Douglas Turner Ward, pioneer in Black theater, dies
Douglas Turner Ward, an actor, playwright and director who co-founded the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company, a New York theater group that supported Black writers and actors at a time when there were few opportunities for them, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.
The death was confirmed by his wife, Diana Ward.
Ward was establishing his own career as an actor in 1966 when he wrote an opinion article in The New York Times with the headline “American Theater: For Whites Only?”
“If any hope, outside of chance individual fortune, exists for Negro playwrights as a group — or, for that matter, Negro actors and other theater craftsman — the most immediate, pressing, practical, absolutely minimally essential active first step is the development of a permanent Negro repertory company of at least off-Broadway size and dimension,” he wrote. “Not in the future … but now!”
The article got the attention of W. McNeil Lowry, Ford Foundation’s vice president of humanities and the arts, who arranged a $434,000 grant to create precisely the kind of company that Ward was proposing. Thus the Negro Ensemble Company was born, in 1967, with Ward as artistic director, Robert Hooks as executive director and Gerald S. Krone as administrative director.
The company went on to produce critically acclaimed productions, among them Joseph A. Walker’s “The River Niger” (1972), which won the Tony Award for best play in 1974 and was adapted for film in 1976. Ward not only directed the play but also acted in it, earning a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a play.
Other notable productions by the company included Samm-Art Williams’ “Home” (1979) and Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “A Soldier’s Play” (1981), about a Black officer investigating the murder of a Black sergeant at a Louisiana Army base during World War II, when the armed forces were segregated. The cast included Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. (It, too, was adapted for film, as “A Soldier’s Story,” in 1984.)
Frank Rich of The Times called the production, directed by Ward, “superlative.” (In January 2020, the play was revived on Broadway, starring Blair Underwood, before being forced to close because of the pandemic.)
The Negro Ensemble Company became — and continues to be — a training ground for Black actors, playwrights, directors, designers and technicians. Many of the troupe’s actors over the years went on to become stars, among them, in addition to Washington and Jackson, Angela Bassett, Louis Gossett Jr. and Phylicia Rashad.
The company, and Ford’s contribution, won immediate praise after its founding. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said the grant represented “a magnificent step toward the creation of new and greater artists in the community,” and Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP at the time, said the foundation had “recognized the potential in the Negro theater” and the talent of “hundreds of actors and entertainers who have struggled individually.”
The company began racking up Obie, Tony and Drama Desk awards and recording firsts. In 1975, The Times critic John J. O’Connor acknowledged the historical significance of a “superb” television production of Lonne Elder III’s play “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” set in 1950s Harlem. “The event marks the debut of a major Black theater organization, the Negro Ensemble Company, on American network television,” he wrote.
The Negro Ensemble Company enabled Ward to solidify his own career as an actor and director.