About The Panel
Longtime creative collaborators, Richard Lawson and Richard Wesley reminisce on the Black Arts Movement, Black Power Movement and the celebration of the 50th Anniversay of the Drama Desk award winning play Black Terror, set to premier on screen in Fall 2022. Actor, director and master teacher Richard Lawson and dramatist, writer and Associate Professor of Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch School of the Arts Richard Wesley, gather to talk shop and share their latest collaboration.
About The Film
Fifty years after Richard Wesley’s original production of Black Terror, Richard Lawson directs a bi-coastal cast of revolutionaries on a daunting mission to free their people. As the Black Comrades Keusi, M’Balia, Geronimo, and Ahmed fight on the edge of life and death, the divide between them intensifies and widens. This collaboration between Wesley, Lawson’s Waco Theater Center, and Newark Symphony Hall combines theater and film as it weaves together the pulse of liberation struggles both past and present. It calls upon audiences to ask: What does it truly mean to be for the people?
Actor, Director and Master Teacher / Richard Lawson has held a long and distinguished career as an actor, master teacher, public speaker, drug counselor and patented inventor. His works spans nearly 5 decades. Lawson’s first professional experience was in the national company of the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Charles Gordone, No Place to Be Somebody. His selected films include Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire, Coming Home with Jane Fonda and Jon Voight, Audrey Rose with Anthony Hopkins and Marsha Mason, Wag the Dog, starring Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, and For Colored Girls, directed by Tyler Perry. An acting and teaching protégé of one the finest and most respected acting teachers in the world, Milton Katselas, Lawson honed his skills and sharpened his abilities. Recognizing a hole in the teaching model, he created one of the most cutting-edge schools in existence – the Richard Lawson Studios. RLS uses motivational and modern computer technology to empower artists and professionals to achieve their dreams.
Dramatist / Richard Wesley, Associate Professor in Playwriting and Screenwriting. He was educated at Howard University in Washington, DC, graduating with a BFA in 1967. His plays include, The Black Terror, a Drama Desk winner, produced at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theatre, in 1971; The Mighty Gents, an Audelco Award winner, premiered on Broadway in 1978. The 1970s also saw Prof. Wesley embark on a motion picture career, penning screenplays for the motion pictures, Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Let’s Do It Again (Warner Bros., 1975), Native Son (1984) and Fast Forward (Columbia Pictures, 1985). Prof. Wesley’s teleplays include, Murder Without Motive (1991), Mandela And De Klerk (1997), and Bojangles (2000). He has also written episodes for the television series, Fallen Angels and 100 Centre Street. His play AUTUMN was awarded an AUDELCO Award for Outstanding Playwriting in 2017. The opera Five, for which Richard wrote the libretto, had its premiere at the Long Beach Opera Company in San Pedro, California this past June. Richard has also written three librettos for the Trilogy Opera Company of Newark, NJ: Papa Doc, composed by Dorothy Rudd Moore; Kenyatta, composed by Trent Johnson; Booker T. and W.E.B., composed by Julius Williams; and Scott, Garner and Gray composed by Dwayne Fulton. Prof. Wesley served as an Adjunct at the following institutions: Manhattanville College, Wesleyan University, Borough of Manhattan Community College and Rutgers University.
