Kicha's photos with the keyword: Thespian

Rose McClendon was one of the most famous black dramatic actresses of the 1920s and 1930s. Although she did not become a professional actor until she was in her thirties, she consistently won critical acclaim for many of her acting roles and influenced the careers of many aspiring black actors of the period. Rose (Rosalie) V. McClendon was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1884 and with her parents, Sandy and Lena Jenkins Scott, migrated to New York City around 1890. At the age of twenty she married Dr. Henry Pruden McClendon, a licensed chiropractor, who supplemented his income by working as a Pullman porter. McClendon's interest in the theatre first found expression in the church where she directed and acted in cantatas at Saint Mark's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Manhattan. In 1916 she won a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts at Carnegie Hall under the tutelage of Franklin Sargent, and subsequently began her stage career. McClendon made her professional debut in Justice (1919-1920), a play starring writer, director, and actor Butler Davenport. Four years later she appeared in Roseanne (1924) with Charles Gilpin (and later Paul Robeson). In 1926 she gained prominence for her acting in Deep River, where she earned rave reviews, and in Paul Green's Pulitzer prize-winning folk tragedy, In Abraham's Bosom that starred Jules Bledsoe in the title role. Her reputation grew with her portrayal of Serena in Dubose and Dorothy Heyward's Porgy (1927) for which she received the Morning Telegraph Acting Award the following year (along with Ethel Barrymore and Lynn Fontanne). After a long run of one year in New York City, McClendon went on tour with Porgy to Chicago (nine weeks), London (approximately six weeks), Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Washington, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the northwest, and Canadian cities. Other plays she appeared in include Green's House of Connelly (1931), Black Souls, an all black production of Never No More and The Cat and the Canary (1932), Brain Sweat (which had a black cast) and Roll Sweet Chariot (1934), and Panic (1935). Her last starring role was as Cora in Langston Hughes' Mulatto (1935) which ran for 375 performances on Broadway, the second-longest run by a black playwright at that time. Hughes created the role of Cora specifically for her, unfortunately, McClendon left the cast in December when she became ill. Her love of the theatre inspired McClendon's stewardship of other African American's involvement in the theatre. From 1923 to 1925 McClendon was active in the Ethiopian Art Theatre. Also by the mid-1920s, she was a director for the Negro (Harlem) Experimental Theatre located at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library and, in addition, worked in a supervisory capacity with the Federal Theatre Project (Negro Unit), ca. 1935-1936. Furthermore, she served as a board member for the Theatre Union, which governed the Civic Repertory Theatre on West 14th Street. While working with the Federal Theatre Project, McClendon developed her vision of a black theatre company. Together with Dick Campbell she founded the Negro People's Theatre in 1935. Members of the advisory board included: Cheryl Crawford, Clifford Odets, Paul Green, Albert Bein, Countee Cullen, Herbert Kline, and Lena Bernstein. Officers of the small thirty-five member company were: Morris McKenney (chairman and director of the executive board), Campbell (vice chairman), Lena Bernstein (play reader), and Alston Burleigh (musical director). The company produced one play, Odets' Waiting for Lefty, prior to McClendon's untimely death at the age of 51 of pneumonia in 1936. Two years later, Campbell, his wife, actress Muriel Rahn, and George Norford established the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem in her honor. NYPL Archives & Manuscripts

Photo: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library He was born in Manhattan, NY in 1807. His family belonged to the world of the “quasi-free,” to take a phrase from the historian John Hope Franklin. Slavery was gradually being abolished in New York, but the black population was hemmed in by Jim Crow-like restrictions—notably, drastic limits on voting rights. Aldridge’s father, Daniel, worked as a street vender and served as a lay preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church; his mother, of whom almost nothing is known, was named Luranah. Aldridge’s early education took place at the African Free School, a network of schools set up by antislavery advocates to educate “the descendants of an injured race.” Daniel Aldridge wanted his son to be a minister, but Ira fell in love with the theatre. "The New Yorker" by Alex Ross LONDON — The story is gripping. It is the mid-1820s, and a young black American actor improbably moves to London while still a teenager, tours the provinces and gets his big break a few years later, when he is asked at the last minute to replace Edmund Kean as Othello at Covent Garden in 1833. Can he overcome the innate prejudice of his fellow actors, the public and the critics? Will he succeed? His name was Ira Aldridge, and when the British actor Adrian Lester was asked, way back in 1998, to do an informal reading of some writings about Aldridge, he was astonished by the story. Aldridge was an anomaly in theater history: a Black actor — and an American — who achieved mainstream success in grand Shakespearean roles at a time when no black actor had ever been seen on the stage of a major London theater, and who went on to win considerable renown in Europe, honored with titles and medals by crowned heads of state. Aldridge’s Covent Garden debut in 1833 coincided with the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, and the heightened debate over the decision. His performances in “Othello,” well received by the audiences, were vilified by critics; after two shows, the management closed the theater, and Aldridge never appeared again on a mainstream London stage. Until he died at 60, in the Polish town of Lodz in 1867, he toured Europe relentlessly, becoming something of a celebrity in Eastern Europe and Russia. Memorials in this country are few, but in Stratford, a plaque for him is on the back of one of the seats in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. When Aldridge died, he was on the cusp of a lengthy United States tour, beginning in Brooklyn at the new Academy of Music. [ NY Times, Roslyn Sulcasmarch ]