Edward Artie Bullins was born on July 2, 1935, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,[2] to Bertha Marie (née Queen) and Edward Bullins.[1] He was raised primarily by his mother.[2] As a child, he attended a predominantly white elementary school and became involved with a gang.[3] He attended Benjamin Franklin High School, where he was stabbed in a gang-related incident.[3] Shortly thereafter, he dropped out of high school and joined the navy.[4] During this period, he won a boxing championship, returned to Philadelphia, and enrolled in night school. He stayed in Philadelphia until moving to Los Angeles in 1958.[5][6] He married poet and activist Pat Parker (then Patricia Cooks) in 1962.[2][7] Parker accused him of violence[2] and she and Bullins separated after four years.[8]
After completing his G.E.D., Bullins enrolled in Los Angeles City College and began writing short stories for Citadel, a magazine he started.[2] In 1964, he moved to San Francisco and joined the creative writing program at San Francisco State College, where he started writing plays.[9]Clara's Ole Man, which premiered on August 5, 1965, at San Francisco's Firehouse Repertory Theatre, is about an Ivy Leaguer who meets the titular Clara and several other "strange and unpleasant characters" who show her the "realities of ghetto life".[10] It turns out that "Clara's ole man" is actually Clara's partner, a woman.[10]
Black House and Black Panthers
After seeing Amiri Baraka's play Dutchman, Bullins felt that Baraka's artistic purpose was similar to his own.[11][12] He joined Baraka at Black House, the Black Arts Movement's cultural center, along with Sonia Sanchez, Huey Newton, Marvin X, and others. A 2005 history of the Black Arts Movement described Bullins as among the "leading … theater workers" of the Movement.[13] The Black Panthers used Black House as their base in San Francisco, where Bullins was their minister of culture as of the 1960s.[14] Black House eventually split into two opposing factions: one group, led by Eldridge Cleaver, considered art to be a weapon and advocated joining with "all oppressed people", including whites, to bring about a socialist revolution;[15] while the other group, represented by Marvin X and Baraka, considered art to be a form of cultural nationalism.[16][15] Bullins was part of the latter group.[16] While in San Francisco, Bullins founded Black Arts/West, a theater collective inspired by Baraka's Harlem-based Black Arts Repertory Theatre project.[17]
New Lafayette Players
The director Robert Macbeth read Bullins' plays and asked him to join the New Lafayette Players, a theatrical group.[18][19] The first production the New Lafayette Players performed was a trilogy called The Electronic Nigger and Others at the American Place Theatre. Electronic Nigger was about a Black man who imitates the views of the white majority.[10] The trilogy earned Bullins a Drama Desk Award for 1968. The trilogy's title was later changed to Ed Bullins Plays for what Bullins called "financial reasons".[20] Bullins worked with the Lafayette Players until 1972, when the group ended due to lack of funding. During these years, ten of Bullins's plays were produced by the Players, including In the Wine Time and Goin' a Buffalo.
1970s and later
Bullins returned to the East Coast in 1967.[17] From 1973, he was playwright-in-residence at the American Place Theatre.[19] He founded the Bronx-based Surviving Theatre, active from 1974 to around 1980.[17] From 1975 to 1983, he was on staff at The Public Theater with the New York Shakespeare Festival's Writers' Unit. During these years, Bullins wrote two children's plays, titled I Am Lucy Terry and The Mystery of Phillis Wheatley.[21] He also wrote the text for two musicals, titled Sepia Star (1977)[22] and Storyville (1979).[23]
In addition to playwriting, Bullins wrote short stories and novels, including The Hungered One and The Reluctant Rapist. The Reluctant Rapist features Bullins's alter ego, Steve Benson, who appears in many Bullins works.[11][24]
Bullins died aged 86 on November 13, 2021, in Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts, due to complications from dementia.[2]
Themes
Samuel A. Hay, Bullins's biographer, writes that Bullins rejected models of theater advanced by Amiri Baraka, who wrote and promoted protest art, and Alain LeRoy Locke, who suggested that Black playwrights should condemn racism by producing "well-made plays".[25] Instead, Hay argues, Bullins's writing aimed to "get people upset by making them look at racism in totally new ways".[26] By contrast, the critic W. D. E. Andrews argues that the distinction between Baraka and Bullins lies instead in Bullins's efforts to describe Black lived experience, as opposed to referring to relations between Black and white people.[27]
Ishmael Reed has been quoted as saying of Bullins: "He was able to get the grass roots to come to his plays. ...He was a Black playwright who spoke to the values of the urban experience. Some of those people had probably never seen a play before."[2]
The Theme Is Blackness (The Corner and other plays) [Dialect Determinism, The Helper, It Has No Choice, A Minor Scene, Black Commercial #2, The Man Who Dug Fish, The American Flag Ritual, One Minute Commercial, State Office Bldg. Curse]. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1973. ISBN0-688-05012-3[1]
^Gussow, Mel (February 4, 1976). "Stage: 'Phyllis Wheatley'". The New York Times. Retrieved November 17, 2021. When writers of children's theater contemplate significant events, such as moments in the nation's history, they tend to glamorize or to condescend. Ed Bullins is an exception. In contrast to other playwrights of his stature, he also write plays for children —and his approach, as in all of his work, is serious and thoughtful. His 'The Mystery of Phillis Wheatley' is now running in the Henry Street Settlement's handsome new Arts for Living, Center, and his 'I Am Lucy Terry' opens next week at the American Place Theater.
