Richard E Wesley

Richard Wesley was born in Newark, New Jersey and graduated from Howard University in 1967. He studied Playwriting under the tutelage of Owen Dodson and Ted Shine. A member of the New Lafayette Theater from 1970 through 1973, he served as Managing Editor of its Black Theater magazine.

He was awarded a Drama Desk Award for his 1971 stage play, THE BLACK TERROR. His 1978 play, THE MIGHTY GENTS, ran briefly on Broadway. His 1989 play, THE TALENTED TENTH, brought him his fourth AUDELCO Award for outstanding play.  In 2013, he was commissioned by the Trilogy Opera Company of Newark, NJ to write the libretto for the opera, PAPA DOC, with music composed by Dorothy Rudd Moore, and adapted from an essay by Edwidge Danticat. Other librettos for Trilogy include: FIVE, with music composed by Anthony Davis, KENYATTA, with composer Trent Johnson, SCOTT, GARNER and GRAY SAYS JIMMY BALDWIN, composed by DWANE FULTON and BOOKER T and W.E.B., composed by Julius Wilson.

A new version of FIVE, called, THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE, was performed June, 2019, by the Long Beach Opera Company at the Warner Theater in San Pedro, California.

Mr. Wesley’s most recent play, AUTUMN, received its premiere at the Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick in April of 2015. A subsequent production was produced in New York by the Billie Holiday Theater in 2016 and received the AUDELCO Award for Dramatic Production of the Year.

Mr. Wesley has shared two NAACP Image “Best Picture” Awards for the motion pictures, UPTOWN SATURDAY NIGHT and LET’S DO IT AGAIN, both of which starred Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby. Among his other motion pictures: NATIVE SON (1984), with Victor Love, Elizabeth McGovern, Matt Dillon and Akosua Busia, and the musical drama, FAST FORWARD (1985).

In television, Mr. Wesley’s has scripted, THE HOUSE OF DIES DREAR, (PBS, 1984); MURDER WITHOUT MOTIVE (NBC, 1992), with Curtis McClarin, Anna Maria Horsford, Georg Stanford Brown, and Cuba Gooding, Jr.; MANDELA and DE KLERK (Showtime, 1997), with Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine, and co-wrote the scripts for BOJANGLES, starring Gregory Hines (Showtime, 2002) and DEACONS FOR DEFENSE (Showtime, 2003), with Forest Whitaker, Jonathan Silverman and Ossie Davis. DEACONS FOR DEFENSE was the recipient of a “Black Reels Best Picture” Award from the Foundation of African American Films. He has also written episodes for the series FALLEN ANGELS (Showtime, 1996) and ONE HUNDRED CENTER STREET (A&E Cable Networks, 2000 and 2001).

Citations Mr. Wesley has received include: The Castillo Award for Outstanding Writing in Political Theater (2013), The Pioneer Award from the National Black Theater of New York (2015), The August Wilson Playwriting Award from the National Black Theater Festival (2015), The Distinguished Playwriting Achievement Award from the Texas State University Black and Latino Playwrights Conference (2018), The August Wilson Award from the National Black Writers Conference (2018), The Grace L. Jones Award for Lifetime Achievement in Playwriting from AUDELCO (2022), The Howard University Chadwick Boseman College of Fine Arts Legacy Award in Playwriting (2023) and The Dramatist Guild Foundation Legacy Playwrights Initiative Award (2024).

The National Film Preservation Board included Uptown Saturday Night, for which Mr. Wesley wrote the screenplay, among 25 films selected for inclusion in the 2024 National Film Registry, for archival in the Library of Congress.

Mr. Wesley is currently an Associate Professor in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing, Chair of the Selection Committee for the Black Film Festival of the Newark Museum of Art, Advisor to the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers University in Brooklyn, NY, a Guest Lecturer at the Advanced Playwrights Workshop for the New Federal Theater and a Member of the Board at the Manhattan Theater Club.

He is married to the novelist, Valerie Wilson Wesley.