I have never been fully able to clearly articulate an artistic statement of my work and my process. It operates as a mystery and as a mystery it serves me best. However Todd London in the introduction to the New Dramatists, Smith and Kraus anthology, Best Plays by the Graduating Class of 2001, says for me what I myself could not otherwise express.
Carlyle Brown
Playwright
“As much as personality, lives lived seem to shape the writer’s vision. Carlyle Brown has traveled the globe many times as a sailor and has trained young people in the wilds of America as a leader in the Outward Bound program. Along the way, he’s learned to carry his home with him and cultivated a profound empathy for others.
“You see this empathy in his sense of character. His creations, while trapped or delineated or defined from the outside by social status, skin color, local custom, or political history are, largely fluid, complex, capacious human beings, many times more full of possibility than any category or cultural frame that determines their course in the world. This fluidity and human size comes, I believe, from Carlyle’s core belief in and pursuit of freedom. It comes, too I think, from his own rare freedom of mind and heart and imagination.
“Carlyle is steeped in history…and he trains his sights on the attempts of people, especially people of African descent, to locate the freedom within themselves within restraints history and politics forge for them. In his now famous The African Company Presents Richard the Third, a troupe of free northern blacks-mostly servants-stage the first black public performances of Shakespeare in defiance of just about everybody. When the ‘woolly-headed’ waiter playing Richard asks the African Company’s confrontational producer where he can find a little freedom, he’s answered: ‘You have it. It’s there in your head and here in your heart and in your hands…”
Todd London
Artistic Director
New Dramatists