A new performance space at New York University will be named “The African Grove Theatre” in honor of the African Theater, a historic New York production company and venue widely regarded as the first black theater in the United States, the university said Wednesday. familiar. †
Backed by a $1 million donation, the theater is located on the fourth floor of a new multi-purpose education building at 181 Mercer Street that will open in the spring of 2023. It will also house the graduate acting and design programs for stage and film of the University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Where there was once just a plaque with a brief history of the theater, there is room for theatrical performances, lobby screenings, educational seminars, and an annual symposium on the history of black theater and culture.
“This theater was not ‘somewhere downtown’; it was on our campus,” said Laurence Maslon, an art professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, who is also a theater historian and co-chair of a university committee to commemorate the African forest. “It’s been part of our DNA for over 200 years.”
“Happy is the word I keep coming back to,” he added.
The original African Theater was founded in 1816 by William Alexander Brown, a retired ship’s steward who began hosting music, poetry and short plays for Black New Yorkers in his backyard at 38 Thomas Street. The entertainment “tea garden” became known as the African Grove, one of the few spaces where black patrons could enjoy leisure art.
In 1821, the theater moved to Bleecker and Mercer Street – where the new performance space will be next spring – and is expanding into a 300-seat venue known for staging operas, ballets and Shakespearean classics alongside original work, initially performed by black performers for black audiences and, later, an integrated audience.
The original venture was not entirely peaceful. The theater was mobbed by white rivals and police raids. A yellow fever epidemic further plagued the theater, which closed two years later. The last known poster for an African theater production dates from June 1823.
The new theater will be a “space where we celebrate another tradition in New York City culture that has often been ignored and overlooked and misunderstood,” said Michael Dinwiddie, an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. from NYU, who is also a theater historian and co-chair of the Committee to Commemorate the African Grove. “This was a theater in its early days that really created a model for what American theater could be. And that’s what we want the modern African Grove Theater to be.”
Dinwiddie said he was excited “to see what’s happening culturally” for students learning about theater and understanding that they are performing in a place that is “historic, sacred and new, all at the same time”.
