The Lafayette Players Stock Company, commonly known as the Lafayette Players, was New York’s firstAfrican American stock company to concentrate on legitimate theater. From 1915 to 1923, the company resided at the Lafayette Theater, one of the major playhouses in Harlem. The company presented more than 250 productions that included original works by African American playwrights as well as revivals of popular comedies and the classics. The stated goals of the Lafayette Players were to raise the standards of African American acting and dramatic productions, demonstrate that black actors could excel in dramatic roles as well as in song and dance, and provide the black community of Harlem with an alternative to vaudeville and minstrel shows, which often ridiculed African Americans. The actor Charles Gilpin, who became famous in the title role in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920), was among the founding members of the company. Other well-recognized members included Ida Anderson, Andrew Bishop, Laura Bowman, Inez Clough, Evelyn Ellis, Clarence Muse, Evelyn Preer, and Arthur “Dooley” Wilson.

The Lafayette Players were founded in 1915 by the actress and former dancer Anita Bush, as the Anita Bush Stock Company. The company made its first stage appearance at the Lincoln Theater in Harlem on 15 November 1915, with a production of Billie Burke’s The Girl at the Fort. The players had been gathered only two weeks earlier, when Eugene Elmore, the manager of the Lincoln, had given Bush permission to perform there with a troupe of her own. Shortly after their opening at the Lincoln, the players followed Elmore to the nearby Lafayette Theater, where their first production, Across the Footlights, opened on 27 December 1915. In 1916, because of financial difficulties, Anita Bush sold the managing rights of her company to the comanager of the Lafayette, Lester Walton. She remained with the players until 1920, however, and it was she who chose most of their repertoire. In March 1916, the troupe was renamed the Lafayette Players Stock Company. In the same year, Walton sold the management rights of the Lafayette Players to the Elite Amusement Corporation, which hired Elmore to manage the troupe. In 1917 the Lafayette Players were taken over by the Quality Amusement Company, and in 1919 Walton was reinstalled as the company’s manager. As their productions became famous, the Lafayette Players organized road companies; in 1916–1917 two of these offspring toured on different circuits, appearing in Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Richmond, Norfolk, and other large cities on the East Coast. When the Lafayette Theater was turned into a vaudeville house in 1923, the Lafayette Players disbanded as a residential troupe and concentrated on their traveling companies. They reunited as a stock company in 1928, when Robert Levy, who now headed the Quality Amusement Corporation, invited them to move to Los Angeles. The Lafayette Players performed at the newly built Lincoln Theater in Los Angeles, until the economic hardships of the Great Depression finally forced them to dissolve in 1932.

The Lafayette Players had an almost exclusively African American audience. They presented a repertoire that changed weekly, staging abridged versions of popular Broadway plays. Many of these plays were being performed by black actors, and for black spectators, for the first time. The players obtained stock-company rights to numerous Broadway hits, particularly comedies, melodramas, and classics; but their repertoire occasionally also included original plays, operas, and musical revues. Among the most successful productions of the Lafayette Players were the Broadway melodramas Within the Law (1915–1916) and Madame X (1916–1917); Jerome Kern’s musical Very Good Eddie (1917–1918); and adaptations of The Count of Monte Cristo (1916–1917), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1916–1917), and Goethe’s Faust (1917–1918). In Los Angeles, the Lafayette Players performed before racially mixed audiences. This turned out to be a challenge for the company, because black and white patrons often had conflicting expectations about how African Americans should be portrayed onstage. Nevertheless, the players continued to present—successfully—their usual offering of popular works from the white stage, which now included Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms as well as DuBose Heyward’s Porgy.

The Lafayette Players generally received favorable reviews, which were regularly published nationwide in the black press. However, progressive theater critics and intellectuals, including Theophilus Lewis, Lester Walton, and James Weldon Johnson, attacked the company for being too “white” with regard to the scope and style of its productions. The Lafayette Players favored light-skinned actors and actresses; in fact, dark-complexioned performers such as Clarence Muse sometimes whitened their faces. Moreover, not only was the repertoire taken almost exclusively from Broadway; the performances also followed the conventions of the white stage. Considering their need to survive financially, the Lafayette Players operated within a rather narrow framework of opportunities. Their popularity depended on the range of their repertoire, and also on their low ticket prices. Well into the 1920s, they were the least expensive legitimate theater company in New York and on the road. Furthermore, the concept of a black legitimate theater that would present original works and develop its own dramatic conventions was only just emerging during the time when the Lafayette Players were active. Nevertheless, to meet audiences’ demand for authentic portrayals of blacks onstage, and to compensate for a general lack of plays written by and for African Americans, the company did occasionally commission works from within its own ranks. Andrew Bishop’s It Happened in Harlem (1917–1918) and An Automobile Honeymoon (1917–1918) are probably the best-known examples. As the first and major African American legitimate theater company in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, the Lafayette Players helped pave the way for the development of modern African American theater in the United States. In taking productions from the white repertoire and having black actors present them to black audiences, the company overcame racial barriers in casting and broke away from the traditional portrayals of African Americans onstage. Perhaps the company’s most significant achievement was training African American actors in a variety of dramatic roles, many of which had never before been given to black performers. The Lafayette Players not only fostered the theatrical careers of a whole generation of African American actors but also helped raise the general standards of black theatrical entertainment.