Robert Earl Price

Last updated

Robert Earl Price (born 1942) is an American playwright and poet. He is a recipient of the American Film Institute's William Wyler award for screenwriting and is the author of four books of poetry and has had eleven plays produced in American regional theaters and abroad in Berlin and Johannesburg. He is artist-in-residence in the Drama Department at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, where he also serves as artistic director of the Charles Sumner G.A.R. Post #25, a historic hall built in 1908 to honor African-American veterans of the Civil War. [1] [2]

Contents

Early life

Robert Earl Price was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He has a B.A. from Clark College in Atlanta and graduated from the American Film Institute's Film Conservatory in Los Angeles in 1977.

Early career

Price spent fifteen years in Los Angeles working in the Black film movement and collaborated with artists associated with the L.A. Rebellion, including Julie Dash, Halie Gerima and Charles Burnett. Price received an NAACP Image Award for service with the Black Anti-Defamation Coalition formed with Pearl Sharp in 1980. [3] During this period, Price worked as a screenwriter, for television and film. This includes sole credit on an episode of Palmerstown USA (1980), a CBS series by Alex Haley and Norman Lear, as well as work on The Lazarus Syndrome (1978) and Freedom Road (1979). [4]

Poet and playwright

By 1985, Price had settled in Atlanta, Georgia and worked primarily as a poet and playwright. He was appointed playwright in residence at 7 Stages Theater in Atlanta in 1987. At 7 Stages, he premiered several plays beginning with Black Cat Bones for Seven Sons in 1988. Several of his plays took jazz or blues musicians as their subject and married poetry and experimental drama: Yardbird's Vamp (1990), Blue Monk (1996), and HUSH: Composing Blind Tom Wiggins (2002). The latter play, based on the true story of a blind savant pianist born as a slave to a Confederate general and attaining a national reputation, was hailed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as the "most important Atlanta premiere of the new century". Blue Monk was featured as part of the Cultural Olympiad connected with the 1996 Olympics held in Atlanta. The play, about Thelonious Monk, was later performed at the Windy Brow Theater in Johannesburg, South Africa.

His play Come on in My Kitchen (2006) uses the myth of blues guitarist Robert Johnson's legendary deal with the devil to discuss the compromises of African-American celebrities, with characters clearly based on Colin Powell, Jesse Jackson, Condoleezza Rice, and Clarence Thomas. [5] The play won the Gene Gabriel Moore Playwriting Award. [6] The contribution of this work to the ever-evolving myth of Robert Johnson is discussed in the film documentary America's Blues (2015). [7]

In 2011, Price's play All Blues was performed at Washington College and at 7 Stages Atlanta. With variations of the Miles Davis composition "All Blues" interweaving through the work, the play reimagines the story of Ray Sprigle, a white reporter from the Pittsburgh Gazette who, in 1948, traveled through the Jim Crow South posing as a black man and recorded his life-changing experiences in a series of articles entitled "I Was a Negro in the South for Thirty Days." [8] Price's most recent play is Red Devil Moon, a musical written with composer Pam Ortiz based on excerpts from Cane by Jean Toomer. [9]

Price regularly publishes poetry in literary magazines including The Chattahoochee Review and the Atlanta Review ; he was awarded the Atlanta Mayor's Fellowship for Poetry in 1998, the same year he was part of the Georgia Poetry Circuit Tour. In 1991 he was selected for a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry. [10] He has published several collections of poetry, with many poems written in a style inflected by American blues music. His most recent collection is Wise Blood (2004). [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Angelo Parra</span> American dramatist

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.

Erik Ehn is an American playwright and director known for proposing the Regional Alternative Theatre movement. The former dean of theater at CalArts, the California Institute of Arts, he is the former head of playwriting and professor of theatre and performance studies at Brown University. His published works include The Saint Plays, Beginner, and 13 Christs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lee Breuer</span> American theatre director (1937–2021)

Esser Leopold "Lee" Breuer was an Obie Award-winning and Pulitzer-, Grammy-, Emmy- and Tony-nominated American playwright, theater director, academic, educator, filmmaker, poet, and lyricist. Breuer taught and directed on six continents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lynn Nottage</span> American playwright (born 1964)

Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often focuses on the experience of working-class people, particularly working-class people who are Black. She has received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: in 2009 for her play Ruined, and in 2017 for her play Sweat. She was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama two times.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Woodie King Jr.</span>

Woodie King Jr. is an American director and producer of stage and screen, as well as the founding director of the New Federal Theatre in New York City.

