First Acts: A Black Playwright Comes of Age - Paperback

by Kermit Frazier (Author)

Playwright and television writer Kermit Frazier began life as a precocious Negro boy growing up in southeast Washington, D.C., during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. As a student at an all-Black elementary school, Kermit was selected for a newly formed honors track at a predominantly white secondary school. Traveling a complex path, Kermit tore down segregation barriers, balanced on an academic pedestal, and battled an internal war of denial against his same-sex attractions. This memoir is not a story about a young man rising from the hood but rather a young Black man struggling with stereotypes, identity, and mild dyslexia while straddling two middle-class worlds, Black and white, and striving not to be everyone's other.

Author Biography

Kermit Frazier has been a writer as well as a teacher of writing, literature, and theater for nearly 40 years. His plays have been produced in New York and around the country at such theaters as the New Federal Theatre, Baltimore Center Stage, the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, and the First Stage Children's Theatre. He has written for such television series as Ghostwriter (which he helped to create), Gullah Gullah Island, Married People and The Wonder Pets. His articles, reviews, and short stories have appeared in several magazines and journals, including Callaloo, The Missouri Review, Green Mountains Review, The Chicago Review, American Theatre, Black World, Essence and The New York Times Book Review. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.