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Replay: “Writers on Writing” Radio Show
October 11, 2020 at 7:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Replay: “Writers on Writing” Radio Show
Sunday, October 11, 2020
Interview with Richard Wesley
With Dr. Brenda M. Greene, Founder and Executive Director
Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY
Listen on radio station WNYE 91.5 FM
About the Episode
Dr. Brenda M. Greene interviews playwright, screenwriter and essayist Richard Wesley. They discuss his memoir, It’s Always Loud in the Balcony: A Life in Black Theater, from Harlem to Hollywood and Back (Applause Books, 2019) and his life as a playwright and screenwriter. Wesley ends his memoir with the words “My memories are a great foundation to build on and I remind myself that it’s okay to go there, as long as I don’t live there.” Greene and Wesley discuss his reflections on the post-civil rights movement, the Black Arts Movement, the Black Theater Movement, and contemporary Black theater and film. Beginning with the 1960s, Wesley takes the reader on an historical journey of the playwrights, actors, and dramatists who informed the many iterations of the Black Theater and Black Film Movements.
About the Author
Richard Wesley’s work has been produced on stage and for screen and television. He has received the Drama Desk Award, the NAACP Image Award, the AUDELCO Award, and the Castillo Award for his work in political theater. His first play, The Black Terror, was presented at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater. The Mighty Gents, another play by Wesley, premiered on Broadway in 1978 and in the mid-1970s. Wesley wrote screenplays for Uptown Saturday Night in 1974, Let’s Do It Again in 1975, and Fast Forward and Native Son in 1986. He is the author of the recently published book It’s Always Loud in the Balcony: A Life in Black Theater, from Harlem to Hollywood and Back (Applause Books, 2019) and he recently won a Pulitzer for the libretto for Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer-winning, jazz-infused opera The Central Park Five, the story of the Black teenagers wrongfully convicted of the 1989 assault of a white woman.
Email writers@mec.cuny.edu for more information.