Wolfe, George C. 1954–

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George C. Wolfe 1954–

Playwright, stage director, producer

At a Glance…

An “Integration Soldier”

Making a Name as Playwright, Director

On the “A-List”: Heading Up the NY Shakespeare Festival

Selected writings

Sources

In the spring of 1993 George C. Wolfe was named the new head of the New York Shakespeare Festival, one of Manhattan’s most influential theater projects. Wolfe will preside over the Joseph Papp Public Theater, home of the Shakespeare Festival and numerous other offerings of classical and experimental performance. A playwright and director with several successful Broadway and Off-Broadway plays to his credit, Wolfe is perceived by commentators as an artist who will be able to infuse new energy into the Shakespeare Festival. New York Times theater critic Frank Rich, for one, noted: “With George Wolfe, the New York Shakespeare Festival has found, and not a moment too soon, a leader with the real promise to reinvent the role of producer for the new generation now banging at the theater’s door.”

Wolfe is still a young man, but he has nevertheless compiled a body of work that has lifted him to national prominence. He is the author of The Colored Museum, a satirical comedy, and Jelly’s Last Jam, a production that began a long Broadway run in the early 1990s. Wolfe has also forged a reputation as a premier director, working with the Shakespeare Festival and at other venues on such pieces as German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and Tony Kushner’s epic drama Angels in America. These and other plays bearing ‘Wolfe’s influence have established him as “one of the leaders of a new generation … in the American theater—one whose work raises provocative questions about racial culture, history, and identity,” to quote Los Angeles Times contributor Hilary De Vries.

The New York theatrical community reserves its greatest respect for those people who can merge the sometimes conflicting considerations of art and commerce—those who can craft a hit play that also pleases the critics. Wolfe’s Jelly’s Last Jam was one such play, selling out on Broadway while garnering eleven Tony Award nominations and winning three. Observers expect Wolfe to bring this concept of heightened commercialism without artistic sacrifice to the Shakespeare Festival. Wolfe himself told the Los Angeles Times: “I don’t think you have to compromise edge for entertainment; in my life, they’ve gone hand in hand.…When you go to the theater, you can experience somebody trying to deal with his own vulnerability, and it’s affirming to see the struggle and the attempt to survive. I think that’s what good theater does.”

Wolfe told the New York Times: “I was 13 or 14 before I was thrust into the white world. And ever since then it’s

At a Glance…

Born September 23, 1954, in Frankfort, KY; son of a government worker and a school principal. Education: Pomona College, B.A., 1976; New York University, M.A. In musical theater arts, 1983.

Playwright and director, 1978—; head of New York Shakespeare Festival, 1993—. Principal works directed include Spunk, 1990; The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1990; Fires in the Mirror, 1992; Jelly’s Last Jam, 1992; and Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, 1993.

Selected awards: Obie Award, 1990; Drama Desk Award, 1992; Dorothy Chandler Award, 1992; Tony Award for best director, 1993, for Angels in America: Millennium Approaches; HBO/USA Playwrights Award; New York University Distinguished Alumni Award.

Addresses: Office —New York Shakespeare Festival, 425 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10003.

become clearer and clearer to me that I was part of a generation of black children who were raised like integration soldiers, who were groomed to invade white America. I don’t know how conscious it was, but with my parents it was definitely: ‘They think you’re less than; you’ve got to be better than.’”

An “Integration Soldier”

Wolfe was born in 1954, the third of four children in a middle-class Frankfort, Kentucky family. His mother was a teacher who rose to be principal of an elementary school. His father worked for the Kentucky state government. In his early youth, Wolfe lived in “a very insular world” that included little contact with those outside his race. “There were white people, but I didn’t feel they had any severe impact on me,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “The church was all black, the grade school was all black. I knew I couldn’t go down to the local movie theater and see ‘101 Dalmatians,’ but it was a nice and polite little world.”

