Richard Westley
*On this date in 1945, Richard Wesley was born. He is a Black playwright and screenwriter. Richard Wesley was born in Newark, New Jersey, to George and Gertrude Wesley and grew up in the city's Ironbound section.
After finishing high school, he studied playwriting and dramatic literature at Howard University and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1967. He first became known for the 1971 New York Shakespeare Festival of his play Black Terror, which portrayed the story of a black revolution. Wesley received the 1971/1972 Drama Desk Award as the most promising playwright for Black Terror, which went on tour in Italy in 1972, performing it alongside five one-act plays by Ed Bullins.
In 1975, Wesley wrote and directed The Past Is the Past, a drama about a Black man who meets the father who abandoned him years prior. The play was revived, featuring John Amos and Ralph Carter, in 1989 at the Billie Holiday Theatre in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Wesley wrote the screenplays for the 1974 film Uptown Saturday Night, and the 1975 film Let's Do It Again, both starring Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier. His 1978 play, The Mighty Gents, is the story of the members of a gang that had conquered their rival gang, the Zombies, and ruled the Central Ward of Newark. The play depicts the gang members in their 30s and left with only the recollections of their earlier success.
His 1989 play, The Talented Tenth, portrays six fictional graduates of Howard University (a realtor, an advertising agent, a middle manager at a Fortune 500 firm, and a Republican) who have succeeded but feel guilty about betraying their origins. The play received six awards, including dramatic production of the year and best playwright, at the 1989 AUDELCO Recognition Awards. These awards were established in 1973 by the Audience Development Committee to honor excellence in African American theatre in New York.
In 2013, Wesley wrote the libretto for the opera Papa Doc, composed by Dorothy Rudd Moore and based on an essay by Edwidge Danticat from her 2010 book Create Dangerously. In April 2015, Autumn, Wesley's first full-length play in over two decades, premiered at The Crossroads Theater. On November 12, 2016, Five, an opera from Trilogy: An Opera Company about the 1989 Central Park Five jogger case in New York City, composed by Anthony Davis with a libretto by Wesley, premiered at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. He is an associate professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing. He is married to author Valerie Wilson Wesley. As of 2000, he was a resident of Montclair, New Jersey.
