Black Horizon Theatre Company
Local school served as performance site for Black Arts movement
In 1968, student activist at the University of Pittsburgh founded the Black Action Society (BAS), an organization to serve the needs and interests of Black students by building community and “providing educational, political, and social programming relative to the Black experience.”
As part of this effort, Pitt's BAS developed an arts organization to support Black writers, artists and performers. This idea was modeled after the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem, founded in 1965 by playwright and poet Amiri Baraka, usually considered the founding of a national Black Arts Movement.
The BAS would meet at a restaurant called the Pan Fried Fish on Wylie Ave. Known for having the best fish sandwiches for miles around, the restaurant was a gathering spot for students and artists in the neighborhood to express themselves freely, creating music, poetry, and art under a united cause.
One night, artist and native resident Frank Floyd Hightower was exhibiting his photography and leading a discussion on his work at the restaurant when he met August Wilson, Rob Penny, and Curtiss E. Porter, who were playwrights, social activists, and artists in their own right. Penny and Porter were also co-directors of the University of Pittsburgh's Africana Studies Program. That same night, they also met Sala Udin and Sakina Abdul A’la, an actress and women’s rights advocate. This group of friends became instrumental in the local Black Arts movement and together founded Black Horizon Theatre. Their goal was to establish a community theater aimed at raising social consciousness within the Black community and the world.
The A. Leo Weil School auditorium at 2250 Centre Ave became home to Black Horizon Theatre, and they staged plays there from 1968 to 1972. The school’s principal allowed them to use the auditorium at no charge.
Black Horizon Theatre Company portrayed characters struggling with inequality, opening the audience’s and community’s eyes to the constant obstacles African Americans faced. The company initially charged only 50 cents for admission to their plays. “We literally went into the street a half hour before the show and talked people into going in,” recalled Wilson years later. “Once they got in, they really liked it.”
In many ways, the experience of Black Horizon Theatre was responsible for initiating a transformation in August Wilson’s writing; poetry had been his primary focus through the mid-1960s, but he volunteered to direct the company’s productions - even though he had no previous experience. Instead, he taught himself the fundamentals from a book checked out from the local library. As his experience in theater grew, his creative focus also began to shift to playwriting.
Black Horizon Theatre dispersed by the mid-1970s. In 1975, Dr. Vernell A. Lillie, a University of Pittsburgh professor, continued Black Horizons’ legacy by founding the Kuntu Repertory Theatre.
The following year, August Wilson brought his early playwriting effort, Homecoming, to Kuntu. It was his first play to be produced by a resident company at the University of Pittsburgh. Wilson won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his Broadway show Fences and later won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for The Piano Lesson.
While Wilson was the most prominent author to come out of the Pittsburgh Black Arts scene and Black Horizon Theatre, it is important to recognize and appreciate the Black Horizon Theater, and the creative collaborators who helped shape and nurture his remarkable talent.