Wolfe’s parents and teachers groomed him to move beyond the “polite little world,” and in his teen years he discovered his life’s passion. At the age of thirteen he traveled to New York City and saw the Broadway staging of Hello, Dolly! Afterward he was determined to become an actor. He joined theater workshops in Frankfort and continued to pursue acting in college, first at Kentucky State University and later at Pomona College in California. After earning a bachelor’s degree in theater arts, he settled in Los Angeles, where he wrote, directed, and acted in plays. For a time in the 1970s he was associated with the Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles as a playwright and director, but he gradually became disenchanted with California. “The goal of success in L.A. was not theater, but movies and TV, and I knew that wasn’t right for me then,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

Making a Name as Playwright, Director

In 1979 Wolfe moved to New York City. He enrolled in the master’s degree program in musical theater at New York University and continued to write, act, and direct. “I struggled for six or seven years,” he admitted in the New York Times. Amidst the years of struggle he saw his first play produced, a work called Paradise that was presented Off-Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 1985. De Vries noted that the play, “a musical about a family that escapes to an island, was largely savaged by area critics.” A better reception awaited Wolfe’s next production.

Wolfe told the Los Angeles Times that he wrote The Colored Museum as a personal “exorcism” of black cultural myths. The work was an outrageous, satirical look at black people that dared to challenge some of black America’s most cherished icons, including Lorraine Hans-berry’s play A Raisin in the Sun and political activist Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. The piece, modeled on a revue, includes skits in which a young black woman must choose between two hairpieces, one an Afro, one a Euro; a segment in which a hefty black woman reminiscent of Aunt Jemima stirs a cauldron of unidentified stew; a monologue from a black transvestite; and a sketch in which a flight attendant takes her passengers through three centuries of African American history. New York magazine columnist John Simon called the work “young in spirit, gifted in most aspects … a sophisticated, satirical, seriously funny show that spoofs white and black America alike. It is remarkably unafraid of lampooning black foibles, which is a sign of artistic maturity. We come of age—all of us, black or white—when we can laugh at ourselves.”

The Colored Museum had its premiere at the Crossroads Theater in New Jersey in 1986. The show’s New Jersey producers hailed Wolfe in the Los Angeles Times as “a courageous and fresh voice, … a new voice.” Within a year the play moved to New York’s Public Theater—home of the Shakespeare Festival—and later it was broadcast on public television as part of the Great Performances series. “That’s when my career started to feed me,” Wolfe told the New York Times.

Not everyone greeted The Colored Museum with enthusiasm, however. The play’s content and mordant satire drew charges of reverse racism from some critics. Wolfe told the Los Angeles Times: “When [the play] opened, the self-appointed black crowd said, ‘This is horrifying. This is horrifying. I can’t believe he is actually saying that’.…And that was painful. Because that was exactly the place where I was coming from.… All the whites went into programmed guilt and the black people went into programmed rage and the play kept saying, ‘You can’t do that.’ It was really a play about self-empowerment. About how I am now going to define myself the way that I am capable of.” In a sense, The Colored Museum prefigured other popular black satires such as In Living Color that dare to explode black cultural myths.

The success of The Colored Museum brought Wolfe other opportunities under the aegis of the Shakespeare Festival. He became a resident director at the Public Theater and worked on a number of projects there. Most notable among these was Spunk, a series of three vignettes he adapted from short stories by renowned author Zora Neale Hurston, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, an adaptation of a Brecht play done by Thulani Davis. Both works premiered at the Public Theater in 1990 and received good reviews. New Yorker critic Mimi Kramer wrote of The Caucasian Chalk Circle: “The production is uplifting and exhilarating in a way that New York Shakespeare Festival theater hardly ever is: through simply showing a work to its best advantage and giving the audience a good time.” Likewise, New Yorker columnist Edith Oliver praised Spunk for its “powerful injection of irony and wit,” and concluded that the piece is “a beautiful show.”

Wolfe directed other plays and performance art pieces at the Shakespeare Festival, but in the early 1990s he sought to produce a musical for Broadway. This is a risky undertaking—musicals are expensive to mount and require extensive preparation and rehearsal. Wolfe’s musical, for which he wrote the book and helped to write the lyrics, was based on the life of Ferdinand Joseph LeMenthe “Jelly Roll” Morton, a 1920s New Orleans jazz musician. In the play, Jelly Roll is given a supernatural opportunity—like the one afforded Ebenezer Scrooge—to review the important and formative moments of his life. The show features songs and tap dancing as well as a portrait of a man uncomfortable with his racial origins. Wolfe not only wrote the play but directed it as well.

