Delaware Theatre Company acknowledges an overlooked basketball legend’s 100th anniversary.
The Kings of Harlem spotlights the Harlem Rens, the first Black-owned, all-Black professional basketball team in history. Formed five years before the Harlem Globetrotters, the Rens compiled over 2,000 wins.
In this production of the playwright Layon Gray’s The Kings of Harlem, the actors’ stage is a basketball court.
The concept initially met with doubters 10 years ago, but Gray persisted, ultimately staging it in a basketball arena in Arizona.
“I just said I want to take a risk and try to create this. This was in 2014, in New York - we workshopped it - it just became an instant hit. It’s a lot of trust with tossing the ball around onstage and it ended up working out fabulous.”
Kings of Harlem follows last year’s DTC production of Gray’s Black Angels Over Tuskegee, a recounting of the first Black aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps program during World War II.
“I always like to take these historical ideas and these historical things from history that no one knows about and try to do something unique with each story that I tell.”
Thaddeus Daniels plays Jimmy “Jojo” Robinson and says there's an exhilaration in portraying athletes.
“You know, those guys are from college basketball, high school and on to the NBA, they’re all entertainers, in a sense. They perform for us for two and a half hours each night, and they have to perform for people on all sides.”
The Kings of Harlem opens this week at Delaware Theatre Company and runs through November 12th.
Delaware Public Media' s arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
