performance history. Letson’s Julius X is a tale rife with much more recent collective American cultural memory, evoking images and speeches from a moment in America when people fought for the right simply to be recognized as American, and notions of equality and justice occupied the center of that that contest.

“Fences” and “Two Trains Running” at Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company

The Pittsburgh Tatler: In the lobby of the August Wilson house you can read a letter that Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company’s founder and artistic director Mark Clayton Southers wrote to August Wilson in 2002, describing his intent to establish a theater in Pittsburgh that would offer Black audiences stories that spoke to their history and lived experience.

Caesars Palace Times Square and Wendell Pierce Partner To Support New York's Historic Theatres Of Color

www.broadwayworld.com: Caesars Palace Times Square has partnered with actor and producer Wendell Pierce on a $10 million investment to launch and sustain the New York Coalition of Legacy Theatres of Color Fund, a 501(c)3, to support theaters and ensembles focused on telling the stories of New York's communities of color while combatting the longstanding funding inequities they face.

Reviews of 2 Plays Running - August Wilson's 'Two Trains Running' and 'Fences' - in Pittsburgh Playwrights' Historic Experience

onstagepittsburgh.com: Mark Clayton Southers kicked off opening night of Two Trains Running by announcing that everyone present was now a part of history: Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company was about complete a second round of all 10 plays in the August Wilson American Century Cycle.

National Black Theatre Names Kamilah Long 1st Director of Development

Playbill: The National Black Theatre has appointed Kamilah Long as its first director of development. Long joins the New York company after serving as executive director of Play On Shakespeare, a former program of Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

‘Coming full circle’: How Pittsburgh’s Black theater community fosters talent

www.publicsource.org: August Wilson’s vision of Pittsburgh in plays like “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson” brought his native Hill District to stages across the world. But though Wilson is a defining voice, his work is only one part of a rich community of Black playwrights, directors and actors with roots in the city.

How 20th-century DC theater helped African Americans take center stage

DC Metro Theater Arts: Examining presence in a theatrical context is a provocative idea, and a challenging one. A performance gives presence to the narrative, characters, and ideas of a play. The theater gives presence to the artists and audiences that the company gathers together in the construction of a community. A performance and a theater make the lives, the values, the hopes and aspirations, and the people of that constructed community visible beyond themselves.

Black Theatre United, Theater Industry Leaders Outline Widespread, Historic Reform Agreement In “New Deal For Broadway”

Pittsburgh in the Round: Black Theatre United, the nonprofit advocacy organization that’s taken a leading role in the move for greater equity, diversity and inclusion on Broadway, has released a comprehensive, industry-wide agreement on wide-scale reform that includes increased training, expanded casting efforts, the naming of theaters for Black artists and a pledge for producers to “never assemble an all-white creative team on a production again, regardless of the subject matter of the show.”

Playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza Wins Susan Smith Blackburn Prize

thebroadwayblog.com: The 2021 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize has been awarded to U.S. playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza for her play about the Flint, Michigan water crisis, cullad wattah. Awarded annually since 1977, The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize is the largest and oldest international prize honoring Women+ playwrights. On April 7, a livestream of the award ceremony honored Dickerson-Despenza and the other nine finalists.

Seattle and Atlanta theaters team up to connect Black theaters, nurture Black playwrights

The Seattle Times: Valerie Curtis-Newton misses live theater. The head of directing and playwriting at the University of Washington School of Drama and the founding artistic director for Seattle-based theater company The Hansberry Project, Curtis-Newton is firm in this belief: The magic of theater is untranslatable to another medium.

National Negro Opera Company House in Homewood receives $500,000 for restoration

Arts + Entertainment | Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh City Paper: A major Pittsburgh-based nonprofit is helping to bring the National Negro Opera Company House in Homewood, an important piece of the city’s Black history that has stood vacant for over 50 years, back to its former glory.

Honoring 101 Black Stage Managers | Stage Managers’ Association

Stage Directions: During this pause in our working lives, The Stage Managers’ Association has focused its energies on creating initiatives to better serve the entire theater community. The Stage Managers’ Association (SMA) is pleased to announce that they are partnering with the Black Theatre Caucus to raise the visibility and knowledge into the community of excellent Black Stage Managers.

Making Black Lives, Not Just Black Deaths, Matter Onstage

The New York Times: As far as theater is concerned, the pandemic has been a paradox, shrinking life down to lockdown bubbles and simultaneously expanding horizons. When you can stream plays from Europe as easily as from Brooklyn, the world seems more interconnected than in the past — tied together by bonds of humanity.

'Queen Sugar' Showrunner Anthony Sparks on Black History

Variety: Black history, to me, means my Mississippi mother was right after all. She often told me that “Any room you walk into, assume you belong there.” Ironically, I’m not sure my mother– a domestic, sharecropper, and factory worker for much of her life– ever fully realized that feeling for herself.

#WeSeeYou antiracist accountability report includes 11 DMV theaters

DC Metro Theater Arts: An accountability report released by the We See You, White American Theater collective (WSYWAT) points to more than 100 theater institutions nationwide that have responded to the group’s BIPOC Demands for White American Theater in the past seven months. Included are 11 theaters from the DMV.

Member Perspectives: Richard Montgomery Shares His IATSE Journey and Speaks on Being a Black Male President for Local B-29

https://iatsecares.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/RMLoeb.png IATSE Cares: “I enjoy advocating for all union members. Protecting rights and building a secure future for the membership is my passion”, says Front of House Workers Union IATSE Local B-29 President Richard Montgomery.

The Black Designer Database Is Connecting Black-Owned Brands With TV and Movie Costumes Designers

InStyle: Sex and the City made Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo household names, and, everyone knows what "an AlaÏa" is — and that the couturier is a "totally important designer" — thanks to Clueless. Even when a brand isn't name-dropped so bluntly, the impact of a pop-culture appearance can be a major launchpad for success.