When the playwright and director George C. Wolfe moved to New York City in his twenties, he got a job at a black cultural history archive, where his work by preserving newspaper articles and keeping records fostered a habit of creating his own ephemera. store.
“It triggered this kind of curiosity-slash obsession about who’s remembered, what’s saved, what’s appreciated and what’s not,” Wolfe said recently.
On Thursday, the New York Public Library announced it had acquired more than 50 boxes of material spanning Wolfe’s entire career, which saw him become one of the most sought-after theater directors in the country. His productions, including ‘Angels in America’ and ‘Bring in’ Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk’ garnered multiple Tony Awards, and he is credited with revolutionizing public theater during a decade as a producer.
Working scripts, correspondence with theatrical figures such as Tony Kushner (with whom Wolfe worked closely on “Angels in America”) and photographs from throughout his career were acquired for an undisclosed sum. The archive also includes his research into historically driven productions, including ‘Shuffle Along’, which Wolfe wrote based on the events of the 1921 musical – a rare all-black production at the time – and ‘Jelly’s Last Jam’, a musical about the life of jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, which will be revived next year as part of the Encores! series in downtown New York.
Wolfe, 68, who directed “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” for film, warns that building the archive shouldn’t mean his career is on the wane. Rather, he sees the process as making room for new stories, and – more practically speaking – making room in his home.
“They took over,” he said of the boxes, “so I let them win.”
Wolfe recalled that some of his preserved materials were audition forms with his assessments of actors, Kushner’s notes on Part 1 of “Angels,” and a scrapbook of his 1986 Off Broadway play “The Colored Museum,” which earned him national recognition as a playwright. Some items he said he wasn’t willing to part with just yet, including a note from Joseph Papp, the founder and longtime leader of the Public Theater, who took over Wolfe a few years after Papp’s death and produced Broadway shows such as ‘Caroline , or Change’, ‘Take Me Out’ and ‘Topdog/Underdog’. (All three have had recent Broadway revivals.)
Doug Reside, the theater curator at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, has been trying to persuade artists like Wolfe to start transferring their collections sooner than they expected because of the complexities surrounding storing digital material that can be storable on machines that are quickly becoming obsolete. This became a priority for Reside when he worked as a researcher at the Library of Congress on the archives of Jonathan Larson, the “Rent” playwright and lyricist, whose three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks were a challenge to save.
“It has become very important to preserve this history as close as possible to the moment of creation,” Reside said.
Wolfe’s own career spans a period of rapid technological development: he wrote and directed his first play, “Up for Grabs”, in 1975, and directed his most recent Broadway production in 2019. The archives include handwritten letters and telegrams Wolfe received with show feedback. Further down the technology timeline, there is a DVD previewing Act 2 of “Shuffle Along”, as well as e-mail printouts related to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”.
“It tells the stories of the shows I’ve worked on,” Wolfe said of the collection, “but embedded in it, it tells the story of the time.”
Wolfe has not yet agreed to transfer his digital archives to the library, but he said he would consider doing so in the future. The collection will be accessible in about a year from now in the Special Collections Reading Room of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.