Carlyle Brown’s 1989 play, "The African Company Presents Richard III," re-stages the history of the African Company, founded by Billy Brown in 1820s New York. This play explores a pivotal moment when their production of "Richard III," featuring a "Black Richard," was staged in competition with Stephen Price’s Park Theater production, starring the renowned English actor Junius Brutus Booth.
Junius Brutus Booth, whose character is a point of contention in the play's historical setting.
NYU's African Grove Theatre hosted its inaugural production, The African Company Presents Richard III, Carlyle Brown’s play about the country's first Black theater that performed on the same block where its namesake theater now stands. NYU announced last year that strategic investor and philanthropist Ceci Chan donated $1 million to name the theater after the historic Black company that performed in Greenwich Village two centuries ago.
William Alexander Brown, a former ship steward, founded the African Grove in 1816, hosting poetry readings, musical performances, and plays. The company opened a 300-seat theater in 1821, where it performed Shakespeare and other classics, including a play penned by Brown. The theater served as a place for Black creative expression for just two years before it was destroyed by a White mob. Despite its short history, the company had an outsize influence on Black theater, especially in New York.
The Central Conflict: Love of Shakespeare vs. Desire for Independent History
The play grapples with the evident love of Shakespeare and an equally strong desire to write an independent history for African-American theater. Inside the company’s ranks, similar debates rage about whether to mimic the English tongue, or to provide a more lively interpretation of white theater by acknowledging the vibrancy of the Black experience (in the words of the African Company’s manager: “say ya Shakespeare like ya want.”)
Shakespeare is the chosen cultural battleground in this inventive retelling of a little known, yet pivotal event in the African Company’s history. Their competition, Stephen Price, an uptown, Broadway-type impresario, is producing Richard III at the same time as the African Company’s production is in full swing. Price has promised a famous English actor overflowing audiences, Price manipulates the law and closes down the theatre. The Company rebounds and finds a space right next door to Price’s theatre. At the rise of curtain of the next performance, Price causes the arrest of some of the actors in a trumped-up riot charge.
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A depiction of a riot, alluding to the challenges faced by the African Company.
Key Characters and Their Struggles
The modern play features a love story between Jimmy Hewlett, who plays Richard, and Ann, who plays Lady Anne. Darius Aushay presents a charismatic and compelling Jimmy-Richard, sliding in and out of the King’s character with a hunch of his shoulder. But Psacoya Guinn’s Ann was the scene stealer: composed, powerful, and with a keen stage presence, she performed her struggle with the part of Lady Ann - “I cannot be such a slack woman as this Lady Ann,” she tells Jimmy - in a way that undergirded the play’s larger struggle with the Shakespearean overplot. Why should she have to submit to the evil, manipulative King?
Another key character who jumped off the page to the stage was Papa Shakespeare, a formerly enslaved African who’d also live in the islands before he traveled to New York with Billy Brown in somewhat unclear circumstances. Papa Shakespeare, played with Falstaffian gusto by Anthony Michael Stokes, carries a drum and interweaves his own Afro-Caribbean musicality with his roles on stage (he plays Catesby in Richard III) and his sense of what Shakespeare means. He knows that his master in the islands “call me Shakespeare so to mock me,” but he also asserts that “If Shakespeare was a black man, he would be a Griot,” a traveling poet-performing in West African cultures. Papa Shakespeare loves Shakespeare but also transforms him.
Themes of Rebellion and Identity
Billy Brown’s intentions aren’t always clear. Jimmy insists that Billy wants to co-opt Shakespeare and Jimmy’s performance as Richard III for his “great Negro revolt.” Jimmy’s not sure what he wants. “I get to be loved and to be accepted,” he says to Billy Brown - but he’s also playing an evil king, even if it is one one of Shakespeare’s iconic roles. It’s not always clear what Jimmy’s Black Richard represents: rebellion against artistic limitations? an effort to connect with classical theater from the perspective of a formerly enslaved person? the more personal drama and exchange between Jimmy and Ann?
