Ed Bullins
Born(1935-07-02)July 2, 1935
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
DiedNovember 13, 2021(2021-11-13) (aged 86)
Roxbury, Massachusetts, US
OccupationPlaywright
Literary movementBlack Arts Movement
Notable awardsGuggenheim Fellowship, Obie Award

Edward Artie Bullins (July 2, 1935 – November 13, 2021), sometimes publishing as Kingsley Bass Jr,[1] was an American playwright. He was also the minister of culture for the Black Panthers.[2] He won numerous awards, including the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and several Obie Awards. He was among the best known playwrights of the Black Arts Movement.[3]

Early life and education

Edward Artie Bullins was born on July 2, 1935, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,[4] to Bertha Marie (Queen) and Edward Bullins.[1] He was raised primarily by his mother.[4] As a child, he attended a predominantly white elementary school and became involved with a gang.[5] He attended Franklin High School, where he was stabbed in a gang-related incident.[5] Shortly thereafter, he dropped out of high school and joined the navy.[6] During this period, he won a boxing championship, returned to Philadelphia, and enrolled in night school. He stayed in Philadelphia until moving to Los Angeles in 1958.[7][8] He married poet and activist Pat Parker in 1962.[9][10] Parker and Bullins separated after four years.[11] After completing his G.E.D., Bullins enrolled in Los Angeles City College and began writing short stories for the Citadel, a magazine he started. In 1964, he moved to San Francisco and joined the creative writing program at San Francisco State College, where he started writing plays. Bullins' first play was How Do You Do (1968),[12] followed by Clara's Ole Man (1969) and Dialect Determinism (1973).[13]

Black House and Black Panthers

After seeing Amiri Baraka's play Dutchman, Bullins felt that Baraka's artistic purpose was similar to his own.[14][15] He joined Baraka at Black House, the Black Arts Movement's cultural center, along with Sonia Sanchez, Huey Newton, Marvin X, and others. The Black Panthers used Black House as their base in San Francisco, where Bullins was their minister of culture.[16] Black House eventually split into two opposing factions: one group considered art to be a weapon and advocated joining with whites to achieve political ends, while the other group considered art to be a form of cultural nationalism.[17] Bullins was part of the latter group.[17]

New Lafayette Players

Robert Macbeth, the director who took the trilogy to The American Place Theatre, read Bullins' plays and asked him to join the New Lafayette Players, a theatrical group.[18] The first production the New Lafayette Players performed was a trilogy called The Electronic Nigger and Others. The trilogy earned Bullins a Drama Desk Award for 1968. The trilogy's title was later changed to Ed Bullins Plays for what Bullins called "financial reasons".[19] Bullins worked with the Lafayette Players until 1972, when the group ended due to lack of funding. During these years, ten of Bullins' plays were produced by the Players, including In the Wine Time and Goin' a Buffalo.

1970s and later

After Bullins left the New Lafayette Players, he and his family remained in the Bronx.

Several of his plays were produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the early 1970s. Street Sounds was produced at La MaMa in October 1970[20] and again in February 1971, then toured to Middletown, Connecticut, for a performance at Middletown High School sponsored by Wesleyan University on February 9, 1971.[21] The next Bullins production at La MaMa was a set of four one-acts, called Short Bullins, in February/March 1972. The four works were How Do You Do?, A Minor Scene, Dialect Determinism, and It Has No Choice, and the production featured music by Aaron Bell.[22] These four one-acts, along with another Bullins work called Clara's Ole Man, toured to Italy alongside Richard Wesley's Black Terror in fall 1972, with performances in Venice and Milan.[23] Bullins later performed in Wallace Shawn's The Hotel Play at La MaMa in 1981.[24] Clara's Ole [Old] Man was produced again at La MaMa in 1981.[25]

In 1973, he was playwright-in-residence at the American Place Theatre. From 1975 to 1983, he was on staff at the Public Theater with the New York Shakespeare Festival's Writers' Unit. During these years, Bullins wrote two children's plays, titled I am Lucy Terry and The Mystery of Phillis Wheatley. He also wrote the text for two musicals, titled Sepia Star and Storyville.[2]

Bullins later returned to school, and received a bachelor's degree in English and playwriting from Antioch University in San Francisco.[5] In 1995, he became a professor at Northeastern University.[1]

Bullins died on November 13, 2021, in Roxbury, Massachusetts.[4]

Other work

In addition to Bullins' playwriting, he wrote short stories and novels, including The Hungered One and The Reluctant Rapist. The Reluctant Rapist features Bullins' alter ego, Steve Benson, who appears in many of Bullins' works.[14]

Awards

Bullins has received numerous awards for his playwriting.[26] He has twice received the Black Arts Alliance Award, for The Fabulous Miss Marie and In the New England Winter. In 1971, Bullins won the Guggenheim Fellowship for playwriting.[27] He received an Obie Award for distinguished playwriting for The Taking of Miss Janie in 1975, which also received a New York Drama Critics Circle Award.[28] Also in 1975, he won the Drama Desk Vernon Rice Award, four Rockefeller Foundation playwriting grants, and two National Endowment for the Arts playwriting grants. In 2012, Bullins received the Theatre Communications Group Visionary Leadership Award.

