David Barr (playwright)

Last updated

David Barr III is an American writer and playwright [1] of African descent.

Contents

Career

As an actor, Barr received a Joseph Jefferson Citation for an Actor In A Principal Role for his portrayal of Philip Mbuso in the drama Victims at the Organic Theatre Greenhouse in 1992.

In 1994 he was a principal actor in the Chicago Theatre Company production of Pill Hill, which was the recipient of a Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Ensemble. Additional acting accolades that David has received include the Best Actor Award from the Association Of Theatre Artists & Friends in 1989 for his portrayal of Creon in the Stage Left production of Antigone.

Barr's first full-length play was The Death of the Black Jesus, which premiered at the Unicorn Theatre in Kansas City, Mo. in January 1995. [2] (In the theater's pre-season booklet "21st Season of Plays," the title is given as Betrayal of the Black Jesus.) The success of this play led to an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship (1995) and the Black Theater Alliance Awards. [3] The play was the winner of the National Playwriting Award sponsored by the Unicorn Theatre, and the winner of the Mixed Blood Versus America National Playwriting Contest sponsored by the Mixed Blood Theatre.

His adaptation of the Walter Mosley novel A Red Death had its world premiere in September 1997. [4] It won the 1998 Edgar Allan Poe Award, sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America in the Best New Play category.

Barr's two-act drama, Black Caesar, was the winner of the 1997 Theodore Ward Contest for Playwriting, sponsored by Chicago's Columbia College. PerformInk, Chicago's entertainment tradepaper, published Black Caesar in October 1999.

In January 1999, Barr received his second Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for Playwriting/Screenwriting. His play Ev'ry Time I Feel the Spirit, based on the life of Marian Anderson, was the winner of the 1999 Unicorn Theatre National Playwriting Award. It opened at the Unicorn Theatre in June 1999 and at Pegasus Players in November 2000. [5]

In September 1999, his full-length play The Face of Emmett Till (formerly The State of Mississippi vs Emmett Till) debuted at Pegasus Players. [6] The play was developed with Mrs. Mamie Till Mobley and is based on the life and tragic death of her son Emmett Till [7] and was revived in the fall of 2003, again at Pegasus Players.

2000 To Present

Barr is a co-adapter of The Journal of Ordinary Thought, a stage adaptation of poems and monologues written by members of the Neighborhood Writing Alliance. The Journal of Ordinary Thought had its world premiere at the Chicago Theatre Company in September 1999. It was voted one of the best plays of 1999 by both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times.[ citation needed ] In March 2000 it was named winner of the Festival of Emerging American Theatre (FEAT) National Playwriting Competition, sponsored by Phoenix Theatre Company in Indianapolis, and played there in the spring of 2000.

In 2001, Barr received his third Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for Playwriting/Screenwriting. His play Bronzeville opened at the Pegasus Players Theater, [8] but reviews were negative. [5] [9]

Barr's screen adaptation of the Zora Neale Hurston short story "The Gilded Six Bits" was selected for the 2008 International Black Harvest Film Festival. The film was aired on the Chicago and Gary, Indiana PBS affiliates WTTW and WYIN. The movie was screened at several 2006 and 2007 film festivals across the United States and was named Best Picture at the 2006 Twin Cities Film Festival. It was screened at the annual "Zora Fest" in Eatonville, Florida earlier that same year.

Barr's play The Upper Room was performed at Truman College in 2005. [10] http://www.btaawards.org/index.html His Civil Rights docudrama My Soul is a Witness, produced by The Jena Company, New York City toured nationally in 2005 and 2006 and a Pegasus Players production of the work was included in the Hindu MetroPlus Theatre Arts Festival in Chennai, India during the Summer of 2007. My Soul is a Witness subsequently played in the cities of Kolkata, New Delhi and Mumbai. His second engagement with The Jena Company was the biopic Jackie, Vi, and Lena which toured nationally during the Winter of 2007.

In the Spring 2006 he co-authored the vaudevillian production "Point Of Revue", a composite shot of African American through a collection of short plays and original songs, with several artists including Kia Corthron, Don Cheadle and Lynn Nottage.

Barr's screenplay Death of Innocence was co-written with Christopher Benson, Associate Professor of African American Studies, and Journalism at the University of Illinois, and with Oscar-winning director James Moll. It was adapted from a memoir co-written by Benson and the late, Civil Rights activist Mamie Till-Mobley. It was optioned for development by HBO Films in 2007.

Related Research Articles

Angelo Parra

Angelo Parra is an American playwright. He was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx, New York City. After graduating from Fordham University, his career included work as a reporter/photographer, public relations professional, politician, free-lance writer, and PR and journalism teacher at New York University before turning to theatre in 1986. His first produced play, Casino, was presented at T. Schreiber Studio, and won a 1989 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in Playwriting and an Arts International grant.

Emmett Till 14-year-old African American from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi in August 1955

Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.

David Auburn is an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre director. He is best known for his 2000 play Proof, which won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He also wrote the screenplays for the 2005 film version of Proof, The Lake House (2006), The Girl in the Park (2007), and Georgetown (2019).

The State of Mississippi and the Face of Emmett Till is a 2003 play written by David Barr and Mamie Till Mobley. The show chronicles the life and brutal death of Emmett Till, and the circumstances that surrounded his murder.

Louis Till was an American soldier. He was the father of Emmett Till, whose murder in August 1955 at the age of 14 galvanized the Civil rights movement. A soldier during World War II, Louis Till was executed by the U.S. Army in 1945 after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two white woman and murdering a third. The circumstances of his death were little known even to his family until they were revealed after the trial of his son's murderer ten years later, which affected subsequent discourse on the murder of Emmett Till. Novelist and essayist John Edgar Wideman suggests Louis Till's conviction and punishment is questionable, presenting the viewpoint it may have been racially motivated and used as propaganda to justify his son's murder.