Eduardo Oscar Machado is a Cuban playwright living in the United States. Notable plays by Machado include Broken Eggs, Havana is Waiting and The Cook. Many of his plays are autobiographical or deal with Cuba in some way. Machado teaches playwriting at New York University. He has served as the artistic director of the INTAR Theatre in New York City since 2004. He is openly gay.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Kan Gotanda</span> American dramatist

Philip Kan Gotanda is an American playwright and filmmaker and a third generation Japanese American. Much of his work deals with Asian American issues and experiences.

Adrienne Kennedy is an American playwright. She is best known for Funnyhouse of a Negro, which premiered in 1964 and won an Obie Award. She won a lifetime Obie as well. In 2018 she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Scharf</span> American dramatist

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.

Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian/Lebanese American playwright, screenwriter and theater director whose work tackles the history of Palestine and the modern Middle East, as well as wider themes of race, colonialism, displacement and war. He is best known for the plays Tennis in Nablus (2010) and Truth Serum Blues (2005) and the critically-acclaimedReturning to Haifa, which premiered in London in 2018. Tennis in Nablus received two graduate student Kennedy Center Honors in 2008 while he was still at NYU, the Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award and the Quest for Peace Playwriting Award. Since then his plays have been produced and presented internationally and published in half a dozen anthologies.

Susan Miller, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting, is perhaps best known as the author/performer of the critically acclaimed one woman play, My Left Breast and as Executive Producer and writer for the award-winning web series Anyone But Me. For her work on the web series she won the first Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Achievement in Writing Original New Media.

Arthur M. Jolly is an American playwright and screenwriter. In 2006, he was awarded an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting for his comedy The Free Republic of Bobistan.

Kitty Mei-Mei Chen is a playwright and actress and the author of five full-length plays and numerous short plays and children's stories. She received the 1992–93 NEA Fellowship in Playwriting.

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

Paula Cizmar is an American academic, playwright and librettist.

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.

Idris Goodwin is a North American playwright, rapper, essayist, and poet. In July 2022, Idris Goodwin became the third Artistic Director of Seattle Children's Theatre.

Rites and Reason Theatre is a theater within the Africana Studies department of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. It was founded in 1970 by Professor George Houston Bass, and Professor Rhett Jones, is one of the longest-running continuously producing black theaters in the United States. Writers for the theater have included Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Adrienne Kennedy. The theatre serves to develop theatrical and visual performance works that articulate and understand the expansive African Diaspora.

Janine Nabers is an American playwright and television writer.

Donja R. Love is an American playwright. Originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Love identifies himself as an Afro-Queer, HIV positive playwright and filmmaker. His work has been produced in multiple states around the United States, but he is mainly based in New York City and Philadelphia. He is best known for his 2019 play one in two based on the 2017 CDC study that found that one in two black gay or bisexual men will be diagnosed with HIV at some point in their life.

References

  1. ↑ https://www.washcoll.edu/live/profiles/1867-robert-earl-price/
  2. ↑ http://www.kentcountyartscouncil.org/charles-sumner-post/robert-earl-price-g-a-r-artistic-director/
  3. ↑ "S. Pearl Sharp's Biography". The HistoryMakers. Retrieved 2019-06-03.
  4. ↑ A Place for Bo , retrieved 2019-06-03
  5. ↑ Patricia R. Schroeder, Neo-Hoodoo Dramaturgy: Robert Johnson on Stage African American Review Spring/Summer 2015 Vol 48 Issue 1/2 pp. 83-96.
  6. ↑ http://www.suziawards.org/page/1076/gene-gabriel-moore-playwriting-award
  7. ↑ America's Blues , retrieved 2019-06-03
  8. ↑ http://www.post-gazette.com/news/nation/2011/10/02/Ray-Sprigle-s-story-of-the-Jim-Crow-South-hits-the-stage/stories/201110020253
  9. ↑ http://chestertownspy.org/2014/10/29/red-devil-moon-a-discussion-with-robert-earl-price-and-pam-ortiz/
  10. ↑ "National Endowment for the Arts NEA Literature Fellowships 40 Years of Supporting American Writers" (PDF). Arts.gov. National Endowment for the Arts. Retrieved 1 March 2006.
  11. ↑ http://www.snakenationpress.org/product/wise-blood-by-robert-earl-price/
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.