Prometheus 6

[In] 1957...he was offered the job of directing a play called "A Raisin in the Sun," about the Youngers, a black family struggling to get out of poverty in Chicago, by an unknown playwright named Lorraine Hansberry.

...when the play opened to a cheering, standing ovation at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on March 11, 1959, it was a landmark moment in American theater and social history.

"Never before," James Baldwin later wrote, "in the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage."

The play ran for 530 performances. It would not be the only time that Mr. Richards, a small, compact, bespectacled man, brought a new and reverberating voice into the dramatic landscape.

Lloyd Richards, Theater Director and Cultivator of Playwrights, Is Dead at 87
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Lloyd Richards, one of the most influential figures in modern American theater and a pioneering director who brought the plays of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson to Broadway and championed several generations of young playwrights, died on Thursday in Manhattan. It was his 87th birthday.

The cause was heart failure, said his son Scott Davenport Richards.

In the 1980's, as dean of the Yale School of Drama, as artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater and of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, and as a director of commercial theater on Broadway, Mr. Richards was in a position of rare power in American theater, rarer still for an African-American.

Though he was a writer's director, for the most part avoiding a conspicuous directorial thumbprint on his productions, his mark on the dramatic landscape was tremendous, starting as far back as 1957, when he was offered the job of directing a play called "A Raisin in the Sun," about the Youngers, a black family struggling to get out of poverty in Chicago, by an unknown playwright named Lorraine Hansberry.

At the time, the chances for success seemed slim. The play was almost exclusively about black characters, written by a black woman, and Mr. Richards was a black director with no experience directing on Broadway. Indeed, one of the producers, Philip Rose, who was also inexperienced, titled his 2001 memoir "You Can't Do That on Broadway!"

"The odds were pretty stacked against us," Mr. Rose recalled yesterday.