Mamie Till American schoolteacher and mother of Emmett Till

Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley was an American educator and activist. She was the mother of Emmett Till, who was murdered in Mississippi on August 28, 1955, aged 14, after allegedly whistling at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant at an White only store, a white cashier at the grocery store. For her son's funeral in Chicago, Mamie Till insisted that the casket containing his body be left open, because, in her words, "I wanted the world to see what they did to my boy."

Prince Gomolvilas is a Thai American playwright. He has written many plays which have been produced in the United States and won several distinctive awards, including a PEN Center USA West Literary Award for Drama.

Tarell Alvin McCraney American actor and playwright

Tarell Alvin McCraney is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. He is the chair of playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble.

Robert Falls is an American theater director and the current artistic director of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.

Mark Scharf

Mark Scharf, is an American playwright, actor and teacher. His plays have received readings and productions across the United States and internationally in England, Mainland China, Australia, Canada and Singapore.

W. David Hancock American playwright

W. David Hancock is an American playwright, best known for his plays The Race of the Ark Tattoo and The Convention of Cartography. He is a two-time Obie winner for his works with the Foundry Theatre. His experimental, nonlinear work is known for blurring boundaries between artifice and reality, often through unconventional theatrical spaces and an object-centric dramaturgy. As the critic Elinor Fuchs writes, in Hancock’s work, “…we encounter mystery and authenticity at another level entirely.”

James Still is an American writer and playwright. Still grew up in a tiny town in Kansas, and graduated from the University of Kansas. His award-winning plays have been produced throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, China, Australia and South Africa. He is a two-time TCG-Pew Charitable Trusts' National Theatre Artist with the Indiana Repertory Theatre where he is the IRT's first-ever playwright in residence (1998–present). He currently lives in Los Angeles.

Adrienne Warren American actress, singer and dancer (born 1987)

Adrienne Warren is an American actress, singer and dancer. She made her Broadway debut in the 2012 musical Bring It On, and in 2016 received a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical nomination for her performance in Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed. She was also praised for her role as Tina Turner in the West End production of Tina in 2018, and for the same role in the Broadway production, for which she received the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 2020.

Sheri Wilner is an American playwright.

Dreaming Emmett is the first play by the Nobel-winning African-American writer Toni Morrison. First performed in 1986, the play was commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute at SUNY-Albany. The play's world premier, which was directed by Gilbert Moses, was on January 5, 1986 at Capital Repertory Company in the Market Theater in Albany, New York. After its first production, Morrison reportedly destroyed all known video recordings of the play and copies of the script. Thus, all descriptions of the plot are reconstructed from contemporary reviews.

Antoinette Nwandu is an American playwright based in New York.

Harrison David Rivers is an American playwright. Rivers' work has won him the Relentless Award, a GLAAD Media Award, a McKnight Fellowship for Playwrights, a Jerome Foundation Many Voices Fellowship, an Emerging Artist of Color Fellowship, a Van Lier Fellowship and the New York Stage & Film's Founders Award. He is based in Saint Paul, Minnesota and is married to Christopher Bineham.

Ifa Bayeza is a playwright, producer, and conceptual theater artist. She wrote the play The Ballad of Emmett Till, which earned her the Edgar Award for Best Play in 2009. She is the sister of Ntozake Shange, and directed Shange's A Photograph: Lovers in Motion, which was a part of the Negro Ensemble Company's 2015 Year of the Woman Play Reading Series in New York City.

Carlos Murillo is an American playwright, director, and professor of Puerto Rican and Colombian descent. Based in Chicago, Murillo is a professor and head of the Playwriting program at the Theatre School at DePaul University. He is best known for his play Dark Play or Stories for Boys.

Janine Nabers is an American playwright and television writer.

References

  1. ↑ Christopher D. Benson; Charles F. Whitaker (3 February 2014). Magazine Writing. Routledge. pp. 160–. ISBN   978-1-136-19122-0.
  2. ↑ Amnon Kabatchnik (18 October 2012). Blood on the Stage, 1975-2000: Milestone Plays of Crime, Mystery, and Detection. Scarecrow Press. pp. 493–. ISBN   978-0-8108-8355-0. Playbill from Unicorn Theatre production, January 1995.
  3. ↑ `Flyin' West' Tops Black Theatre Alliance Awards. Chicago Tribune, 9 19 1997
  4. ↑ Charles E. Wilson (2003). Walter Mosley: A Critical Companion. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 9–. ISBN   978-0-313-32022-4.
  5. 1 2 "theater reviews". Windy City Times, 2001-11-14
  6. ↑ Gilbert Jonas (5 July 2005). Freedom's Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle Against Racism in America, 1909-1969 . Routledge. pp.  462–. ISBN   978-1-135-93087-5.
  7. ↑ Marvin Lachman (31 October 2014). The Villainous Stage: Crime Plays on Broadway and in the West End. McFarland. pp. 174–. ISBN   978-1-4766-1875-3.
  8. ↑ "You can go home again Playwright takes personal look at Bronzeville". Chicago Sun-Times, November 2, 2001 | Mary Houlihan |via Highbeam (subscription required)
  9. ↑ "`Bronzeville' falls well short of lofty goals". November 09, 2001|By Richard Christiansen, Chicago Tribune.
  10. ↑ "Theater: The Upper Room" by JONATHAN ABARBANEL, Windy City Times, 2005-03-16
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.