Theater Director and Cultivator of Playwrights, Is Dead at 87: “Lloyd Richards, one of the most influential figures in modern American theater and a pioneering director who brought the plays of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson to Broadway and championed several generations of young playwrights, died on Thursday in Manhattan. It was his 87th birthday…

In the 1980’s, as dean of the Yale School of Drama, as artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater and of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, and as a director of commercial theater on Broadway, Mr. Richards was in a position of rare power in American theater, rarer still for an African-American.” (New York Times )A light has certainly gone out of the world. I have never enjoyed theatre more than my years living in New Haven and attending the Yale Rep, when Richards was the artistic director in the early ’80’s.