Today is Lloyd Richards Day, in recognition of an esteemed theater figure who directed August Wilson’s plays on Broadway.
Good morning. It’s Thursday, and it’s also Lloyd Richards Day, according to a proclamation from the Manhattan borough president. We’ll find out how the day became official. We’ll also check on the Canadian wildfires and the air quality today in New York.
A man named Jack Shalom got a call a couple of years ago from someone who had been a classmate at Hunter College in the 1970s.
“I’m talking about someone I had not seen or spoken to in 45 years,” said Shalom, who is 69. “We had a teacher named Lloyd Richards for acting and directing. That was the first thing we started talking about — his impact.”
The city remembers Richards’s impact on theater as the director who brought “A Raisin in the Sun” to Broadway, as well as August Wilson’s plays.
Shalom and his classmate remembered Richards’s impact on them. “I didn’t become a professional actor,” Shalom said. “but he was the most remarkable teacher I ever had, and I say that as someone who went on to teach high school mathematics.” (And to co-host a weekly arts program on WBAI-FM, he said as he repeated, “I’m not a professional actor.”)
The conversation led the two Hunter classmates, who reached out to a third alumnus, to wonder about recognition for Richards and, as Shalom put it, why “the city has not done anything for him.”
That, in turn, led to something of a campaign to designate a Lloyd Richards Day. Shalom said it had to be today because Richards was born on June 29, 1919, and died on June 29, 2006. A ceremony will be held at noon outside the August Wilson Theater on West 52nd Street.
The location is appropriate because “there’s no August Wilson Theater without Lloyd Richards,” Shalom said. “He directed every play of August Wilson’s on Broadway and won the Tony for directing ‘Fences,’” in 1987.
Mayors have long designated days to recognize people or events. Just this month, Mayor Eric Adams declared June 15 as PIX11 Day in the city, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the debut of WPIX-TV. Earlier Adams had declared June 12 Jennifer Raab Day, honoring the president of Hunter College, who is stepping down. Before that the mayor declared April 21 Ariel Palitz Day, recognizing the director of City Hall’s Office of Nightlife, who left after five years as the city’s “bar czar.”
Shalom discovered that six people in New York City apparently have the power to issue such proclamations, the mayor and the five borough presidents (although the borough presidents’ designations apply only to their boroughs, not the entire city).
Kenneth Cobb — the assistant commissioner of the city’s Department of Records and Information, which keeps the municipal archives — agreed. “They seem to have broad powers,” he said of the six officials. “I also don’t believe there are strict rules about this. It’s largely honorary.” He said the only reference to proclamations in the city’s administrative code had to do with something of a different nature — proclamations announcing rewards for information that helps the authorities catch and convict criminals.
