Programming Highlights

This Saturday at 8:30 pm INSIDE NEW YORK celebrates Black History Month with Richard Wesley

February 26, 2016
MNN Manhattan Public Access

8:30PM Sat. INSIDE NEW YORK celebrates Black History Month with Richard Wesley, on the occasion of the publication of the Richard Wesley Play Anthology which had a standing-room only book-signing.  The award-winning playwright and screenwriter for film and television and educator, hits include "Uptown Saturday Night" and "Let's Do It Again" which starred Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby and "The Mighty Gents" which went to Broadway.  His long-awaited anthology is a collection of five full length plays written across four decades.   

 
Wesley joined INSIDE NEW YORK host Joan Allen in the studio to discuss his career in theater and one of his greatest influences, Amiri Baraka.  Although Mr. Wesley had initially enrolled at Howard University to study writing for television, when he arrived he learned that the department had not been fully developed.  The theater department chair, Owen Dodson, persuaded him to study theater instead.  
 
Wesley's Anthology of plays outline a cultural history of Black America in the post-Civil Rights era, from the late twentieth century through the first decades of the twenty-first. "The Black Terror" looks at the radical politics of the Black Power era; "The Sirens," the destabilization of black familial and social life in the early 1970s; "The Mighty Gents," the self- destructiveness of "black macho" in the late 1970s; "The Talented Tenth," the midlife crises and the end of idealism among some members of the rising black middle class in the early 1980s; and his newest drama, "AUTUMN," a look at a new generational paradigm in Black urban politics in these dawning days of the twenty-first century. The anthology also includes an introduction that reflects a personal memory of the emergence, growth and evolution of black consciousness and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and early 70s; a chronicle of one playwrights' artistic evolution as a writer who was both a witness and literary foot soldier during those turbulent times. 
 
Mr. Wesley is a past winner of The Drama Desk Award, four AUDELCO AWARDS, two NAACP Image Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Organization of Black Screenwriters, the August Wilson Award for Playwriting from the National Black Theater Festival, and the Otto Award for Political Theater Writing. He is currently an Associate Professor in The Goldberg Department of Dramatic at New York University.
 
You can view on "INSIDE NEW YORK" Richard Wesley's Tribute to Amiri Baraka by clicking on the link https://youtu.be/9VY08ijEcR0 via @YouTube.  "INSIDE NEW YORK" is broadcast every Saturday at 8:30 pm  on MNN2 (TWC 56, RCN 83, FiOS 34) on MNN.org and Livestream. Get program updates, win tickets and promotional offers via Joan Allen on  Facebook  and Twitter ( @ARTSINEWYORK ).