Stanley E. Williams, the founding artistic director of Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, died on Friday, July 2 following a battle with cancer, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle. He was 60.
Williams founded the theater with Quentin Easter, who died last April. Their productions were originally presented in a storefront in 1981 and by 1988, were being produced in the company’s own 300-seat theater in downtown San Francisco. Considered by many to be one of the country’s pre-eminent companies for African-Americans, the Hansberry Theatre, under Williams’ leadership was an early champion of August Wilson’s work and Williams often directed the plays that comprise Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle for the company.
Among the other productions Williams staged at the theater are its annual holidaytime offering, Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity, George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum, Maria Irene Fornes’ Sarita, Hansberry’s Les Blancs, and the first fully staged version of Ntozake Shange’s Boogie Woogie Landscapes, the 20th Anniversary production of her for colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow was enuf.
His other directing credits include Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (co-produced with the American Conservatory Theatre), Everybody’s Ruby by Thulani Davis and world premieres of Robert Alexander’s Erotic Justice, Jamal’s LBJ and Jared Choclatt’s musical Hit It!, among others.