The African Company’s production of Richard III ends up with the five actors in the Eldridge Street jail, but the modern play finds a new role for Jimmy. The African Company Presents Richard III featured Tisch School of the Arts students from Grad Acting and Design for Stage & Film directed by Carl Cofield, chair of grad acting and was performed in November in the new state-of-the-art theater on the fourth floor of the John A. Paulson Center.
Black Theatre Day (Sept. 17) and the African Grove Theatre
Historical Context and Lasting Impact
Carlyle Brown's play tells the story of the African Grove Theatre, the ambitious Black theater troupe that performed Shakespeare and other classics in 19th Century New York City. The cast includes Cole Taylor as James Hewlett, Jaylen D. Eashmond as Billy Brown, Marcus Fitzpatrick as Papa Shakespeare, Orlando Grant as the Constable-man, Regina Monique as Ann, Xavier Markey-Smith as Stephen Price and Victoria Villier as Sarah.
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In 1821, forty years before Lincoln ended slavery, and fifty years before Black Americans earned the right to vote, the first Black theatrical group in the country, the African Company of New York, was putting on plays in a downtown Manhattan theater to which both Black and white audiences flocked. Forty years before the Civil War, the African Grove Theatre Troupe in New York sets about staging a production of Richard III.
The time of the play around the 1820s was not 50 years after the birth of our republic. America was a slave nation and the wealth acquired from that agrarian enterprise, fortified with free labor was in the process of industrializing a new nation. The war of 1812 was of recent memory and America had fought for and won a place in world affairs. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 had ceded to the new Nation from Napoleon Bonaparte at the cost of 15million dollars a sprawling, three-thousand-mile-long prime piece of real estate that would eventually become the continental United States of America. It was a time of great opportunity for the nation.
Yet, it was still a new nation. A nation that had not yet found a real national and cultural identity except that they were once English. This vacuum, this cultural identity void if you will, was being filled with competing desires for new opportunities from European immigrants, Native Americans and Africans who themselves or their forebears came to America as slaves. No place could bear better witness to the existence of this multicultural world than New York City circa 1821. Now as always New York was a major city because it was a port city. It was the foremost important place in the world for investing, capitalizing and outfitting in the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Racism as we know it did not exist. The average New Yorker would see Native Americans, not as indigenous savages in loincloths, but a collection of complex and powerful nations like the Mohawk, Iroquois and Heron who were only recently competitors for the same resources and control of the lucrative fur trade in the northeast. Across town free Blacks were doing the same thing. They didn’t have wealth but they were clearly resourceful. Just as white New Yorkers they too wanted to spend what little leisure time they had in entertainments and social fellowship. And although they were welcome to sit way upstairs in the back of the Gallery of the Park Theater some of them decided to make a theater of their own.
What do the words of a dead White poet mean to a group of Black actors? Everything, actually. After all, these are artists forced to spend their days disguised as maids and waiters. Hiding their gifts along with their feelings, until the sun sets and the time comes to discover themselves in Shakespeare's poetry. His writing demanding that everyone find their own way through his words, haters be damned.
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With Shakespeare they can actively learn the peculiarities and subtleties of the new language. They learn to organize themselves around a singular endeavor. The plays give them a structure to explore their own allusive forms. And Shakespeare gives them cover so as not to appear to be engaged in any activity that might remotely be construed as rebellious.
We now live in an era that is reflective of early 19th Century America. We are becoming a world as our early American world began as a multicultural world. We are living in a world, where at the very least artists anyway, are making culture out of cultures. And we are seeing in the world today not just a clash of cultures, but unification. Who owns Shakespeare one might ask?
Key Figures in the Play
| Character | Actor | Description |
|---|---|---|
| James Hewlett (Richard III) | Cole Taylor | The actor playing Richard III, grappling with his role and identity. |
| Billy Brown | Jaylen D. Eashmond | Founder of the African Company, with unclear motivations. |
| Papa Shakespeare | Marcus Fitzpatrick | A formerly enslaved African who infuses Afro-Caribbean musicality into his roles. |
| Ann (Lady Anne) | Regina Monique | The actress playing Lady Anne, struggling with her character's submissive role. |
| Stephen Price | Xavier Markey-Smith | The uptown impresario and competitor of the African Company. |
