Robert Macbeth, founder of Harlem’s New Lafayette Theater, dies at 89

Robert Macbeth, an emerging black actor on the New York theater scene, was sitting in a Greenwich Village bar having a drink before going on stage for an Off Broadway improv show in September 1963. The evening news played in the background.

“I happened to look up and there was a flash, and the flash was about the four little girls being murdered in Birmingham,” he said in a 1967 interviewrecalling the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. “And there I was, sitting in a village bar, with a whiskey in my hand.”

He went on stage that night and instead of following the show’s loose routine, he started shouting, pacing up and down the aisles and getting in the faces of the mostly white crowd.

“I must have scared the audience half to death,” he recalled in the interview. But instead of absorbing his message, they seemed to take it as entertainment: “They loved it, but that wasn’t the idea.”

Mr. Macbeth, distraught over his inability to convey his anger and sadness, quit acting after that night in 1963 and, in his words, went into exile from the stage. He worked in a bookstore, taught acting and tried to cope with the violent changes that swept through Black America in the 1960s.

Slowly, an idea took shape: Black actors and playwrights could never be fully effective in white-dominated spaces. They needed their own. So in 1967, he assembled a group of more than thirty actors and performers to open the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem.

“It is a true community theater,” wrote The New York Times in 1972, “that connects with audiences and nurtures actors, playwrights and technicians in an environment that is flexible and stimulates the theatrical imagination.”

The theater only existed for five years. But in that time it became a vital outpost for black culture in New York and a centerpiece of the emerging Black Arts Movement. Mr. Macbeth brought in playwright Ed Bullins as his artist in residence and welcomed a steady stream of black celebrities as audience members — during one performance, singer Nina Simone stood up and danced in the aisle.

The purpose of the theater, a 1972 poster noted, was “to activate the minds of community audiences to considerations of their existence from points of view consistent with that community’s place in history and its efforts for the future.”

Mr. Macbeth died on October 31 at a medical rehabilitation center in North Miami Beach, Florida. He was 89. His son Jamie Macbeth said the cause of his death, which was not widely reported, was lung cancer.

Robert Douglas Macbeth Jr. was born on March 25, 1934 in Queens and grew up there and in Charleston, SC, where most of his extended family lived. His father was a postman; his mother, Helen (Lee) Macbeth, taught kindergarten.

Robert enrolled at Morehouse College in Atlanta, but left to join the Air Force during the Korean War. After his discharge, he moved to New York to study acting. He attended City College for a while, but became frustrated with the academic approach to theater and left without a degree.

By the late 1950s he found regular work on television and in theaters in New York. In 1962 he made his Broadway debut in the play ‘Tiger Tiger Burning Bright’.

Yet success left him unfulfilled.

“What I did seemed distant and insignificant in the vibrant national unrest of the early 1960s,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. “No, I wouldn’t find my zen on Broadway.”

His first venue was the original Lafayette Theater, at 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem, which operated from 1912 to 1951 and was home to one of the country’s first all-black ensembles. In 1936 it had one under the leadership of Orson Welles all black version from ‘Macbeth’, which is set on a fictional Caribbean island.

With grants from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, Mr. Macbeth spent most of 1967 remodeling the theater and staged two repertory pieces that winter. But before his first major show, “In the Wine Time,” an original work by Mr. Bullins, who could present, burned down the theater.

Mr. Macbeth suspected arson by a disgruntled neighbor, but no one was ever charged. He found a new location, five blocks north of Seventh Avenue, and fully opened the New Lafayette Theater in late 1968, featuring Mr. Bullins’ work.

He presented a wide range of plays, including earthy depictions of city life such as Mr. Bullins, and experimental, freeform performances that drew on African rituals – including the wordless “A Black Time for Black Folks,” the work that inspired Ms. Simone Begins to Dance.

“He had the unique ability to combine what we would call the street with the representation of one aspect of the black community, and at the same time to present very high ideas where we increase the debt and predict the future,” the artist said. Ademola OlugebefolaNew Lafayette’s set designer at the time, said in a telephone interview.

Besides Mr. Bullins, the New Lafayette Theater boasted a long list of affiliated black performers who found career success on stage, film and television, including Whitman Mayo, who played Grady Wilson in “Sanford and Son,” and Roscoe Orman. , who played Gordon Robinson on “Sesame Street.”

Mr. Macbeth also published a magazine, Black Theater, which connected the New York scene with similar communities in other cities, especially in the South.

Faced with budget cuts, Mr. Macbeth was forced to close the theater in 1972. He spent the next ten years teaching and directing, as well as occasionally appearing on TV and in films. In 1985, he moved with his family to Miami, where he continued his involvement in theater and film.

In 1991 he married Helen Ellis. They later divorced.

Along with his son James, he is survived by two other sons, Andrew and Douglas; two granddaughters; and his siblings, Asad Rashid and James, Cornelius, Adrienne, Deanna and Tobias Macbeth.

In 1968, while Mr. Macbeth was renovating the theater’s new home, a German film crew interviewed him for a TV documentary about the New Lafayette. At some point Mr. Macbeth explained his ideas about the kind of radical theater he made and how this related to the culture around him.

“It relates to it in a very subversive way,” he said. “It suggests that the artist himself comes out with the things he has in his head and heart and speaks to the people.”