Vinnette Carroll: Trailblazing Black Director, Actor and Playwright
Vinnette Carroll:
An actor, director, and playwright. She was the first Black woman to direct a production on Broadway. She paved the way for Black women in the theatre, expressing herself through gospel music on stage.
Carroll was born in New York City in 1922, but spent much of her childhood in Jamaica living with her grandparents. She moved back to Harlem at the age of 10. Carroll’s father, a dentist, hoped she would become a doctor. Carroll studied at Long Island University, later getting her master’s degree in psychology at New York University. She briefly worked as a clinical psychologist in New York schools in the late 1940s as she studied for her doctorate at Columbia University, while studying acting with Lee Strasberg at the same time. Theatre won her heart and her career as a psychologist came to an end.
Carroll’s Broadway debut came in the 1956 production of A Streetcar Named Desire. The 60s and 70s were the height of the National Black Theatre movement and Carroll’s career flourished. In 1962, she won an Obie Award for her role in off-Broadway’s Moon Over a Rainbow Shawl. Then in 1964, she won an Emmy for co-conceiving and supervising TV’s Beyond the Blues. She also had an off-Broadway hit with her own show, Trumpets of the Lord, a musical adaptation of the seven sermons. In 1969 it opened on Broadway but closed after less than a week of shows.
In 1967, Carroll founded the Urban Arts Corps, which supported minority theatrical performers in NYC. This is where she conceived, produced and directed Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope: a gospel revue with songs by Micki Grant that became a massive hit. It ran for 1,065 performances on Broadway and cemented Carroll’s place in history as the first Black woman to direct a Broadway production. With this production, Carroll was also the first Black woman to earn a Tony Award nomination for direction, and until 2016, she was the only one to have been nominated.
She followed this success with Your Arms Too Short to Box with God, another gospel music-filled show based on the Gospel according to Matthew. Another smash hit, it returned to Broadway twice after closing, with one production starring Patti LaBelle and Al Green, and another bringing the Broadway debut of Jennifer Holliday.
In the 1980s, Carroll bought a house in Florida and founded the Vinnette Carroll Repertory Company in Fort Lauderdale. It was dedicated to work by minority playwrights and actors. She died in 2002 due to complications from heart disease and diabetes, but her trailblazing work left a mark on theatre history and paved the way for Black women in theatre today.
''I have had a great deal of hurt in the theater both as a Negro and as a woman, but I don't get immobilized by it. I tell myself that no one individual is going to make it impossible for me.” -Carroll in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1967