The Life of a Playwright: An Interview with Steve Carter
- The Life of a Playwright:An Interview with Steve Carter
Steve Carter (Horace E. Carter Jr.), also known professionally as steve carter, was born in New York City in 1929. His father was an African-American longshoreman raised in Richmond, Virginia, and his mother was from Trinidad. He graduated from New York City’s High School of Music and Art in 1948 and began his career as a playwright at the American Community Theatre in 1965, with a production of his short play Terraced Apartment (which would later become the longer play Terraces). His dark comedy, One Last Look, was produced off-off-Broadway in 1967 before he went on to work for the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), the leading black theater company during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. In addition to being literary manager/dramaturge, Carter ultimately became responsible for NEC’s Playwrights Workshop. During those same years, NEC produced the first two plays of his “Caribbean trilogy”—Eden (1975) and Nevis Mountain Dew (1978)—which explored Caribbean immigrant families living in Manhattan.
Carter left NEC in 1981 and became the first playwright-in-residence at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, where the last of the trilogy, Dame Lorraine (1981), was produced. Other plays produced at the Victory Gardens Theater include House of Shadows (1984), the musical Shoot Me While I’m Happy (1986), and Pecong (1990). Carter also served as playwright-in-residence at George Mason University, and his play Spiele ’36 or the Fourth Medal (1991) had its world premiere at the Theater of the First Amendment at George Mason University. Pecong, a Caribbean retelling of Euripides’ Medea, had successive productions at London’s Tricycle Theatre, American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, and Newark Symphony Hall.
Carter, who became a Dramatists Guild member in the 1970s, has received many awards for his writing, including the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award. He is also a recipient of honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. In 2001, he received the Living Legend Award at the National Black Theatre Festival.
I originally sat down with Carter at his home in Queens in January 2011 and followed up by phone the following July; Carter was by then living in Houston, Texas. The third and final part of the interview took place via phone in May 2014.
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You started out as a set designer. Did you learn that at the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan?
I was not trained as a set designer, but that was the first thing I was attracted to in theater. I was taken to see my first play in 1938. I didn’t know what the play was about. What fascinated me was the set design—the stuff coming down from the flies and out of the wings. I determined then that that was what I wanted to do. I was still under ten, and I started to make models of sets. My mother was very tolerant. We had these things all over the house. I guess today people would call them dioramas. They were three-dimensional original designs. I did them for amusement and to show off in front of friends and playmates. I would get them to come up and look at the sets and they would all say, “That’s cute. Let’s go outside and play.” That kind of disappointed me. One day, those scale-model figures in my sets said words. I always remember the first words I had a scale-model figure say: “Get your black hands off me.” All of my playmates started to pay attention to the sets then. The words were keeping them there, so I started making up words as I went along. When I went to Music and Art, which was much later, I studied all forms of art—I really learned how to draw there.
How did you eventually become a playwright? Was Terraced Apartment (1965), which later became Terraces (1974), your first play?
My first...
