Vinnette Carroll was a United States playwright and actress, and the first African-American woman to direct on Broadway, with the 1972 musical Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope. She is best known for her significant contributions to black theater and her support of young minority artists.
Background
Vinnette Justine Carroll was born on March 11, 1922, in New York City, New York, United States. She was a daughter of Edgar Edgerton, a dentist, and Florence Carroll, a teacher. She and her family moved to Jamaica when she was three and she spent much of her childhood in Falmouth as well as in the West Indies. During the 1930s, after Carroll and her sister had rejoined their parents in New York City, the family moved to Sugar Hill, Harlem.
Education
Vinnette Carroll found an instant affinity for the arts, playing viola with the Dean Dixon Symphony when in Wadleigh High School in Harlem. Her father, however, had medical plans for her and her sister: he wanted his daughters to become Physicians so as a compromise, Caroll chose Psychology, because the sight of blood bothered her. After earning a bachelor's degree from Long Island University in 1944 and a master's degree in psychology from New York University in 1946, Carroll was a student in Columbia University's doctoral psychology program in 1948-1950, where she completed the required course work. At the same time, she was studying acting with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. This experience prompted Carroll's decision to change careers and she went full time into the performing arts. She studied acting with Erwin Piscator at the New School of Social Research and from 1954 to 1955 she studied with Stella Adler. Vinnette Carroll also studied acting with Margaret Barker and voice with Susan Steele.
Career
Following doctoral work at Columbia University, Vinnette Carroll worked as a clinical psychologist with the New York Bureau of Child Guidance in the early 1950s.
Carroll made her professional acting debut in 1948 at the Falmouth, Massachusetts, Playhouse in George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion. She was cast as Flatateeta in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, becoming the first black woman to play the role. When additional roles became scarce, Carroll developed a one-woman show and successfully toured throughout the United States and the West Indies.
Realizing there was a scarcity of decent roles for black actresses, Carroll turned to teach drama. From 1955 to 1966 she taught theater arts and directed productions at the High School of Performing Arts in New York. She also acted as a consultant for the New York State Council of the Arts and was a key person on the Council's Ghetto Arts Program, out of which the Urban Arts corps emerged.
In 1958 Carroll made an impressive London stage debut at the Royal Court in Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, a play by the Trinidadian actor Errol John. This was described by the critic Kenneth Tynan as a "hauntingly hot-climate tragicomedy about backyard life in Trinidad." Carroll was praised for her portrayal of the tough, warm-hearted Sophia who holds her family together against poverty and an alcoholic husband. Carroll recreated the role in a highly regarded off-Broadway production in 1962.
In 1960, she returned to the United Kingdom to co-star with Frances Cuka and Dennis Waterman in a Granada Television Play of the Week production of Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding. Two years later, she made another impressive appearance on the London stage at the Criterion, as the Narrator in Langston Hughes's gospel-song play Black Nativity. Carroll also directed this highly successful production, which featured Marion Williams and the Stars of Faith, one of America's outstanding gospel singing groups. Black Nativity was then produced for British television by Associated-Rediffusion and screened on Christmas Day in 1962. A telerecording was made and deposited in the National Film and Television Archive.
The following year, in London, Carroll recorded Beyond the Blues, an album of African-American poetry, with Cleo Laine, Brock Peters, and Gordon Heath, and also directed a revival of Black Nativity at the Vaudeville.
Trumpets of the Lord was Carroll's 1963 off-Broadway adaptation of James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones: seven negro sermons in verse (1927). Johnson's work celebrated the black preachers he recalled from his youth in the South and as a young man in New York City. What Johnson had succeeded in doing in 1927, Carroll and the show's stars Theresa Merritt, Cicely Tyson, and Al Freeman Jr. accomplished in 1963. The electric gospel singing again captured New York critics and gave the show a healthy initial run, as well as a Broadway revival in 1969.
During the 1960s, Carroll applied to the New York State Council on the Arts for the establishment of a theater where, she said, "a black actor could have a place to learn his art and not have to rely on just being black to get a job." For six months in 1967, Carroll was the associate director of the Inner City Repertory Company in Los Angeles. In 1967, she also founded the Urban Arts Corps (renamed the Urban Arts Theater in 1980); an organization supporting minority performers in all theatrical disciplines in New York City. Located on West 20th Street, the company staged a variety of dramas and musicals by black artists with minority casts.
As Urban Arts Corps' artistic director, Carroll propelled several musicals from its workshops to Broadway including Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope (1972). A spiritual, blues and gospel show, it earned her a Tony nomination for Best Director of a Musical, in an illustrious line-up that also included Bob Fosse (who won for Pippin), Gower Champion (Sugar) and Harold Prince (A Little Night Music).
Four years later, Carroll conceived and directed Your Arms Too Short to Box With God (1976), an adaptation of St Matthew's Gospel. While the last days of Christ were clearly central to the musical, Carroll later admitted that she saw Christ as a Martin Luther King: "a man who was saying things that people didn't want to hear", she said. The show harked back to gospel traditions within the black church and also, in a theatrical sense, to Langston Hughes's gospel musicals. After a year-long run in New York, the show toured 66 American cities, returning to Broadway in 1980.
In 1979 Carroll's production of When Hell Freezes Over I'll Skate was performed at the Lincoln Center, New York, and on national public television. She made only occasional film and television appearances. She played supporting roles in the films Two Potato (1964), Up the Down Staircase (1967), Alice's Restaurant (1969), The Reivers (1969) and Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), and in 1976 she made a guest appearance on American television in the popular comedy series All in the Family. In 1980, Carroll moved to Florida and five years later established the Vinnette Carroll Repertory Company in Fort Lauderdale.
In 1994 she directed her own version of "Eden" by Steve Carter.
Views
Through her theatrical company, Vinnette Carroll promoted the work of black playwrights and provided opportunities for aspiring black actors and directors.
In 1976, Carroll explained to The New York Times that the chief reason she did musicals was that "white producers won't pick up anything intellectual by us, no matter how good it is. They only want singing and dancing. It's where the quick money is."
Quotations:
"We still need black theatre. But I think we need to show black people just living, just trying to get through the world with the problems other people have."
Personality
Vinnette Carroll expressed herself through gospel music.
Physical Characteristics:
A tall woman with round cheeks and a high brow, Vinnette Carroll was not classified as beautiful in the traditional sense, but she impressed people with her expressive eyes and resonant voice.
Quotes from others about the person
Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson said: "She was a force of nature, and she loved being a mentor and generator of opportunities for others."