Lonnie Carter
Affiliated Writer
Falls Village, CT
Garden Cultivator, sonneteer, basketball devotee (aka jazzballet), reader of all RobertoBolanyo,RichardPrice,MarlonJames,PaulBeatty,JudithRock,MauriceBerger
Biography

Lonnie Carter’s play The Romance of Magno Rubio received eight (8) Obies for its production by the Ma-Yi Theatre Company in 2003. His plays have been produced by The Yale Repertory Theater, the American Place Theater, Victory Gardens Theater, the Long Wharf Theater, and at the first Asian-American Theater Festival in New York City (2007), the Los Angeles Theater Center’s Latino Theater Festival (also 2007), and festivals abroad (the Philippines and Romania). His plays include China Calls, The Sovereign State of Boogedy Boogedy, The Gulliver Plays (Lemuel, Gulliver, and Gulliver Redux, published by Broadway Play Publishing), Baby Glo, Wheatley (the Colonial HippeHoppe story of Phillis Wheatley), Concerto Chicago, and most recently The Lost Boys of Sudan, produced by the Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis (Tony Winner for Best Regional Theatre 2003). The Lost Boys (and Girl) of Sudan was produced by Victory Gardens in 2010. He is a charter member of the Victory Gardens Playwrights’ Ensemble. (Victory Gardens was the Tony Winner for Best Regional Theatre 2001). He is an Alumnus of New Dramatists in New York and the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. He is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and Marquette University, a Guggenheim Fellow and twice a Fellow of the National Endowment of the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. He is an Associate Teacher at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in the Dramatic Writing Program.

Agent Information

Clyde Kuemmerle

Nexus, Inc

440 Riverside Dr.

NY, Ny 10016

Plays

by Lonnie Carter

1937.  Milwaukee.  Lil Hardin Armstrong (Louis' second wife), pianist, singer, tapper, composer of 'Struttin' with Some Barbecue', 'Doin the Suzy Q', plays in the Bronzeville nightspots, and  comes up against the St Benedict the Moor Church and School (alumni include red Foxx, Lionel Hampton and Harold Washington, the first Black may of Chicago).  The struggle is for the artistic soul of one Calpurnia Ann Hampton, 11 year old tapper and trombone player.  Does she stay at St Bennie's and sing in the choir led by Sister Ignatius Loyola, a devotee of Buxtehude, or go to Chicago and live with Lil and hang on the South Side?

All Lil's music included.

O, yes, the 400 year old ghost of St. Benedict the Moor (the Andre De Shields role, which he read at New Dramatists in May 2014).

 

Cast:
by Lonnie Carter

Carl Van Vechten, Langston Hughes.  1926.  Harlem's The White Veal, a Black, Tan and Alabaster Gay Men's Club.  Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff's West Side Manhattan apartment, the site of a rollicking jazz party, starring Bessie Smith.  Ensuing ruckus.

Cast:
Van Vechten, Hughes, Smith, Marinoff, Countee Cullen,, et alia.

Successes

Received along with Hartbeat Ensemble a grant to do a play about Gwendolyn Reed, who played Aunt Jemima in the Hartford are aofr 18 years.  Sponsored by the PWC and the NET (National Ensemble of Theaters).  Title THE BOOK OF GWEN.

I am also writing a regular column for The Lakeville Journal called Sovereign State.  You maky look it up on line.

Lonnie Carter’s play The Romance of Magno Rubio received eight Obies for its production by the Ma-Yi Theatre Company in 2003 and is now streaming HERE.