Negro Ensemble Company

The Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) is a New York City-based theater company and workshop established in 1967 by playwright Douglas Turner Ward, producer-actor Robert Hooks, and theater manager Gerald S. Krone, with funding from the Ford Foundation. The company's focus on original works with themes based in the black experience with an international perspective created a canon of theatrical works and an audience for writers who came later, such as August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others. Beginnings The Negro Ensemble Company was created in 1964 when Hooks created a tuition-free acting workshop for urban youth which he named the Group Theatre Workshop (GTW), in tribute to Harold Clurman's The Group Theatre. The group became a refuge for young minority actors, with a focus on black theatre. He and his associate Barbara Ann Teer produced in a one-night showcase for friends and family of the actors. The plays chosen were Gwendolyn Brooks's We Real Cool and Douglas Turner Ward's Happy Ending. Jerry Tallmer, reviewer for the New York Post, happened to attend this showcase and gave it a glowing review. This inspired Hooks to produce Happy Ending and Ward's Day of Absence as a double bill presented by Robert Hooks Productions. After raising $35,000 from music executives Clarence Avant and Al Bell, Hooks booked the St. Mark's Playhouse (where many black performers had performed in the long-running show, The Blacks) and hired Gerald Krone as company manager. Ward was invited by the New York Times to write an opinion piece for its Sunday edition on the state of black theatre. His piece, "American Theatre: For Whites Only?", published in August 1966, was a scathing indictment of America's theatre establishment and posited the need for a unique black theatre institution.