Native Son by Richard Wright and Paul Green

Click here to listen to the symposium

On Sunday evening, April 5, TACT Artistic Director Jack Marshall moderated a live “telesymposium” by toll-free conference call to a lively examination of the history, significance and controversy surrounding Native Son, the 1941 stage adaptation of Richard Wright’s classic novel that sparked a debate about civil rights, social policy and racism that still burns hotly today.

The telesymposium was made possible by a generous grant from the Arlington County Cultural Affairs Division of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Services, in conjunction with the TACT’s current production of Native Son, which runs from April 14 – May 9 in Gunston Theatre Two in Arlington.

Joining Jack on the telesymposium were the following distinguished panelists:

• Hazel Rowley, author of the biography Richard Wright: The Life and Times, published by Henry Holt in August 2001, which went into its second printing this month. She authored Tête-à-Tête: The Tumultuous Lives & Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, published by Harper Collins, New York, in 2005, and currently writing a book called Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: An Extraordinary Marriage, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ms. Rowley is a passionate speaker on many topics. Her article for The Mississippi Quarterly, Backstage and Onstage, the Drama of Native Son, is a fascinating, in-depth analysis of the creation of the play.
  
  
• Professor Lawrence Avery, Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, the backyard of playwright, poet, social activist and Native Son coauthor Paul Green. His current research focuses on the development of African American drama in the context of American culture, a pursuit that naturally followed his extensive research on the life and career of Green. That research culminated in A Southern Life: the Letters of Paul Green, 1916-1981, a landmark work on the North Carolinian. Professor Avery is well-versed in theater history and playwrights, having also published several studies of the playwright Maxwell Anderson and an edition of his letters: Dramatist in American: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912-1958.
  
  
• Professor Arnold Rampersad, noted biographer and literary critic, Professor of English and the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford. His Life Of Langston Hughes was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Prof. Rampersad’s teaching covers such areas as nineteenth- and twentieth-century American Literature; the literature of the American South; race and American literature; and the Harlem Renaissance. In 2007, he published a biography of Ralph Ellison, and was the editor of the Library of America’s two volume collection of works by Richard Wright, including the revised individual editions of Native Son. He also co-authored Slavery and the Literary Imagination, and was the co-editor of Race and American Culture, published by Oxford University Press.
  
  
• Bob Bartlett, director, playwright, and director of the American Century Theater’s production of Native Son. He is a member of the Theatre Department of Bowie State University.

In addition, cast members Ja-Ben A. Early (Bigger Thomas) and Bud Stringer (Edward Max) performed a scene from TACT’s production.

Click here to listen to the symposium