Tag Archives: Theatre

About the Documentary HARLEM THEATRE (1968)

HARLEM THEATRE (1968) is a ninety-minute documentary that was made for German television by filmmaker Klaus Wildenhahn. The movie, filmed just after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., follows Harlem’s New Lafayette Theatre members as they rehearse for their upcoming season and run politically radical workshops in the community.

Founded by actor-director Robert Macbeth, the New Lafayette Theatre was a significant institution within the Black Power Movement. Ed Bullins, the theatre’s playwright-in-residence was the Black Panther’s Minister of Culture. In addition to recording the theatre’s workshops, the movie contains street interviews with Harlem’s residents, and scenes from the Black Panther fundraising event held at Fillmore East for Eldridge Cleaver.

NLT

New Lafayette Theatre 1968, Company Members: J.E. Gaines, Beverly   , Bill Lathan, Yvette Hawkins, Roscoe Orman, George Miles, Helen Ellis, Roberta Raysor, Gary Bolling, Sam Wright, Estelle Evans, Bette Howard, Whitman Mayo, Peggy Kirkpatrick, Kris Keiser, Robert Macbeth, Ed Bullins

The movie is a powerful political and historical document that speaks to today’s concerns regarding justice for black people, police brutality, and the instrumentality of art to bring about change. Today’s renewed interest in the Black Panthers also makes the film timely. Until 2018 the film had never screened publicly outside of Central Europe. (16MM, B/W, English Language)

Here is a clip from HARLEM THEATRE in which Robert Macbeth discusses Black theatre as a subversive force.

This clip was transferred by film collector, Ira Gallen, from a print of the film that has since been lost/destroyed. The only known of surviving ninety minute, English language print of HARLEM THEATRE exists in an archive. If you would like to find out more about this film please email me.

[MAJOR UPDATE: In early 2018, on the movie’s 50th anniversary, Ira Gallen contacted me to say he had managed to locate the print within his storage unit. He generously agreed to finance the film’s digitization and it is now available for screenings].

Some of the Many Outstanding Moments From the Movie:

  • A young Ed Bullins reading for the first time to the NLT members the prologue to one of his most famous plays In the Wine Time. The theater would go on to perform the play that winter.
  • Black Panther leader Bobby Seale delivering a speech at a fundraiser held at Fillmore East.
  • Robert Macbeth’s “Method” workshops.
  • George Lee Miles, Gary Bolling and Helen Ellis rehearsing for their performance of Bullins’s play How Do You Do.
  • A humorous sequence in which Macbeth, Ellis, and Roscoe Orman appear on the Sonny Fox show and are interviewed by New York Times theater critic Stewart Klein.
  • Street interviews and scenes with people in Harlem (including Jackie Robinson, baseball player, civil rights activist, co-founder of Freedom Bank).
  • Scenes of street parties and people dancing to the Jazzmobile.
  • The theatre company led workshops held for the children in the community. Improvisation scenarios were often politically charged: Two twelve year old boys are asked to act out a scene in which they are political prisoners of the state who have been sentenced to death.

NEW LAFAYETTE THEATRE Project website!

Former New Lafayette Theatre Actor: Gary Bolling. 

Here are two snippets from an interview I conducted with former NLT actor Gary Bolling who appears in HARLEM THEATRE. In addition to his extensive theater work Gary has featured in several movies including the spectacular Losing Ground (1982, dir. Kathleen Collins) that previewed at the Lincoln Center this Spring (distributed by the wonderful Milestone Films). In the interview Gary spoke about his time at the NLT, and the rewards and dangers of acting with the Free Southern Theatre in the Sixties.

Interviewed last year, 2014.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Blog