Leslie Lee, a playwright whose award-winning work, much of it with the Negro Ensemble Company, focused on stretching the boundaries of the African-American experience as it was portrayed on the stage, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 83.
The cause was congestive heart failure, Heather Massie, a friend, said.
Over four decades, Mr. Lee wrote more than two dozen stage works, scouring American history for his subjects and characters. In “Black Eagles,” he wrote about black fighter pilots in Italy in World War II. In “Ground People” (originally titled “The Rabbit Foot”), he wrote about Southern black sharecroppers and visiting minstrel-show performers in the 1920s.
In “Blues in a Broken Tongue,” the daughter of a family that had moved to Russia in the 1930s as an escape from racism discovers a pile of recordings by Billie Holiday, Paul Robeson and others and reconsiders her heritage. An early play, “The War Party,” was about the conflicts within a community civil rights organization in the 1960s.
In “The Book of Lambert,” written in the 1970s and set contemporaneously on an abandoned New York subway platform, a black intellectual has been reduced to despair by the loss of the white woman he loves. In “Colored People’s Time,” Mr. Lee presented a century of black history, from the Civil War to the dawn of the civil rights movement, in a pageantlike parade of vignettes.
“One can be black and also many other things,” Mr. Lee said in a 1975 interview about his writerly concerns. “I want to expand the thinking of blacks about themselves.”
Most of Mr. Lee’s work was produced Off Broadway and on regional stages, though his best-known play, “The First Breeze of Summer” (1975), appeared on Broadway, at the Palace Theater, after moving from the St. Mark’s Playhouse, then the home of the Negro Ensemble Company, in the East Village. It was nominated for a Tony Award for best play. (Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” was the winner.)
“The First Breeze of Summer” tells the story of a middle-class black family in Pennsylvania whose ambitious and sensitive younger son is emotionally derailed when he learns the past secrets of the grandmother he reveres. Mr. Lee acknowledged that it was an autobiographical work. And at a time when black theater was often polemical, it was notable for its naturalistic drama and its probing of family dynamics and character.
That it had its debut in an earlier era, both theatrically and journalistically, was evident in Walter Kerr’s review in The New York Times.
“For all the explicitly black experience detailed in ‘The First Breeze of Summer,’ ” Mr. Kerr wrote near the conclusion of an unqualified rave that was redolent of surprise, “I have rarely seen a play at which someone who is not black can feel so completely at home.”
Leslie Earl Lee was born on Nov. 6, 1930, in Bryn Mawr, Pa., and grew up nearby in West Conshohocken, one of nine children. His mother, the former Clementine Carter, was a homemaker; his father, John Henry Lee, like the patriarch in “First Breeze,” was a plastering contractor.
Mr. Lee studied English and biology at the University of Pennsylvania — he thought he would be a doctor — and worked as a hospital medical technician, as a bacteriologist for the state health department and as a researcher for Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company, before abandoning his scientific pursuits in the mid-1960s to study playwriting at Villanova University. (For a time, his roommate was David Rabe, who went on to his own award-winning playwriting career).
Mr. Lee taught writing at several colleges, including New York University, and wrote several television scripts, including an adaptation of Richard Wright’s short story “Almos’ a Man.” “The First Breeze of Summer” was broadcast as part of the “Great Performances” series on public television.
His other stage work includes two collaborations with the composer Charles Strouse and the lyricist Lee Adams, creators of “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Applause” and other shows. Together they updated another Strouse-Adams show, “Golden Boy,” the 1964 musical based on Clifford Odets’s boxing drama; the newer version, with Mr. Lee’s book, was presented in 1989 at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Florida.
The three men also worked on a musical about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that follows Dr. King from his teenage years in Atlanta to the Montgomery bus boycott of the 1950s. The show had its premiere Off Broadway at the Kraine Theater in 2011.
Mr. Lee won numerous Audelco Awards, given to black theater artists and productions. He was married once and divorced. He is survived by a brother, Elbert, and three sisters, Evelyn Lee Collins, Grace Lee Wall and Alma Lee Coston.
In 2008, “The First Breeze of Summer” was revived Off Broadway by the Signature Theater Company in a production that starred Leslie Uggams and was directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.
“He captured African-American life with all its frailties and all its power,” Mr. Santiago-Hudson said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “Most of all he bestowed integrity on people, even when they were ne’er-do-wells or people whose intentions weren’t the best for other folks. Leslie wasn’t only poetic; he was authentic.”
*****
*****
Leslie Lee, Playwright of the African-American Experience, Dies at 83
By Robert Simonson
24 Jan 2014
24 Jan 2014
Advertisement
Mr. Lee's first produced work at NEC—and probably his best-known play overall—was The First Breeze of Summer, which bowed in March 1975, when the company was a decade old. Directed by NEC's founder, Douglas Turner Ward, the cast featuredCharles Brown, Frances Foster, Moses Gunn andLou Myers.
A naturalistic, autobiographical, family drama set in Pennsylvania—where Mr. Lee was born—it told of a young man who uncovers some disturbing family secrets from his grandmother, a women he reveres. "Both playwright and director have avoided simple stereotypes, and the people in the play emerge as richly complex human beings," wrote the New York Times.
It won three Obie Awards, including one for Best New American Play. Mr. Lee also won the John Gassner Award, given out by the Outer Critics Circle. The play then transferred to Broadway, where it ran a month and was nominated for a Tony Award as Best Play.
When, in 2008, the Signature Theatre Company decided to devote a season to the legacy of the Negro Ensemble Company, it restagedSummer. The production, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, once again won a host of honors, this time from the Audelco Awards.
At that time, Mr. Lee hadn't had a New York production since 1991, when Manhattan Theatre Club staged his Black Eagles, about black fighter pilots in Italy in World War II. Other plays by Mr. Lee included Ground People, The War Party and Colored People's Time.
Leslie Earl Lee was born Nov. 6, 1930, in Bryn Mawr, PA. He studied English and biology at the University of Pennsylvania. For a time, he worked as a hospital medical technician and took on various other medical positions. In the mid-1960s, however, he began to study playwriting at Villanova University.
One of nine children, he is survived by a brother and three sisters
No comments:
Post a Comment