Ed Bullins, Woodie King Jr., and Theater as Protest

Ed Bullins, Woodie King Jr., and Theater as Protest

The story of Harlem's theater becomes even more interesting when we come to Ed Bullins and Woodie King Jr.

By the late 1960s, a new generation of Black theater artists was asking a different question:

What if theater did not have to remain inside a theater?

That question was especially important in Harlem.

The New Lafayette Theatre, where Bullins became one of the important resident playwrights, was part of the Black Arts movement. Its artists were interested not simply in presenting plays to an audience, but in creating theater that reflected the realities of Black communities.

Ed Bullins brought a distinctly political and often confrontational voice to this work.

His plays dealt with racism, poverty, violence, identity, family, sexuality and the political tensions of Black life in America. Rather than presenting Black characters through the conventions of mainstream American theater, Bullins wanted to put Black experience at the center of the stage.

But the theater itself was also becoming a place of political debate.

Theater and the Harlem community

This is where the story of Harlem's streets becomes important.

The theater existed within a neighborhood.

People walked past the theater every day. They lived nearby. They worshipped nearby. They worked nearby. They organized nearby.

The boundary between theater and community could therefore become very thin.

This was especially true during a period when Harlem was experiencing intense political and social change.

The late 1960s brought struggles over housing, education, economic inequality, police-community relations and the redevelopment of Harlem.

The question was not simply:

What should be performed on a stage?

It was also:

Who controls the neighborhood?

Woodie King Jr.

Woodie King Jr. became another important figure in this developing Black theater movement.

King was a producer, director and theater organizer who understood that Black theater needed institutions of its own.

He had already been involved with the New Federal Theatre, founded in 1970, which became an important home for Black, Latino and other underrepresented playwrights and performers.

King's work was part of a broader effort to create opportunities for artists who were frequently excluded from mainstream American theater.

This is important because Black theater was not simply a matter of putting Black actors on existing stages.

It involved creating new institutions, new audiences and new possibilities for Black playwrights.

Theater as a form of protest

This brings me back to the phrase I was trying to understand: "theater on the corner."

The phrase captures something important about the period even when we have to be careful about attaching it to one particular production or artist without checking the original documentation.

The idea was that theater could leave the conventional stage.

A street corner could become a performance space.

A vacant lot could become a stage.

A community meeting could contain theatrical elements.

A demonstration could incorporate performance.

And ordinary people could become part of the audience.

This approach challenged the traditional idea that theater belonged primarily in a formal building with a ticket booth, a curtain and rows of seats.

For artists working in the Black Arts movement, the community itself could be the theater.

The State Office Building and 125th Street

This is also where 125th Street re-enters the story.

Ed Bullins wrote State Office Building Curse, a play whose title refers to the New York State Office Building at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue.

That location is significant because the State Office Building was an imposing symbol of government in the middle of Harlem.

The building represented one kind of institutional power.

Black artists and community activists were asking who had power over Harlem's future.

The theater could therefore become a way of questioning the institutions surrounding the community.

From the stage to the street

This is what I find most interesting about this period.

There was no sharp dividing line between:

theater

politics

community organizing

music

literature

street life

and

protest.

They overlapped.

The Black Arts movement was part of a larger cultural transformation in which artists were asking whether art should simply represent society or whether it could participate directly in changing how people understood themselves and their communities.

Ed Bullins' writing belonged to that conversation.

Woodie King Jr.'s institution-building belonged to that conversation.

The New Lafayette Theatre belonged to that conversation.

And Harlem's streets were part of the conversation too.

The neighborhood was the stage

This brings me back to what I was discovering about 138th Street.

At first, I thought I was simply trying to locate a theater.

Then I discovered the Lafayette Theatre.

Then I discovered Strivers' Row.

Then Dorrance Brooks Square.

Then the churches, musicians, political organizations and historic buildings.

The map kept expanding.

And now I see something else.

The Harlem theater movement of this period cannot be understood only by looking at theater buildings.

You have to look at the neighborhood around them.

The people who lived there were not merely spectators.

They were the community that gave the theater its meaning.

Perhaps that is the most interesting thing about "theater on the corner."

The corner wasn't simply where the theater happened to be.

The corner was the community.

And for a generation of Black artists, the community itself could become the stage.

