1. Ed Bullins won awards including the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and several Obie Awards.
21 Facts About Ed Bullins
1. 2.
Edward Artie Ed Bullins was born on July 2,1935, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Bertha Marie and Edward Ed Bullins.
3.
Ed Bullins attended Benjamin Franklin High School, where he was stabbed in a gang-related incident.
4.
Ed Bullins stayed in Philadelphia until moving to Los Angeles in 1958.
5.
Ed Bullins married poet and activist Pat Parker in 1962.
6.
Parker accused him of violence and she and Ed Bullins separated after four years.
7.
Ed Bullins joined Baraka at Black House, the Black Arts Movement's cultural center, along with Sonia Sanchez, Huey Newton, Marvin X, and others.
8.
The Black Panthers used Black House as their base in San Francisco, where Ed Bullins was their minister of culture as of the 1960s.
9.
The director Robert Macbeth read Ed Bullins' plays and asked him to join the New Lafayette Players, a theatrical group.
10.
The trilogy's title was later changed to Ed Bullins Plays for what Bullins called "financial reasons".
11.
Ed Bullins worked with the Lafayette Players until 1972, when the group ended due to lack of funding.
12.
Ed Bullins founded the Bronx-based Surviving Theatre, active from 1974 to around 1980.
13.
Ed Bullins wrote the text for two musicals, titled Sepia Star and Storyville.
14.
Ed Bullins later returned to school, and received a bachelor's degree in English and playwriting from Antioch University in San Francisco.
15.
The Reluctant Rapist features Ed Bullins's alter ego, Steve Benson, who appears in many Ed Bullins works.
16.
Ed Bullins died aged 86 on November 13,2021, in Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts, due to complications from dementia.
17.
Samuel A Hay, Bullins's biographer, writes that Bullins rejected models of theater advanced by Amiri Baraka, who wrote and promoted protest art, and Alain LeRoy Locke, who suggested that Black playwrights should condemn racism by producing "well-made plays".
18.
Ed Bullins was a Black playwright who spoke to the values of the urban experience.
19.
Ed Bullins twice received the Black Arts Alliance Award, for The Fabulous Miss Marie and In the New England Winter.
20.
Ed Bullins received an Obie Award for The Taking of Miss Janie, which received a New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
21.
In 2012, Ed Bullins received the Theatre Communications Group Visionary Leadership Award.