African Grove Theatre

The African Grove Theatre was a theatre founded and operated by William Alexander Brown a free black in New York City in 1821. He was from the West Indies.

This was six years before the final abolition of slavery in New York state (gradual abolition brought it to an end in 1827, but young people born to slave mothers had to serve apprenticeships to age 21.) The African Grove Theatre was attended by "all types of black New Yorkers -- free and slave, middle-class and working-class" along with others. It was the first place where Ira Aldridge, who would later become an esteemed and renowned Shakespearian actor, first saw a production of a Shakespeare play.

For some years, the African Company—the company of the African Grove—played with a black cast and crew to mostly black audiences. It was the third of at least four attempts to create a black theater in the city, and the most commercially successful. After a few years, city officials shut down the African Grove, because of complaints about conduct: conduct that was normal among working-class white New York theatre audiences of the time was considered unacceptably boisterous when displayed by blacks. One source says that the theatre was "mysteriously burned to the ground in 1826", but it appeared to have failed financially well before that. "There are no records of the African Grove Theater after 1823."

The theatre was founded by William Alexander Brown, a pioneering actor and playwright from the West Indies. He had worked as a ship's stewards at times. Through his work as a ship's steward, he traveled to England and the Caribbean, so he had a broader opportunity to see theatre than the typical New Yorker. The West-Indies-born Brown left a job on a Liverpool ship and bought a house in New York, at 38 Thomas Street. At the start, Brown held performances of the African Grove in his back yard, where he offered food and drink, but also poetry and short drama pieces. At the suggestion of James Hewlett, both an entertainer and a regular customer, together they hired other black actors.

The theater's repertoire drew heavily on Shakespeare, with comic entr'actes. White audience members were confined to a separate section because, in the words of the theater's management, "whites do not know how to conduct themselves at entertainments for ladies and gentlemen of color." The most popular plays were Richard III and Othello. James Hewlett was the first black man of record to play the leading role in Othello.

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