Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
By W. Stuart McDowell
In the fall of 1994 I was appointed chair of the department of Theater, Dance and Motion Pictures at Wright State University. I was charged by the dean of the college to increase the diversity within our department.
I soon learned the university had earned its moniker “White State” due to the predominately Caucasian make up of its student body. Like the university at large, the department’s students and faculty were not a reflection of the greater Dayton region which it served.
To help redress this imbalance, my second year we opened with A Soldier’s Play, Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning murder mystery set in 1944 on a segregated Louisiana army base, directed by leading Black actress/director, Sheila Ramsey. Subsequent seasons included Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, as well as Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Fences. These plays, in turn, helped us to attract a more diverse student body.
This growing diversity enabled us to develop new dramas such as Harlem Renaissance: In Black and White, featuring Nicole Scherzinger, who is now starring on Broadway in Sunset Boulevard, as well as new plays reflecting the rich history of Dayton. These included 1903: The Wings of Dreams about Orville and Wilbur Wright and their close high school friend, leading African American poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, as well as 1913: The Great Dayton Flood which featured the story of W. G. Sloan, Black baseball player who saved over 350 people on a flat-bottomed boat during the devastating Dayton flood. 1913 played to over 10,000 from Dayton to the Kennedy Center, where it won major awards at the American College Theater Festival.
These productions helped our students and our audiences understand our country’s multi-faceted history.
Our department also fostered young Black filmmakers, such as Hannah Beachler, who won the 2019 Academy Award as production designer of “Black Panther”, as well as Selena Burks Rentschler, whose documentary “Saving Jackie” which won audience awards at the Sundance Film Festival, and has been screened throughout Ohio.