Selected works

Anthologies

Individual plays

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa Matthews, Tracy, ed. (2005). "Bullins, Ed 1935–". Contemporary Authors. new revision series. Vol. 134. Gale. pp. 62–67. ISBN 978-1-4144-0536-0. ISSN 0275-7176. OCLC 507351920.
  2. ^ a b "Bullins, Ed (1935- ) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed". The Black Past. October 20, 2007. Retrieved March 2, 2011.
  3. ^ "Ed Bullins, University of Michigan Press". Press.UMich.edu. Retrieved March 2, 2011.
  4. ^ a b c Risen, Clay (November 17, 2021). "Ed Bullins, Leading Playwright of the Black Arts Movement, Dies at 86". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved November 17, 2021.
  5. ^ a b c Manheim, James M. (2000). "Ed Bullins 1935–". In Oblender, David G. (ed.). Contemporary Black Biography. Vol. 25. Gale. pp. 34–36. ISBN 978-1-4144-3553-4. ISSN 1058-1316. OCLC 527366290.
  6. ^ Hedgepeth, Chester (1991). "Bullins, Ed". Twentieth-Century African-American Writers and Artists. American Library Association. pp. 40–41. ISBN 0-8389-0534-X. OCLC 21231734.
  7. ^ Hay 1997, p. 22.
  8. ^ Grant, Nathan L. (2001). "Bullins, Ed". In Andrews, William L.; Foster, Frances Smith; Harris, Trudier (eds.). The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Oxford University Press. pp. 57–59. ISBN 978-0-19-803175-8. OCLC 49346948.
  9. ^ De Veaux, Alexis. Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, ISBN 0-393-01954-3, pp. 166–167.
  10. ^ Alexander, Ilene 1998.
  11. ^ Garber, Linda (October 17, 2001). Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory. Columbia University Press. p. 71. ISBN 978-0-231-50672-4.
  12. ^ Hay 1997, p. 23.
  13. ^ Hay 1997, p. 24.
  14. ^ a b Sanders, Leslie. "Ed Bullins (1935- )." Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatist and Prose Writers, volume 38. Edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris. Detroit: Gale, 1985. 43-61.
  15. ^ Woll, Allen L. (1983). Dictionary of the Black Theatre: Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Selected Harlem Theatre. Greenwood Press. pp. 191–192. ISBN 0-313-22561-3. OCLC 9080974.
  16. ^ Thomson, Peter; Salgādo, Gāmini (1985). The Everyman Companion to the Theatre. J.M. Dent. p. 164. ISBN 0-460-04424-9. OCLC 14132895.
  17. ^ a b Ferguson 2013, p. 197.
  18. ^ Sanders 1989, p. 177.
  19. ^ a b Bailey, Peter (September 1968). "The Electronic Nigger: Controversy Over Play's Title Fails to Cloud Author's Acclaim". Ebony. 23 (11). Johnson Publishing: 97. ISSN 0012-9011.
  20. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Street Sounds (1970)". Accessed May 2, 2018.
  21. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Street Sounds (1971)". Accessed May 2, 2018.
  22. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Short Bullins (1972)". Accessed May 2, 2018. Archived July 7, 2018, at the Wayback Machine
  23. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Five One-Acts by Ed Bullins and Black Terror in Italy (1972)". Accessed May 2, 2018.
  24. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Hotel Play, The (1981)". Accessed May 2, 2018.
  25. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Clara's Ole Man (1981)". Accessed May 2, 2018.
  26. ^ http://www.bridgesweb.com/blacktheatre/bullins.html Archived 2009-04-16 at the Wayback Machine [1]
  27. ^ "Ed Bullins". Guggenheim Fellowship. Retrieved November 17, 2021.((cite web)): CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  28. ^ "New York Obies". VillageVoice.com. Retrieved March 2, 2011.
  29. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Arata, Esther Spring; Rotoli, Nicholas John (1976). Black American Playwrights, 1800 to the Present: A Bibliography. Scarecrow Press. pp. 34–42. ISBN 0-8108-0912-5. OCLC 2020626.
  30. ^ Hay 1997, p. 133.
  31. ^ Hay 1997, p. 15.
  32. ^ Hay 1997, p. 121.
  33. ^ Hay 1997, p. 181.
  34. ^ Hay 1997, p. 149.
  35. ^ Gates, Anita (June 3, 1997). "A Family Ever on the Verge of Emotion". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved November 17, 2021.
  36. ^ Bourne, Kay (August 17, 2000). "Dance brings to life Nubian coronation". Bay State Banner. p. 15. ProQuest 367585627.

Sources

Further reading

External links

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