Lloyd Richards Interview (page: 2 / 6) Tony Award-Winning Director	Print Interview

At that time, did you see A Raisin in the Sun as one, as a significant breakthrough, and two, as this monumental work in the American theater?

Lloyd Richards: No, you don't look at it that way. It is people later who recall it or make it history. It's just work. A good play, and you get good people to do it. You do the best you can, and it has nothing to do with making history, it has to do with making the work... work. Creating a piece that works for you, works for me. All of the other things that happen from that are surprises to me. My real fun is in the rehearsal hall. That's when the creative experience is happening. That's when I am close to what is going on, stimulating and affecting others to make the work shape up into something that you want it to be, or that you envision for it. History is something else.

Is there a scene, is there something in A Raisin in the Sun, or any of the other plays that you have directed, that is special to you? That stands out for any reason?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Lloyd Richards: It's all special. They were all very special experiences, even the ones that didn't work. It's like saying which of your children do you love the most? Sometimes you have a special feeling for things that didn't work. It's like a child with a deformity, a child that doesn't quite make it. He is not loved less, he is sometimes even loved more, because you felt you didn't do enough for him. So, they all stand out. And I don't try and differentiate between them. People ask me which is my favorite play. Which is your favorite August Wilson play? I have no favorites. They are all my favorites. My work is my favorite.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

Will you tell the story about the woman who was waiting in line to buy the ticket?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Lloyd Richards: Well, it really illustrates why I am in the theater, and the kind of thing that keeps you going. It happened when we were doing Raisin in the Sun. We were in Philadelphia. We had opened without anyone really being conscious that we were there. The third day, or the fourth, we began to really have some lines at the box office. I happened to be standing in the lobby, and there was a very small thin black woman standing in line, and she had a shopping bag. I know what those shopping bags are about. My mother used to carry one. They were the badge of the housekeepers. I used to watch it on Grand River, when I went to school. Grand River (Avenue) was a major artery in Detroit. The buses and streetcars went downtown, and the buses went uptown. In the morning when you approached a corner, you saw the buses going downtown, and they were filled with white persons on their way downtown. On the other side of the street, there was a different group. There was a group of black women, getting on the buses, going out into the suburbs to clean their house or take care of their houses while they went downtown. And it would reverse in the evening. Well, this was obviously one of those women. She got up to the ticket booth, she asked for a ticket, and she put up a dollar. The ticket man told her that will be $4.80. She said, "Four dollars and eighty cents?" Yes. She said, "Why is it $4.80? I can see Sidney Poitier around the corner for 95 cents." She was obviously referring to the movies. Well, it's $4.80 here. So she took her $4.80, which I knew was hard-earned, she put it out, got her ticket and she started to go into the theater. The door was locked, and she said, "I can't get in." The ticket man said, "You have to come back tonight at 8:30. There is only one show in the evening, it's at 8:30." So she started to leave, and I stopped her and I asked her, "Why are you paying $4.80 and coming back tonight to see Sidney Poitier, who you can see around the corner for 95 cents?" And she said, "Well, the word is going around in my neighborhood that there is something going on down here that concerns me, and I had to come find out what it was about."

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Lloyd Richards: Now, that's why I'm in the theater. To take those lives, to reveal them. Not just those lives, any life. And that's what's important about theater, or should be. It does reflect the lives of a totality of a community that exists out there, and does speak to the totality of that community. Not all at once, but through its own particularness, which is what Raisin did. Other people were able to find themselves in it. I remember when we first did Fences at Yale Rep. My promotional manager, a wonderful woman, she had come to see a run-through, and she sat with me afterwards. She said, "Do you know, I looked at the play, and I looked at that role that James Earl Jones is playing, and I said, you know, that's the man down the street. I know him, that's the man down the street." A little further into the play, she said, "No that's not the man down the street, that's my brother." And a little further, "No, not my brother, that's my father." At the end of the play, she said, "I said to myself, no, that's not my father, that's me." And it's that kind of universality, that stems from particularity, that makes a work of value and reach out beyond itself. Not by trying to reach out beyond itself, but by reaching deeper into itself, to its own truth. And that's what's wonderful about theater for me.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

What were you looking for when you found August Wilson? What was it in August Wilson?

