William Alexander Brown
William Alexander Brown
William Alexander Brown (1815-1884) was a pioneering actor and playwright from the West Indies or Nassau County (opinions vary) who worked on shipping lines as steward before moving to New York City and founding the African Company theater group that performed at the African Grove theater in New York City. [0]As a ship steward, he traveled to England and the Caribbean.
Brown bought a house in New York at 38 Thomas Street and began holding performances of short dramas, music, singing, and poetry in its tea garden on Sunday afternoons. The "lavish affairs" included brandy and gin-toddies, wine-negus, porter and strong ale, accompanied with cakes and meats. [2]
The performances were moved repeatedly after police interference including to a site in lower Manhattan near the famed Park Theatre.
Brown eventually moved the company to the African Grove Hospital site, a 2-story building on Mercer and Bleeker Street.
He converted the second floor into a 300-seat theatre and named it the The African Grove Theatre.
Brown also wrote and staged the first African American play, The Drama of King Shotaway (1823). The historical drama was based on a Garifuna chief who led the Black Carib war in St. Vincent in 1796 against both English and French settlers. [1]The Company's principal actors were James Hewlett, one of the first African American Shakespearean actors, and the young Ira Aldridge. They studied acting from the balcony of Stephen Price’s landmark Park Theatre in New York City. [1]
Brown was attacked and beaten by a white mob.
His actors were arrested repeatedly.
His theater and its furnishings were destroyed by vandals.
And yet Brown kept going.
He had the company tour in Albany, the state capitol.
He opened near the dominant Park Theater.
He staged sheriff and newspaper publisher Mordecai Noah's play. And he invited in white theater goers and his troupe faced hecklers or goons sent to disrupt the performances. His shows were open to whites, but in the wake of the attacks he included a partition to segregate the whites., perhaps for their own comfort or for that of the black theater goers and performers. All this was going on as the free black population of New York was growing as slavery was being ohased out in the city, former slaves were moving north, and black suffrage (voting rights) was being discussed at a state constitutional convention in Albany.
The African Company lasted three years until 1823.
The theater building burned down in 1826.
Aldridge moved to London and became an international star.
His performers faced mocking accounts in Mordecai Noah's publications and at least one historian traces the rise of black Face, minstrel show s and coon song s to descriptions and imitations of the black Shakespeare performers, who also acted out oher classics, and their black audience members. Certainly the climate of hostility and disrespect was there at the time in New York City as vandals, violent mobs, and the competiting theater worked to close down Brown's theater once and for all.
Gerty Dambury authored the book Le Rêve de William Alexander Brown (William Alexander Brown's Dream).
A French play has also told his story.
And a new theater group in New York is reviving the African Grovr theater group.