Horace E. “Steve” Carter, Jr. was born in New York City in 1929 to an African-American longshoreman father and a Trinidadian mother. He graduated from New York City’s High School of Music and Art in 1948 and began his career as a playwright at the American Community Theatre in 1965, with a production of his short play Terraced Apartment (which would later become the longer play Terraces). His dark comedy, One Last Look, was produced off-Off-Broadway in 1967 before he went on to work for the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), the leading black theater company during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. NEC produced the first two plays of his “Caribbean trilogy” — Eden (1975) and Nevis Mountain Dew (1978) — which explored Caribbean immigrant families living in Manhattan. Carter left NEC in 1981 and became the first playwright-in-residence at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, where the last of the trilogy, Dame Lorraine (1981), was produced. Other plays produced at the Victory Gardens Theater include House of Shadows (1984), the musical Shoot Me While I’m Happy (1986), and Pecong (1990). Carter also served as playwright-in-residence at George Mason University, and his play Spiele ’36 or the Fourth Medal (1991) had its world premiere at Theater of the First Amendment at George Mason University. Carter, who became a Dramatists Guild member in the 1970s, has received many awards for his writing, including the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award. He is also a recipient of honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. In 2001, he received the Living Legend Award at the National Black Theatre Festival.
Steve Carter
Studios
Wood
Steve Carter worked in the Wood studio.
Wood Studio, given to the residency program by Mrs. Frederick Trevor Hill, was completed in 1913 in memory of Mrs. Hill’s mother, Helen Ogden Wood. Like Schelling Studio, the building is sided with large, overlapping pieces of hemlock bark. When the studio was renovated in 1995, MacDowell staff researched the origins of this unusual building material and…