Jelly’s Last Jam had its premiere in Los Angeles in 1991 and moved to Broadway in 1992 with Gregory Hines in the leading role. Edith Oliver called the play “an ironic, tough evocation of the complex, embittered, and anything but heroic man who wrote and played [jazz],” adding: “The book, strong enough to justify the narrative and the characters, the music and the emotions, is Mr. Wolfe’s accomplishment. There has never been anything like it, on or off Broadway.” And E. R. Shipp commented in Emerge that the depth and boldness of Jelly’s Last Jam made Wolfe “the hope for the future of American theater.…He [shows] theatergoers that so much that is referred to as black culture is really about being human.”

On the “A-List”: Heading Up the NY Shakespeare Festival

A New York Times reporter claimed that the success of Jelly’s Last Jam “propelled [Wolfe] onto producers’ A-lists and garnered him the choicest of this [1993] season’s assignments on Broadway.” That “choice assignment” was Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner’s two-part epic drama Angels in America, a sweeping look at gay America, AIDS, and politics. Wolfe earned a Tony Award for directing part one of the drama, Millennium Approaches, which opened on Broadway in May of 1993. In a review of the three-and-a-half-hour play, Newsweek correspondent Jack Kroll called the work “the most intelligent, most passionate American play in recent memory,” adding that Wolfe “is the perfect director for the play’s ricochet rhythm between realism and fantasy.” Wolfe’s staging of the second part, Perestroika, opened in December of 1993.

Just before Angels in America: Millennium Approaches opened, the board of directors of the New York Shakespeare Festival announced that Wolfe would be the new head of the Festival. Wolfe took the reins of the institution from JoAnne Akalaitis, a producer-director who had run it for eighteen months. In making the change in leadership, the Festival’s board of directors cited declining revenues and waning corporate support for the program and its Public Theater. Wolfe, who had for years half-jokingly called himself “the Negro at the Public,” enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to revive the flagging fortunes of the Shakespeare Festival. He plans to accent diversity in programming and casting, to invite more participation from minority playwrights, and to produce “a theater that looks, feels and smells like America,” to quote Wolfe in the New York Times.

Asked about his vision for the Shakespeare Festival in the future, Wolfe told Newsweek: “I see a brilliant, dangerous new musical on one of the main stages [at the Public Theater]. Upstairs, a workshop of a play by a writer who failed last season but has come back with a marvelous play. On the top floor, a young director is staging his first Shakespeare. On the other large stage, I’m directing a Restoration comedy because by now the endowment is so large I can relax. And downstairs, there’s a series of solo artists, white, Asian, and Hispanic.” Wolfe hopes to attract new sponsors for the Festival and revive former sources of revenue, all the while maintaining artistic control over the institution’s offerings. He begins with a 1994 budget of roughly four million dollars.

Rich of the New York Times hailed Wolfe as a producer-director-playwright who has “crossed over from the American to the African, from drama to satire to musical theater, from verbal elegance to visual dash. He is one to try anything rather than take no for an answer.” Assessing his own capacity to create new directions for American theater, Wolfe told the Los Angeles Times: “I’m a warrior.… I know the right conditions under which good work happens. And there are a number of artists who may not be as good at being warriors as I am, but they’re good artists. If I can use my connections and the force of my personality to create structures for other artists, great, because other people did that for me.”

Selected writings

Paradise, produced Off-Off Broadway at the Playwrights Horizons, 1985.

The Colored Museum, first produced at the Crossroads Theater, New Jersey, 1986; produced at Public Theater, New York, 1986; broadcast on PBS-TV as part of Great Performances series, 1991.

(Adaptor) Spunk (three one-act plays based on stories by Zora Neale Hurston), produced at Public Theater, 1990.

Jelly’s Last Jam (musical), first produced in Los Angeles, 1991; produced on Broadway at the Virginia Theater, 1992.

Also author of Queenie Pie, Hunger Chic, and Minimum Wage.