Lonnie Carter papers

Lonnie Carter is a playwright born in Chicago in 1942. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Marquette University, and his M.F.A. in Playwriting and Dramatic Literature from Yale School of Drama in 1969. His first professional production, Iz She Izzy or Iz He Ain'tzy or Iz They Both, was produced at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1970. In the 1980s, Carter began his association with Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater, where several of his plays have been produced. He has also been a member of the Victory Gardens Playwright Ensemble. From 2000 to 2006, he was a member of the New Dramatists, a center for playwrights in New York City. He has taught at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia's Hammerstein Theater Center, and the University of Hartford.

Many of Carter's plays focus on African-American experiences. In 1986, Carter began an association with Emmy-award winning and Tony-nominated actor Andre De Shields. Carter and Shields collaborated on multiple projects including The Gulliver Trilogy, which Shields directed and in which he played the title character. Several of Lonnie Carter's other plays focus on the experiences of marginalized groups. For example, Wheatley is the story of Phyllis Wheatley, the first African-American writer to be published in the U.S. The Romance of Magno Rubio, the story of a migrant Filipino worker, has been performed in both English in the U.S. and Tagalong in Manila, Philippines.