Peterson, Louis Stamford, Jr.
(1922–1998)
A pioneer in the film industry, Louis Peterson
was a playwright, screenwriter, actor, and educa-
tor. Born June 17, 1922, in Hartford, Connecticut,
he was the son of Louis Peterson, Sr., and Ruth
Conover Peterson, bank employees who stressed
the importance of a college education. Although,
initially, Peterson planned to pursue a degree in
music, he graduated from Morehouse College with
a B.A. in English in 1944. While at Morehouse, he
participated in the Little Theatre and acted in sev-
eral plays. Peterson attended Yale University from
1944 to 1945; he received an M.A., degree in drama
from New York University in 1947.
As an actor, Peterson performed in Edwin
Bronner’s A Young American (1946), Theodore
Ward’s Our Lan’ (1947), and Justice (1947). For a
year, he studied acting with Stanford Meisner at
the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the The-
atre and the Actors Studio in New York City. While
pursuing playwriting, he worked closely with Clif-
ford Odets and Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio. He
wrote his debut play, Take a Giant Step, while tour-
ing as an actor and stage manager in a production
of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding
and acting with Lee Strasberg. In 1952 he married
Margaret Mary Feury; they had two sons before
the marriage dissolved in 1961.
Peterson’s career reached a turning point in
1953 when his first two-act semiautobiographi-
cal play, Take a Giant Step, a coming-of-age story,
opened on Broadway, earning him critical acclaim
in American theater for writing a pioneering work
that shattered the race barrier. Take a Giant Step did
so by focusing on the psychological problems of a
black youth reared in a predominantly white neigh-
borhood. Louis Gossett, Jr., then a high school se-
nior, made his stage debut as the sensitive Spencer
“Spence” Scott in the initial Broadway production.
According to DARWIN T. TURNER, “Afro-American
drama came of age professionally with Louis Pe-
terson’s Take a Giant Step” (12). However, although
it received favorable reviews, it ran for only eight
weeks and 76 performances at the Lyceum Theater
in New York. It was later revived off-Broadway in
1954, where it ran for 246 performances, starring
Bill Gunn as Spencer in a production by the New
York Theatre Company. Following the tremendous
success of Take a Giant Step, Peterson wrote scripts
for film and television. “Padlocks” on the CBS se-
ries Danger and Class of ’58, which was considered
a sequel to Take a Giant Step, with an all-white
cast, were produced in 1954. These were followed
by Joe y, starring Anthony Perkins and Kim Stanley
(1956), “The Emily Rossiter Story,” produced on
the series Wagon Train (1957), and “Hit and Run”
on the series Dr. Kildare (1961).
In addition, Peterson wrote film screenplays,
including an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The
Tempest (1957) with Alberto Lattuada, which
was produced in Italy. He adapted his own pro-
duction of Take a Giant Step (1960) with Julius J.
Epstein, starring Johnny Nash and featuring Ruby
Dee. Although he was the first African-American
screenwriter in Hollywood, Peterson, finding him-
self subjected to its instability, left Hollywood in
the 1960s. He continued to write, especially plays,
but seemed unable to meet the expectations of
East Coast theatergoers, who were always awaiting
another Take a Giant Step. Nevertheless, in April
1962, almost a decade after the debut of his first
play, Peterson’s Entertain a Ghost opened at the Ac-
tors Playhouse to poor reviews. His audience was
not prepared for the intricate plot, a style he con-
tinued in other plays over the next 20 years.
In 1972, Peterson joined the faculty at State
University of New York at Stony Brook, where he
taught in the department of theater arts. While
there, he wrote the screenplay The Confessions of
Nat Turner in the 1970s and Crazy Horse, another
semiautobiographical play, staged for a brief stint
at the Henry Street Settlement’s New Federal The-
atre in November 1979. His student production of
Another Show, concerning the suicide of an adoles-
cent young male, was produced at Stony Brook in
February 1983; it captured the attention of Broad-
way critics during its two-week world premiere.
Peterson was the recipient of the Benjamin
Brawley Award for Excellence in English at More-
house College (1944). Take a Giant Step was named
as one of the best plays of 1953–54 by the BurnsPeterson, Louis Stamford, Jr. 411