Word: harrisons
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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After playing "de Lawd" in The Green Pastures for five consecutive years without missing a cue or a curtain call (TIME, March 4), Richard Berry Harrison was found in his Manhattan dressing room "in a state of super-weariness" just before the spectacle's 1,659th performance. The 70-year-old Negro actor was hospitalized for rest. Into the part stepped his understudy and friend of more than 40 years, Charles Winter Wood, 69, longtime teacher at Tuskegee Institute. Understudy Wood had traveled 40,000 mi. with the show since 1930 without having a chance to walk...
...Richard Berry Harrison, life up to his 65th year was woefully thin. His parents were slaves who fled to freedom in Canada. He and five sisters and brothers were born in London, Ontario. Like their parents, his sisters and brothers never amounted to much. "And," says one Negro biographer, "de Lawd nearly missed...
After a scant education in London's public schools, Richard Harrison began hopping bells in Detroit hotels. Stage struck, he went to a dramatic school for a short while, later made a precarious living by giving Shakespearean readings to Negro audiences in Canada. The next 40 years he spent as a dining car waiter on the Santa Fe running between Chicago and Los Angeles, as a police station handyman in Chicago, as a wanderer in the Deep South. At intervals he taught dramatics at North Carolina Agriculture & Engineering College, Branch Normal (Arkansas) and Flipper-Key College (Oklahoma). Mostly...
...Harrison was employed by the New York Federation of Churches directing Negro church festivals in Harlem when Destiny and Marc Connelly caught up with him in the autumn of 1929. On the road Actor Harrison lives with friends he made years ago while on Chautauqua tours, or in Y. M. C. A.'s. He has not squandered a liberal salary. A large part of it goes to the support of an invalid wife, whom he married 40 years ago with his friend, the late Negro Poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, as best man. A son, who struggles with a jazz...
With a reputation in the Negro theatre equal to those of Paul Robeson, the late Charles Gilpin and Jules Bledsoe, Actor Harrison plans to open a dramatic school if and when The Green Pastures closes. "The Lord," humbly says "de Lawd," "has showered His mercies...