Leslie Lee (b. November 6, 1930, Byrn Mawr, Pennsylvania – d. January 20, 2014, Manhattan, New York City, New York) was an American playwright, director and professor of playwriting and screenwriting.
Leslie Lee grew up in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a master's degree from Villanova University.
Lee's early theatre experience was at Ellen Stewart's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village, Manhattan. His play Elegy for a Down Queen was produced at La MaMa in 1970 and in 1972 by John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous. Cops and Robbers was produced at La MaMa in 1971 by La MaMa GPA Nucleus Company.
1997, marked the beginning of Lee's theatre collaboration (spanning twenty years) with Sophia Romma (nee Murashkovsky), his Dramatic Writing Student from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts whom he deemed his protégé. Lee directed Sophia Murashkovsky's play, Love, In the Eyes of Hope, Dies Last which was produced at La MaMa in 1997, and he also directed Sophia Murashkovsky's critically acclaimed play, Coyote Take Me There! at La MaMa in 1999.
In 2004, Leslie Lee directed Ms. Murashkovsky's epic, mystic play, Defenses of Prague at La MaMa. Mr. Lee continued to successfully collaborate in the theatre with Dr. Sophia Romma (Ms. Murashkovsky) and in 2006, directed her heart-wrenching émigré saga, Shoot Them In the Cornfields! which premiered at the American Theatre of Actors. Mr. Lee, who seldom took on the role of director, believed that Dr. Romma's unique staccato lyrical voice, her poignant themes of advocating for multicultural tolerance, religious, ethnic and minority acceptance, and most importantly her stark depictions of the trials and tribulations of immigration/assimilation were well worth exploring on the theatrical stage. Ms. Murashkovsky (Romma) in turn, directed Lee's short play, We're Not Here to Talk About Beethoven at John McTiernan's New York Performance Works.
Lee also worked with the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) along with Sophia Romma who served as Literary Manager of the NEC.
Lee's significant work includes his history play Colored People's Time, a production of which featured Angela Bassett and Samuel L. Jackson, and Hannah Davis. He received a 1975 Obie Award for Best Play, a 1976 Tony Award nomination for Best Play, and an Outer Circle Critics Award for his play, First Breeze of Summer. In 2006, the Negro Ensemble Company produced his play Sundown Names and Night Gone Things, based on Richard Wright's life in 1930s Chicago, featuring Stephen Tyrone Williams and Dewanda Wise. In 2008, the Signature Theatre Company produced a revival of First Breeze of Summer, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson and starring Leslie Uggams, Brandon J. Dirden, Jason Dirden, and Yaya Dacosta.
Lee's film credits include Almos' A Man, an adaptation starring LeVar Burton of a Richard Wright story; The Killing Floor, which won first prize at the National Black Film Consortium; and an adaptation (with Gus Edwards) of James Baldwin's novel Go Tell It On The Mountain, starring Paul Winfield and Rosalind Cash.
Lee taught playwriting at the College of Old Westbury on Long Island, New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, The New School's Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, and the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in Manhattan, where he and Sophia Romma taught playwriting and screenwriting workshops under the leadership of Ray Gaspard, Kermit Frazier, and Marc Henry Johnson.
Leslie Lee died on January 20, 2014, due to complications of heart failure. The Negro Ensemble Company and Signature Theatre Company held a memorial celebration of his life and work in March of 2014.
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Leslie Lee, Playwright Who Enlarged Black Life Onstage, Dies at 83
Leslie Lee, a playwright whose award-winning work, much of it with the Negro Ensemble Company, focused on stretching the boundaries of the African-American experience as it was portrayed on the stage, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 83.
The cause was congestive heart failure, Heather Massie, a friend, said.
Over four decades, Mr. Lee wrote more than two dozen stage works, scouring American history for his subjects and characters. In “Black Eagles,” he wrote about black fighter pilots in Italy in World War II. In “Ground People” (originally titled “The Rabbit Foot”), he wrote about Southern black sharecroppers and visiting minstrel-show performers in the 1920s.
