James Hewitt as Richard III in an 1821 production.

The theater was founded by William Alexander Brown and James Hewlett, both ships' stewards. Their work had brought them to England and the Caribbean, so they had a broader opportunity to see theater than the typical New Yorker of their time. The West-Indies-born Brown had left a job on a Liverpool liner. He bought a house in New York, at 38 Thompson Street. At its founding, the African Grove was simply Brown's back yard, offering food and drink, but also poetry and short drama pieces. At the suggestion of Hewlett, a regular customer, they hired a company of black actors.

The theater's repertoire drew heavily on Shakespeare, with comic entr'actes. White audience members were confined to a separate section because, in the words of the theater's management, "whites do not know how to conduct themselves at entertainments for ladies and gentlemen of color." The most popular plays were Richard III and Othello; original works included Brown's now-lost King Shotaway, about a 1796 uprising of black Caribs on the island of Saint Vincent, believed to be the first full-length African American play.

As was common at the time, Shakespeare's plays were heavily adapted; also, at least early on, small casts and smaller budgets required expedients such as that described by reviewer George Odell, writing of an 1821 performance of Richard III: "A dapper, wooly haired waiter at the City Hotel personated the royal Plantagenet in robes made up from discarded merino curtains of the ballroom. Owing to the smallness of the company King Henry and the Dutchess were played by one person, and Lady Anne and Catesby by another." He added, "Lady Anne, in Act III, sang quite incongruously." Laura V. Blanchard identifies Odell's "dapper waiter" as Hewlett.

Frequently harassed by the police, and facing increasing hostility from the white populace, the company moved several times, from Thompson Street "to the Pantheon Theater on Mercer Street between Bleecker and Prince, to Houston and Mercer near the Park Theatre, to One Mile Stone on Broadway between Mercer and Prince, and finally to a rural site north of 14th Street", quite a distance for theatergoers to travel for a performance in that era. On at least one occasion, Brown rented a hall adjacent to the Park Theatre—New York City's leading theater of the time—to put on Richard III on the same night that the Park was showing the same play in a production starring Junius Brutus Booth. Stephen Price, owner of the Park, orchestrated (and paid for) a riot so that the police would shut them down.

Notes

1. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-507832-2. p. 44.
2. Web site of the New African Grove Black Theatre Program at California State University, Dominguez Hills makes the claim about a fire. Accessed August 14, 2005.
3. Gonzalez, Anita & Granick, Ian, African American Performance, Web Lecture #2: African Grove Theater. Accessed December 6, 2005
4. Gonzalez & Granick, op. cit..
5. Lott, op. cit., 44.
6. Gonzalez & Granick, op. cit..
7. Laura V. Blanchard, The African Company Presents Richard III. On the site of the Richard III Society. Review of a play by Carlyle Brown about the African Grove. Accessed August 14, 2005. This is the source for the date of the black Carib uprising.
8. Odell, George. National Advocate, 21 September, 1821, cited by Gonzalez & Granick.
9. Blanchard.
10. Gonzalez & Granick, op. cit.
11. Blanchard, for the identification of Booth.

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