Negro Ensemble a key launch pad

In reading “Master’s Class” [Feb. 10], I was deeply disappointed to read Madeline Puzo’s quote: “Fifty years ago there was a handful of visionary leaders ... who profoundly changed the American theater.”

It’s hard to imagine that sentence excluding New York’s legendary and visionary Negro Ensemble Company, which additionally changed the complexion of mainstream theater in America. Created in 1965 by Robert Hooks, Douglas Turner Ward and Gerald Krone from a grant from the Ford Foundation, the company — for four decades under its original leaders, and up to the present under fresh re-organization — created a canon of plays for artists of color that predated and paved the way for visionary writers such as August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks and others to gain mainstream access.

In addition to providing opportunities for playwrights, choreographers, directors and craftspeople in all areas, the NEC provided nuanced, rich roles that created a deep talent pool of seasoned black actors, giving them the opportunities to hone their craft and gain visibility. Denzel Washington, Moses Gunn, Phylicia Rashad, Rosalind Cash, Laurence Fishburne, David Alan Grier, Samuel L. Jackson ... the list is much too long for anything other than a book’s appendix.

Even now, the NEC, with its dual production and training arms, remains a template for start-up minority theater institutions.

LorrieGay Marlow

West Hollywood Coauthor with Robert Hooks of “More Than Myself: At the Crossroads of Arts, Culture, Politics and the Civil Rights Movement”