Lloyd Richards: Genius. We were looking for genius. I run a program called the National Playwrights Conference. I've run that since 1968. Every year I invite playwrights to submit their work to us. We accept that work, and every year around 1400 scripts. I have readers who read the plays, I read all the reports, and selectors, and I'm a part of that. What are we looking for? I remember talking to a wonderful man who ran the BBC and we were comparing notes. I asked, "What's your ratio?" He said, "Well, ten percent of everything that I get is worth reading. That's 100 in 1000; 10 percent of that is worth doing. That's ten in 1000. And 10 percent of that is exceptional, which is one in 1000. And the other guy may get it." So that's what you are looking for. You are looking for that exceptional, unique voice for the theater. It's really like looking for a needle in a haystack. Looking for genius. It may be in its rough form, and you may be wrong, but that's what you are looking for.

I know that it's not easy to find, and it's not easy to develop even once you find it. It's hard to try and develop a playwright. You know what it costs? It isn't a matter of sitting somebody down and having them write something and rewrite it and rewrite it. In order to really understand their work, they have to see it done. What does it cost to get work done? An aspiring playwright, where do they get that from? So our program called the National Playwrights Conference, we invite people to submit. Then we try and select from those that we will work with, in one month of the year.

And August Wilson submitted something?

Lloyd Richards: Yes. We take those playwrights who we select, and for one month, we bring them together with very talented directors, talented actors, and we work on their scripts with them. We do a stage screening, and we discuss the work with them. We try and affect their work in that manner.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Lloyd Richards: Now August Wilson, he will tell you, he submitted to us -- he is a poet who was in the process of teaching himself to become a playwright at the suggestion of some friends. He was rejected by us five times. It was on the fifth try that he was selected. He even tells the story that once he didn't believe that we had really read his play, so he submitted the same play the next year, and it was also rejected. He thought, maybe these people have a point. But, that is the important part of that is the fact that August Wilson did not arrive full blown. He was a person who did not, in getting rejected, turn around and say, "Aw, there is something wrong with you," the rejector. He ultimately accepted the fact that he was in process, and there may have been something wrong with what he was doing, and he had to learn more and he had to do more. He did, and he finally got to that point where his work was accepted for work. Finally, that was when he came to the Playwrights Conference and our relationship began.

What about directing Fences? What does Fences bring to mind for you? What kind of a challenge did that play present to you?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Lloyd Richards: August brought us Fences after Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom was really two short plays that he was trying to put together. One was in the band room, and one was with Ma Rainey. Our work together was really the cementing of those two plays together, making them integral to one another. And so then he wrote Fences. We did it at the O'Neill Center. When we did it at the O'Neill, it was four hours, and 15 or 20 minutes. I say 20, he says 15. Our work on that began to be...to find what the true line of that material was. Because it was material, a lot of wonderful material, and hidden in it was a story or a tale. Our job became one of searching for that line, and putting that line through the material, and lifting it up and see what hung on it, what belonged there, what was essential, what was necessary, finding the core of the life of that man. And we struggled to find that. I think the key moment when we found that it was in a scene that he had in a speech after the death of the woman who he had become involved with, and who had borne his child. When he heard of her death, he used to have a speech to God. And I finally said to August, "That's wrong. He doesn't talk to God. This is a man who lives with death. He talked about it in the first scene, that death is his constant companion. Death is the thing that he is doing battle with for his life." That speech was changed into a conversation with death. Not just a conversation, but taking death to task; death had betrayed him and stepped into his family. There was the essential inner conflict in that play, the thing that held everything else together, the thing that man was dealing with throughout the play. That became one of the core decisions in the play, that began to bring it all together for us. It was hard work. But it was always good work. Good, not in the sense that we did good work, but good in the sense that it was challenging, and it responded, and we responded to it.

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