Errol Hill, 82; Playwright Was an Expert on Black Dramatists
Hyfler/Rosner
BYLINE: LA Times
Errol G. Hill, a playwright, director, and expert on black dramatists in the
United States and the Caribbean who was the first African American to earn
tenure at Dartmouth College, died of cancer Monday at his home in Hanover,
N.H. He was 82.
Hill, a native of Trinidad who became a naturalized U.S. citizen, taught at
Dartmouth for 35 years until his retirement in 1989.
Over a nearly five-decade career, he produced and directed 120 plays and
pageants in the United States, West Indies, Nigeria and England; wrote 11
plays; and wrote or edited 15 books, including a notable history of black
Shakespearean actors.
He also was an influential figure in the development of modern Caribbean
theater as founder of a West Indian acting company, the Whitehall Players,
in the 1940s.
Hill received his early theater training in England, earning degrees in
drama in 1951 from the University of London and the Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art.
He worked as an actor and announcer and taught creative arts in the West
Indies before moving to the United States in the early 1960s and enrolling
at Yale University. He earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees
at Yale between 1962 and 1966.
After a short stint at Richmond College of the City University of New York,
he joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1968.
He headed Dartmouth's drama department for many years and led the college's
Summer Repertory Program for six seasons. The college productions he
directed ranged from Sophocles' "Antigone" to Jean Genet's "The Blacks."
He also staged an original Caribbean musical he wrote called "Man Better
Man." It blended village music and rhymed calypso verse into a story about a
young man who decides to win the affections of a woman named Petite Belle
Lilly by challenging the local stick-fighting champion.
Other plays by Hill were praised for such innovations as incorporating
vernacular speech and aspects of Trinidadian and Caribbean culture.
Hill developed an international reputation as an expert on African American
Caribbean theater through his scholarly writings, including "Shakespeare in
Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors," which was published in 1984
with a foreword by actor John Houseman.
He also wrote "the "Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theater,"
published in 1994, and "A History of African American Theater," co-written
with James. V. Hatch and published this year.
"Acting and directing -- I loved that, [but] nobody was getting the history
right; nobody was interested in what went before," Hill, who was the
Chancellor's Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley in 1983, said recently.
"So I started [exploring the history of blacks in theater]... Whenever I
felt there was a need, I took it on."
In 1996, Hill was awarded the Robert Lewis Medal for Lifetime Achievement in
Theater Research by Kent State University.
"Errol Hill has done more to further the serious study of African American
theater and drama, as well as the theater of the Caribbean, than any one
scholar in the world," Brown University theater professor Don Wilmeth said
at the time.
Hill is survived by his wife of 47 years, Grace Hope Hill of Hanover; four
children; a brother; two sisters; and three grandchildren.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: ERROL G. HILL: The longtime Dartmouth professor wrote 11
plays and a history of black Shakespearean actors. PHOTOGRAPHER: Dartmouth
College