Zariyah Perry and Sinclair Freeman star in Soul Rep
Accounts of the largely lost history of the African Grove Theatre include references to a sign that supposedly hung at the downtown New York venue founded by William Alexander Brown: “White people do not know how to behave at entertainments designed for ladies and gentlemen of colour.” Apocryphal or true, the sentiment gets to the thematic heart of The African Company Presents Richard III, a 1988 play that pieces together the short yet influential saga of the first Black theater troupe in the United States. The Grove drew not only a substantial Black audience several years before slavery was abolished in New York. White people also flocked to the theater, where they had to be cordoned off in a special section in the back because of their often boisterous jeering of the actors. “One of my favorite things is that these Black people were audacious enough to want to even approach Shakespeare,” says Guinea Bennett-Price, artistic director of Dallas’ Soul Rep Theatre Company, which is producing the play to open its 30th anniversary season. It revolves around a confrontation between the African Company — as the Grove’s acting group was called — and a white theater that was putting on Shakespeare’s historical drama at the same time.
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