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

I was going to ask you another big question, which is race as a theme in your work. How does one best deal with the race issue in America in the arts?

Lloyd Richards: Deal with the race issue? I'd have to clarify that as a question for myself.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Lloyd Richards: If you are dealing with the race issue as it exists in this country, you can write about it. There are times when I know in my own history in the theater, when much of the work that it did, when it was of that nature, was something which was confrontational, antagonistic and the core of the plot was racial attitudes. But that in many respects, past, in the sense that there is no longer an issue of whether I should belong, or whether I shouldn't belong. There is a general acceptance, he ought to belong. The question is that I must in some respect mute the racism that does exist. It used to be very obtuse, very obvious; it is much less now. What you find now is, we have many minorities in this country, all of whom are contributing to the life of the nation, and all of whom have wonderful cultural aspects of their existence, which are revealed through their own artistry. We very often don't see that, or understand it. We tend to look at everything tends to be looked at in terms of Western culture, when there are a lot of other cultures involved that have standards, very high standards. I know that one of the nicest things that happened to me, and I've had so many, but recently I was in Boston at the Huntington Theater, doing Two Trains Running,August Wilson's play. We've done three plays there. This was the third play at the Huntington and I was at the back of the theater with my assistant, taking notes. When the show ended, I was still giving some notes. As people were going out, a couple stopped in front of me. A white gentleman said, "I want to thank you." I said, "You're welcome." He said, "No, I want to thank you and August Wilson because you have permitted me something that I could not have gotten in any other way and elsewhere. You have permitted me into the lives of black people in this country." Not into the problem between, but into the lives. Which is what much of August's work does. Yes, there are all kinds of comments made in the work that stem from a human involvement as black people in the life of this country. But that's not the core of the play, that's a very major aspect of what makes people behave the way they do. Just the permission [to enter] into the life, into the music, into the rhythms, into the thoughts, into the attitudes. That opportunity to see that in an ongoing way permitted him something that he had not experienced otherwise.

Now that is true for every culture that exists in this country. We too rarely get the opportunities to go from our own position, the comfort or discomfort of our own culture into something else, and see the life as we are experiencing it from another point of view. These are characters, these are people who you drive down the street. I worked with Richard Wesley. I did one of his plays; he is a wonderful black writer. Most of his characters came from New Jersey, and we're in New Jersey. He said, "I'm writing characters and putting them on the stage, that people who were driving through town, when they got to a red light in the district, would roll up their windows and make sure their doors are locked. And I just want them to get out of the car, and really see what's happening on the corner." I thought, yes, sure. That's it. And that's what must happen. More and more. We have to accept the fact that this society is not just created out of western culture standards, as part of the cultural baggage that came over from Western Europe. And it, too, has value, and that value has to be recognized.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Lloyd Richards: Growing up in the theater, I did not grow up in a black theater, because there was no black theater. There were very few writers, and their work was very rarely done. Nor did they get that opportunity to develop. I grew up with Shakespeare, Shaw--Chekhov is one of my favorites--and Ibsen. And I do their work, but I do their work, I believe, with some sensitivity and some knowledge because I grew up with those western cultural standards. I was exposed to and studied and observed the life of, saw it through movies, saw it everywhere it could be depicted. The life that existed in those other cultures. I consider myself very versed in western cultural standards, and very capable in my directing of Chekhov, Shaw, all the rest of them because it's part of my heritage, as taught to me. There is another heritage that I have that I grew up with and my own spiritual heritage, which I don't even know about, which reveals itself at times.

What is your advice to a young man or woman who comes to you and says, "Dean Richards, I want to make something of my life, and career, what is your advice?"

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Lloyd Richards: I want to make something of my life? Or my life in the theater? Either way it's the same thing. It's commitment. Trust. Work. there is no substitute for work. There is no substitute for commitment. You've got to commit to something that you love. Invest yourself in it, and trust it.

Well, I know I asked you this, but I'll ask one more time. Any influential books or teachers in your life, and if so, why. Anything that inspired you? Anyone who inspired you?

Lloyd Richards: I spoke of Paul Robeson, Canada Lee, I think.

Why were they influential?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Lloyd Richards: Well, you talk about taking chances, my God, Paul took so many chances in his life. What he was striving for, and insisting on, was acceptance as a human being. Not qualified by the fact of his racial origins, or national origin, but that he was a human being in the world, and should be dealt with on that basis and should be permitted to achieve, without those other really debilitating aspects becoming part of it. Canada Lee dared a lot, tried to find a lot in an atmosphere and in a world that did not make it easy. It doesn't make it easy anyhow, art never does, but made it particularly difficult because of the specifics of this nature of the human being, as a black person, in this culture, in that time. They represented to me a kind of struggle that I was involved with, on whatever level. Whether it be in school, whether it be in terms of being on a swimming team, any of those things. They exemplified both the struggle and the achievement. The fact that achievement is never completely won.

I find it now, fighting the same battles, again and again. I've had to accept the fact: freedom is never won. You are always in the process of winning it. You have to do it again. The National Endowment for the Arts. What a wonderful piece of legislation that original legislation was. What a commendable thing for our government to have done to have created the National Endowment and the stipulations that were on it, the wisdom to create an area of freedom where the government or the legislature could not interfere into the work. Well, they gradually tore those barriers down, and managed to get into it, and restructure it, so that could create little pork barrels here, little pork barrels there. All of the other things that were done to disseminate the endowment.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Lloyd Richards: Okay, you've got to go out and fight that battle again. Freedom of expression. Are we still fighting that battle? Yes. Will we go on fighting it? I assume so. Over the number of years that I have lived, those are the things that I have learned, that the most precious things are never totally won. It's like love. It's never totally won. It has to be worked at in order to be maintained. It's not easy. The whole thing of casting, and non-representational casting, I was doing that 40-some years ago. We were having those same discussions, and they will go on. You keep thinking, it's another generation, they've got to learn, too. They've got to discover, too. You don't realize the turnover in generation, the turnover in understanding. Anti-Semitism! Astonishing! I thought we dealt with that in the Second World War! I thought we understood something when we came out of that. But there, you see it cropping up again in the very major ways that it does. We have to do that one again? All right, we will do it again. I guess that's what life is all about. There are certain eternals, and you have to struggle to keep those eternals fresh, alive, and there for the next generation.

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I can't think of a better place to stop. Thank you. It's been a privilege.

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