Photo: (c) 1997 by Wallace Bridges)

Ed Bullins at the 1997 National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

(July 2, 1935)
Playwright, Educator, Activist

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• Also published as Kingsley B. Bass, he ws born July 2, 1935 the son of Edward and Bertha Marie (Queen) Bullins. His mother was a civil servant and gave him a middle-class orientation.
  

• Attended a largely white elementary school where he was an excellent student and spent his summers vacationing in Maryland farming country.
  

• As a junior high school student he was transferred to an inner-city school and joined a street gang. In a street fight, he was stabbed in the heart and momentarily died.
  

• 1952-1955 - After dropping out of Franklin High School, he joined the U.S. Navy where he won a shipboard lightweight boxing championship and started a program of self-education through reading.
  

• 1958 - Moved to Los Angeles. While in California he earned his GED, began writing and attended Los Angeles City College.
  

• 1961 - While attending classes part time, he started writing seriously, writing mainly fiction, essays and poetry.
  

• 1964 - Moved to the San Francisco Bay area and while registered in a college writing program there, he began writing plays. He realized that only closed circles of blacks read fiction, so he turned to plays to reach more blacks.
  

• Became discouraged at not being produced until he saw productions of Baraka's Dutchman and The Slave in the Bay area which reminded him of his own work.
  

• Inspired by Baraka, he and others like Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers, created and became active in a militant cultural-political organization called the Black House.
  

• After being purged from the Black House Leadership, several months later he was appointed Minister of Culture of the Panthers by Eldridge Cleaver and Emory Douglas. Bullins soon became disenchanted because of differences of ideology.
  

• 1965 - For the Firehouse Repertory Theatre in San Francisco, Bullins wrote and produced How Do You Do?, Dialect Determinism (or, The Rally) and Clara's Ole Man.
  

• 1967 - Bullins began a six-year association with Robert Macbeth's New Lafayette Theatre in New York. He created and/or produced almost a dozen plays there. He also edited the theatre magazine, Black Theatre and served as playwright-in-residience.
  

• 1968 - Met his future wife, Trixie in London. Goin a Buffalo at the American Place Theatre, In the Wine Time at the New Lafayette Theatre, The Corner at the Theatre Company of Boston.
  

• 1968 - He won the Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award for plays performed at the American Place Theatre in New York City. The plays are titled Goin' a Buffalo, Son Come Home, The Electronic Nigger and Clara's Ole Man.
  

• 1969 - We Righteous Bombers as Kingsley Bass, Jr. at the New Lafayette Theatre and The Gentleman Caller in A Black Quartet and produced at Chelsea Theatre Center in Brooklyn.
  

• 1970 - The Pig Pen at the American Place Theatre and The Duplex at the New Lafeyette Theatre
  

• 1971 - He won the Obie Award for distinguished playwriting and the Black Arts Alliance Award for The Fabulous Miss Marie and In New England Winter. He also earned the Guggenheim Fellowship for playwriting in 1971 and 1976.
  

• 1973-1983 - Became playwright-in-residence and producing director at numerous theatres in California. He was also the playwriting instructor at numerous colleges and universities around the country. Bullins has had his works presented around the country in such theatres as the Lincoln Center, the American Place Theatre, the New Federal Theatre, the New Lafayette Theatre, and the Public Theater
  

• 1975 - Bullins won the Obie Award for distinguished playwriting and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for The Taking of Miss Janie. He also won the New York Drama Critic Award, the Drama Desk-Vernon Rice Award, two more Obies, two Guggenheim fellowships, four Rockfeller Foundation playwriting grants, and two National Endowment for the Arts playwriting grants.
  

• 1981 - Began writing Blacklist: A New Play of the Eighties (1982) as his marriage to Trixie broke up.
  

• 1989 - He earned his bachelor's degree in liberal studies (English and playwriting) from Antioch University/San Francisco.
  

• 1994 - Bullins earned his M.F.A. in playwriting from San Francisco State University.
  

• 1995 - Bullins was appointed professor of theatre at Northeastern University. Boy X Man is his most recent and most accomplished play. This is a memory play about a man looking back fondly on his growing up. He strains to come to grips with not having ever really understood his mother, and for having failed to say thanks to a stepfather who had been as much a father to him as any man could have been.
  

• The Gentleman Caller opened at the Chelsea Theatre Center of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, New York with three other plays as A Black Quartet on April 25, 1969.
  

• The most elaborately designed of the four plays, The Gentleman Caller presents a symbolic and expressionistic look at race relations as seen in the interaction of a mistress and servant.
  

• The play opens in a satirically lavish drawing room decorated in white, red and black walls adorned with American flags. Prominent is a gun rack containing rifles and shotguns surrounded by mountings on spikes of the stuffed heads of a black man, a Native American, a Vietnamese and a Chinese--trophies of rich white America.
  

• This "satirical fantasy" served the purposes of the Revolutionary Black Theatre and supports Bullins' view that we don't want to be another form of white art in blackface.
  

"A young black man calls on a decadent rich white lady, sits while she babbles endlessly about her traditions, her family, her 'ecclesiastical rank.' He never speaks. No one else does except the maid, a big black woman dressed in American flags and such. The lady's husband is painted gold (she is painted silver, both roles being played by black performers). The husband is dead. The lady is going to die, and this seems clear from the beginning, because she represents the broker, the 'whitey' from whom the reparations are going to be received. And... down she goes in a fusillade of lead from the maid-turned-militant who subsequently 'ices' the young man after he discovers that Mr. Mann (read the man, or Mr. Charlie) wears a false beard instead of the real one the young man coveted. So, the true and dedicated militant sees that what he thinks the Establishment has isn't worth having, certainly isn't what he wants. So, Mama has to get rid of him in true 'sustainer' fashion."

Riley considered The Gentleman Caller to be one of Bullins' minor plays partly because he considered it "too easy," and partly because he considered it weak in dramatic structure.

Some white critics attacked Bullins' plays because he didn't stick to traditional methods of play structure. But Bullins chose to abandon those methods to better reach the black masses.

However, Clives Barnes called him "a playwright with his hand on the jugular vein of the people... Bullins writes so easily and naturally that you watch the plays and you get the impression of overhearing them rather than seeing them."

Some black critics have objected to "the sense of the black ghetto as lacking in any redeeming sense of community or moral values." While other blacks who had received material success complained about being excluded from his plays.

Hay, Samuel. Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.

Metzger, Linda. Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from "Contemporary Authors". Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1989.

Oliver, Clinton F. Contemporary Black Drama: From "A Raisin in the Sun" to "No Place to Be Somebody". New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971.

Woll, Allen. Dictionary of the Black Theatre, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983.

-----. A Black Quartet. New York: New American Library, Inc., 1970.