Making his way

Eugene O'Neill Theater Center

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The name Lloyd Richards won’t soon be forgotten in New Haven—or on Broadway in New York. Richards, who led the Yale School of Drama and the Yale Rep from 1979 to 1991, was honored in New York in June with the renaming of a street in the Theater District. At Yale, where he was the first Black dean of a professional school, Richards (1919–2006) brought playwright August Wilson to national prominence, directing five of his plays at the Rep before they went on to Broadway. (He won a Tony in 1987 for directing Wilson’s Fences.) But his association with Broadway went back much further: in 1959, he became the first African American to direct a Broadway play, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. The block of 47th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, where that play premiered, is now known as Lloyd Richards Way.