In “Blues in a Broken Tongue,” the daughter of a family that had moved to Russia in the 1930s as an escape from racism discovers a pile of recordings by Billie Holiday, Paul Robeson and others and reconsiders her heritage. An early play, “The War Party,” was about the conflicts within a community civil rights organization in the 1960s.
In “The Book of Lambert,” written in the 1970s and set contemporaneously on an abandoned New York subway platform, a black intellectual has been reduced to despair by the loss of the white woman he loves. In “Colored People’s Time,” Mr. Lee presented a century of black history, from the Civil War to the dawn of the civil rights movement, in a pageantlike parade of vignettes.
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“One can be black and also many other things,” Mr. Lee said in a 1975 interview about his writerly concerns. “I want to expand the thinking of blacks about themselves.”
Most of Mr. Lee’s work was produced Off Broadway and on regional stages, though his best-known play, “The First Breeze of Summer” (1975), appeared on Broadway, at the Palace Theater, after moving from the St. Mark’s Playhouse, then the home of the Negro Ensemble Company, in the East Village. It was nominated for a Tony Award for best play. (Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” was the winner.)
“The First Breeze of Summer” tells the story of a middle-class black family in Pennsylvania whose ambitious and sensitive younger son is emotionally derailed when he learns the past secrets of the grandmother he reveres. Mr. Lee acknowledged that it was an autobiographical work. And at a time when black theater was often polemical, it was notable for its naturalistic drama and its probing of family dynamics and character.
That it had its debut in an earlier era, both theatrically and journalistically, was evident in Walter Kerr’s review in The New York Times.
“For all the explicitly black experience detailed in ‘The First Breeze of Summer,’ ” Mr. Kerr wrote near the conclusion of an unqualified rave that was redolent of surprise, “I have rarely seen a play at which someone who is not black can feel so completely at home.”
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Leslie Earl Lee was born on Nov. 6, 1930, in Bryn Mawr, Pa., and grew up nearby in West Conshohocken, one of nine children. His mother, the former Clementine Carter, was a homemaker; his father, John Henry Lee, like the patriarch in “First Breeze,” was a plastering contractor.
Mr. Lee studied English and biology at the University of Pennsylvania — he thought he would be a doctor — and worked as a hospital medical technician, as a bacteriologist for the state health department and as a researcher for Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company, before abandoning his scientific pursuits in the mid-1960s to study playwriting at Villanova University. (For a time, his roommate was David Rabe, who went on to his own award-winning playwriting career).
Mr. Lee taught writing at several colleges, including New York University, and wrote several television scripts, including an adaptation of Richard Wright’s short story “Almos’ a Man.” “The First Breeze of Summer” was broadcast as part of the “Great Performances” series on public television.
His other stage work includes two collaborations with the composer Charles Strouse and the lyricist Lee Adams, creators of “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Applause” and other shows. Together they updated another Strouse-Adams show, “Golden Boy,” the 1964 musical based on Clifford Odets’s boxing drama; the newer version, with Mr. Lee’s book, was presented in 1989 at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Florida.
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The three men also worked on a musical about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that follows Dr. King from his teenage years in Atlanta to the Montgomery bus boycott of the 1950s. The show had its premiere Off Broadway at the Kraine Theater in 2011.
Mr. Lee won numerous Audelco Awards, given to black theater artists and productions. He was married once and divorced. He is survived by a brother, Elbert, and three sisters, Evelyn Lee Collins, Grace Lee Wall and Alma Lee Coston.
In 2008, “The First Breeze of Summer” was revived Off Broadway by the Signature Theater Company in a production that starred Leslie Uggams and was directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.
“He captured African-American life with all its frailties and all its power,” Mr. Santiago-Hudson said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “Most of all he bestowed integrity on people, even when they were ne’er-do-wells or people whose intentions weren’t the best for other folks. Leslie wasn’t only poetic; he was authentic.”
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