Frank Silvera Writers Workshop records

1973-1992

The Workshop was founded in 1973 by playwright/director Garland Lee Thompson, along with famed actor/director Morgan Freeman, director/actress Billie Allen and journalist Clayton Riley, as a living memorial to the late actor, director, teacher and producer, Frank Silvera (1914-1970). The Workshop has been based in the heart of Harlem, New York, for the past 26 years. The Workshop has built a long time-honored and prestigious reputation as a nationally and internationally renown playwrights development theatre for up-coming and established artists of all colors, sizes and shapes. Records contain administrative files, production files, including contracts and set designs, and more than one thousand play scripts from the Writers/Directors series and the Larry Neal Memorial Seminar Series. Scripts are chiefly unpublished and unproduced and were written by members of the workshop. Among playwrights included are Mari Evans, Billy Graham, A. Marcus Hemphill, Larry Neal, Vinnette Carroll, Ruby Dee, Owen Dodson, Charles Gordone, Charles Fuller, Laurence Holder, James De Jongh, Clifford Mason, Ntozake Shange, Ed Shockley, Garland Lee Thompson, Richard Wesley, and Samm-Art Williams.