vering Lewis, 549–568. New York: Penguin Books,
1995.
Wilfred D. SamuelsWard, Douglas Turner (1930– )
An acclaimed dramatist, actor, and producer and
the cofounder and artistic director of the famed
Negro Ensemble Company, Douglas Turner Ward
is a major figure in American theater. Born on
May 5, 1930, to Roosevelt and Dorothy Short
Ward, in Burnside, Louisiana, a rural town near
New Orleans, Ward grew up on a plantation with
his parents and his mother’s three sisters. Later, he
was sent to New Orleans to live with a relative and
attended public school there; he developed a pas-
sion for reading and graduated from high school
at age 15. In 1946 he enrolled in Wilberforce Uni-
versity in Xenia, Ohio, and in fall 1947 he trans-
ferred to the University of Michigan, where he
briefly studied journalism before suffering a knee
injury on the junior varsity football squad. At the
end of the 1947–1948 academic year, he left col-
lege for New York City.
Before leaving college, Ward was actively in-
volved in left-wing political activism, which he
continued after arriving in New York, where he
wrote for the Daily Worker. His participation in
politics further advanced his interest in the the-
ater. At age 19 he became a playwright, though his
career was put on hold after his arrest and con-
viction on a draft evasion charge. Cleared of the
charge, he returned from Louisiana to New York
and began to train as an actor at Paul Mann’s
Actor’s Workshop. During the 1950s and 1960s,
Ward was featured in The Iceman Cometh (1956);
A Land beyond the River (1957); Lost in the Stars
(1957), and understudied Sidney Poitier in A Rai-
sin in the Sun, eventually playing the leading role;
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1963); Rich Little
Rich Girl, The Blacks (1964); Blood Knot (1963);
and Coriolanus (1965).
In 1965 Ward, along with actor-director Rob-
ert Hooks and off-Broadway producer Gerald S.
Krone, formed the Tony Award–winning Negro
Ensemble Company (NEC), a repertory group
that focuses on African-American themes. As ar-
tistic director, Ward both acted and directed for
the company, which was initially located at the
St. Marks Playhouse on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan. Also in 1965 Hooks produced Ward’s
two most controversial one-act plays, Happy
Ending and Day of Absence, which opened at St.
Marks Playhouse on November 15. Among the
first plays to approach theater from a modern
black perspective using humor, both comedies
examine black/white relations, showing a dif-
ferent perspective on the interdependence be-
tween the races. Audiences were not prepared for
Ward’s biting satire and extended jokes at their
expense. Receiving mixed reviews, the plays were
dismissed by critics. Despite this, the plays ran for
504 performances, and Ward won a Vernon Rice
Drama Desk Award and an Obie Award in 1966,
one for his performance as the mayor and one for
writing the plays.
After the success of these two plays and the
publication of his most influential essay, “Ameri-
can Theatre: For Whites Only?,” Ward published
several other plays. The Reckoning (1969), a play
about black rap, features a battle of words be-
tween two smooth-talking antagonists. Ward
both wrote and acted in this play, which was pre-
sented by Hooks Productions in cooperation with
the Negro Ensemble Company on September 4.
Ward’s Brotherhood, a one-act fantasy that exam-
ines the social relations between suburban whites
and blacks, debuted on March 17, 1970—pre-
sented by the Negro Ensemble Company. Ward’s
The Redeemer (1979) uses six stereotypical char-
acters—an old Christian woman, a rabbi, a black
woman, a young white feminist, a black mili-
tant, and a white revolutionary—to explore each
character’s attitudes and clashes between them at
the specific juncture when they hear that the Re-
deemer is going to appear.
Since the 1970s, Ward, who has remained com-
mitted to black dramatic literature, has supported
many black writers and staged a number of the
best black plays, including LONNE ELDER’s Ceremo-
nies in Dark Old Men (1969), Joseph Walker’s The
River Niger (1973), Leslie Lee’s The First Breeze of
Summer (1975), Charles Fuller’s The BrownsvilleWard, Douglas Turner 531