The A to Z of African American Theater by Anthony D. Hill & Douglas Q. Barnett

Author:Anthony D. Hill & Douglas Q. Barnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2009-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

HILL, ERROL GASTON (1921–2002). Born in Trinidad, West Indies, Hill was a playwright, author, editor, critic, director, and educator. He received his education at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London (1951), Yale University (B.A., summa cum laude, 1962; M.F.A. in playwriting, 1962; and D.F.A. in theater history, 1966). He was author-director of the Dimanche Gras carnival shows for the government of Trinidad and Tobago (1963–64). He performed as an actor in amateur and professional productions and produced and directed numerous pageants in the Caribbean, United States, Nigeria, England, and Wales. He was a tutor of drama and radio and a guest lecturer in creative writing, and he received teaching fellowships in theater history, dramatic literature, and playwriting. He was an associate professor of drama at Richmond College and City University of New York (1967–68), a guest lecturer/director at the Graduate Theatre Workshop at Leeds University in England (Fall 1978), and professor of drama at Dartmouth College from 1961 until his retirement in 1989. He was also a visiting professor at the University of California at San Diego (winter 1982) and the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor at the University of California at Berkeley (spring 1983).

Hill has edited numerous articles and books on theater. His publications include The Trinidad Carnival (1972), Theatre of Black Americans (1980), Shakespeare in Sable (1984), The Jamaican Stage: 1655–1900 (1992), and The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre (with Martin Banham and George Woodyard, 1994). He was also contributing editor to numerous Caribbean plays. His last book before his untimely death, A History of African American Theatre coauthored with James V. Hatch, is a seminal study of theater and drama.

He was also an accomplished playwright, whose plays includes Square Peg (1949) a domestic drama in one act is about a young man who runs away from home; The Ping Pong: A Backyard Comedy-Drama in One Act (1950), about a West Indian steel band; Dilemma (1953), a drama in one act about industrial pollution produced by the University of West Indies in 1966; Man Better Man: Trinidad Folk Musical (1954), a play in three acts in which a man uses Trinidadian folklore to win the love of the woman he wants to marry; Wey-Wey (1957), a comedy in one act concerning an illegal lottery that holds the hopes and dreams of the West Indian people and which University of West Indies produced (1957); and Strictly Matrimony (1959), a domestic comedy about a West Indian couple who is living together happily but faces difficulties after they are tricked into marriage.

Other plays are Away from Home (1979), a two-act comedy about a black man who, after relocating to a big city, loses his family because he finds he does not like intellectuals or whites; Heartshift (1982), a drama in two acts showing the incestuous relationship between a daughter and her father who wants to keep her home to exploit her sexually; The Courtship (1983), a romantic comedy in two acts about interracial love; Never Enough (1984), a dramedy

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