Steve Carter (playwright)

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Steve Carter
BornHorace Edward Carter Jr.
(1929-11-07)November 7, 1929
Manhattan, New York City, US
DiedSeptember 15, 2020(2020-09-15) (aged 90)
Tomball, Texas, US
OccupationPlaywright, screenwriter
NationalityAmerican
Period1965–2020
Notable awardsLos Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award (1980)

Horace Edward "Steve" Carter Jr. (November 7, 1929 – September 15, 2020) was an American playwright, best known for his plays involving Caribbean immigrants living in the United States.

Biography

Born Horace Edward Carter Jr.

longshoreman from Richmond, Virginia, and Carmen, who was from Trinidad,[2][3][4]
he is professionally known as steve carter (spelled in all lowercase letters).

Carter's first interest in the theatre was to be a set designer. As a youngster, he would make models of sets inspired by motion pictures and the occasional play he would see with his mother. Soon he would populate these models with cutout figures. This led to him creating dialog for the figures as he moved them around the set.[3]

In 1948, he graduated from the

High School of Music and Art in New York City.[4]

His professional career as a playwright began in 1965 at the American Community Theater with the production of the short play Terraced Apartment. This work would evolve years later into an expanded version entitled Terraces.[3]

On November 13, 1967, One Last Look premiered off-off-Broadway at the Old Reliable Theatre Tavern under the direction of Arthur French. It is a dark comedy set during the funeral of a family patriarch.[5] It features the character of Eustace Baylor that would later be found in Eden, the first of Carter's trilogy of plays featuring Caribbean families in New York City.

In 1968, he joined the staff of the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), where he would become director of the NEC Playwrights Workshop. One of his best known students was Samm-Art Williams, who once said "that no single individual has influenced my writing to the degree that Steve Carter has."[6]

While Carter was at NEC, several of his plays were produced, including the first two of his Caribbean trilogy.

The Caribbean trilogy

All three plays in the series deal with Caribbean immigrant families living in New York City at various periods during the 20th century. While each family is different, each play features a patriarch that has become incapacitated in one way or another. The plays in the trilogy are as follows:

Eden

Set in the

Outer Critics Circle as the season's most promising new playwright.[3] In 1986, his feature film adaptation, A Time Called Eden, was set to go into production, but has yet to be produced.[7]

Nevis Mountain Dew

Queens section of New York City in the 1950s.[8] Like Whose Life Is It Anyway?, it deals with euthanasia. Both were among the ten productions selected by the Burns Mantle Yearbook as "The Best Plays of 1978–1979."[9]

Dame Lorraine

In 1981, Carter left NEC to become the first playwright-in-residence at the

Harlem that anxiously await the return of their last surviving son who has just been released from prison.[7][10][11][12]

Later works

Other plays produced at the Victory Gardens Theater include House of Shadows, Pecong and the musical, Shoot Me While I'm Happy.[7][11][12] Spiele '36: Or the Fourth Medal had its world premiere at Theater of the First Amendment at George Mason University in 1991.

Carter later lived in

Houston, Texas, and died aged 90 on September 15, 2020, in Tomball, Texas.[13][14]

Awards and nominations

Carter has also received recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts.[4]

References

  1. ^ Catalog of Copyright Entries: Third series, Library of Congress. Copyright Office, 1976, p. 137.
  2. ^ "Fifteenth Census of the United States (1930) [database on-line] , New York (Manhattan Burrough) (Ward 7), New York County, New York, Enumeration District: 31-383, Page: 19A, Line: 48-50, household of Horace Carter". The Generations Network. 1930-04-30. Retrieved September 24, 2009.
  3. ^
    ISBN 0-396-07723-4
    .
  4. ^
    ISBN 0-313-25190-8
    .
  5. ISBN 0-88145-043-X
    .
  6. ^ Carter (1986). Plays by Steve Carter. p. iv.
  7. ^ a b c Carter (1986). Plays by Steve Carter. p. v.
  8. ISBN 978-0-8222-0812-9
    .
  9. ^ a b Guernsey (1979). The Best Plays of 1978–1979. pp. 269–280, 299–314.
  10. Chicago, Illinois: Victory Gardens Theater. Archived from the original
    on December 1, 2008. Retrieved September 24, 2009.
  11. ^ a b Carter (1986). Plays by Steve Carter. pp. 49–80.
  12. ^
    ISBN 0-88145-107-X
    .
  13. ^ Nesmith, Nathaniel G. (September 17, 2020). "Steve Carter, Playwright in a Black Theater World, Dies at 90". The New York Times. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  14. ^ Nathaniel G. Nesmith, "The Life of a Playwright: An Interview with Steve Carter", NER, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2016).
  15. ^ "1980–1989 Awards". Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards. Archived from the original on February 10, 2009. Retrieved November 24, 2009.

External links

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