I would suggest that our next step be to document the specific protest involving Bullins and King—including the building, date, production, participants, and exactly where the phrase “theater on the corner” originated. That will let us distinguish the verified history from the broader Black Arts Movement context.

The story of Harlem's theater becomes even more interesting when we come to Ed Bullins and Woodie King Jr.

By the late 1960s, a new generation of Black theater artists was asking a different question:

What if theater did not have to remain inside a theater?

That question was especially important in Harlem.

The New Lafayette Theatre, where Bullins became one of the important resident playwrights, was part of the Black Arts movement. Its artists were interested not simply in presenting plays to an audience, but in creating theater that reflected the realities of Black communities.

Ed Bullins brought a distinctly political and often confrontational voice to this work.

His plays dealt with racism, poverty, violence, identity, family, sexuality and the political tensions of Black life in America. Rather than presenting Black characters through the conventions of mainstream American theater, Bullins wanted to put Black experience at the center of the stage.

But the theater itself was also becoming a place of political debate.

Theater and the Harlem community

This is where the story of Harlem's streets becomes important.

The theater existed within a neighborhood.

People walked past the theater every day. They lived nearby. They worshipped nearby. They worked nearby. They organized nearby.

The boundary between theater and community could therefore become very thin.

This was especially true during a period when Harlem was experiencing intense political and social change.

The late 1960s brought struggles over housing, education, economic inequality, police-community relations and the redevelopment of Harlem.

The question was not simply:

What should be performed on a stage?

It was also:

Who controls the neighborhood?

Woodie King Jr.

Woodie King Jr. became another important figure in this developing Black theater movement.

King was a producer, director and theater organizer who understood that Black theater needed institutions of its own.

He had already been involved with the New Federal Theatre, founded in 1970, which became an important home for Black, Latino and other underrepresented playwrights and performers.

King's work was part of a broader effort to create opportunities for artists who were frequently excluded from mainstream American theater.

This is important because Black theater was not simply a matter of putting Black actors on existing stages.

It involved creating new institutions, new audiences and new possibilities for Black playwrights.

Theater as a form of protest

This brings me back to the phrase I was trying to understand: "theater on the corner."

The phrase captures something important about the period even when we have to be careful about attaching it to one particular production or artist without checking the original documentation.

The idea was that theater could leave the conventional stage.

A street corner could become a performance space.

A vacant lot could become a stage.

A community meeting could contain theatrical elements.

A demonstration could incorporate performance.

And ordinary people could become part of the audience.

This approach challenged the traditional idea that theater belonged primarily in a formal building with a ticket booth, a curtain and rows of seats.

For artists working in the Black Arts movement, the community itself could be the theater.

The State Office Building and 125th Street

This is also where 125th Street re-enters the story.

Ed Bullins wrote State Office Building Curse, a play whose title refers to the New York State Office Building at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue.

That location is significant because the State Office Building was an imposing symbol of government in the middle of Harlem.

The building represented one kind of institutional power.

Black artists and community activists were asking who had power over Harlem's future.

The theater could therefore become a way of questioning the institutions surrounding the community.

From the stage to the street

This is what I find most interesting about this period.

There was no sharp dividing line between:

theater

politics

community organizing

music

literature

street life

and

protest.

They overlapped.

The Black Arts movement was part of a larger cultural transformation in which artists were asking whether art should simply represent society or whether it could participate directly in changing how people understood themselves and their communities.

Ed Bullins' writing belonged to that conversation.

Woodie King Jr.'s institution-building belonged to that conversation.

The New Lafayette Theatre belonged to that conversation.

And Harlem's streets were part of the conversation too.

The neighborhood was the stage

This brings me back to what I was discovering about 138th Street.

At first, I thought I was simply trying to locate a theater.

Then I discovered the Lafayette Theatre.

Then I discovered Strivers' Row.

Then Dorrance Brooks Square.

Then the churches, musicians, political organizations and historic buildings.

The map kept expanding.

And now I see something else.

The Harlem theater movement of this period cannot be understood only by looking at theater buildings.

You have to look at the neighborhood around them.

The people who lived there were not merely spectators.

They were the community that gave the theater its meaning.

Perhaps that is the most interesting thing about "theater on the corner."

The corner wasn't simply where the theater happened to be.

The corner was the community.

And for a generation of Black artists, the community itself could become the stage.