Lloyd Richards
2002 Recipient
Lloyd Richards was a Tony Award-winning director and Yale University professor emeritus. He was one of the giants of American theatre, recognized for his part in shaping modern works. Over his 40-year career, Richards nurtured playwrights and staged significant new stories, giving theatergoers an ever changing and challenging perspective on life. Richards was instrumental in the introduction of the African American voice to American theater, making history in 1959 as the first black director of the first black drama by the first black woman playwright on the Great Way.
Starting out as a disc jockey, Richards was a waiter, a welfare caseworker, and in World War II, a Tuskegee airman at Alabama’s flight training program for African American soldiers. But it was the theatre that fascinated him. Hoping to make his name as an actor, Richards left home in Detroit and moved to New York. It was a challenging time for African Americans in the theater. He took acting jobs off Broadway; he worked behind the scenes developing his skills as a director and drama teacher. When Sidney Poitier, then a struggling actor, was cast in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, he asked Richards to be the director. The historic production opened up a new era on Broadway, and earned Richards a Tony Award nomination, the first of six. It was his Broadway directorial debut.
Off stage, Richards ran the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, where he served as artistic director from 1968 to 1999. Richards’ technique was to concentrate directly on the plays in simple staged readings that focused on the writing. Here, he encouraged August Wilson and other leading voices in modern theater, including Christopher Durang, John Guare, and Wendy Wasserstein. Richards has since ushered six of Wilson’s plays to Broadway, including The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, and Fences, for which he earned the Tony Award for Best Direction in 1987.
From 1979-1991, Richards was dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre. There he staged works by South African playwright Athol Fugard, Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott, and new discoveries from the National Playwrights Conference. He brought to the Repertory stage theater professionals like James Earl Jones, Jason Robards, Glenn Close, and Colleen Dewhurst. He continued his mission to mold a new generation of theater professionals until his death in 2006.
Richards has been honored by the Writer’s Guild of America as “one whose contribution to the writing community has brought honor and dignity to writers everywhere.” In the fall of 1993, Richards was recognized with the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor for the arts.
