Franklin, J. E. 1937–

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J. E. Franklin 1937–

Playwright, author, educator

Developed Early Love for Drama

Established Reputation With Black Girl

Chose to Risk Telling Truth

Selected works

Sources

The founder of the Blackgirl Ensemble Theatre in New York City and a faculty member of the Harlem School of the Arts, J. E. Franklin has earned acclaim for her uncompromising depictions of contemporary African American life. Her plays and other writings, which examine themes of identity, family relationships, and oppression, convey both the dreams and the harsh realities that shape the experience of black Americans in the decades after the Civil Rights Movement.

Developed Early Love for Drama

Born Jennie Elizabeth Franklin on August 10, 1937, in Houston, Texas, Franklin grew up in a family of 13 children. Money was scarce, and her father, Robert, who was a cook, and her mother, Mathie, who was a maid, worked long hours to make ends meet. With one parent working nights and the other working days, Franklin and her siblings were under strict instructions to amuse themselves silently around the house so as not to disturb whichever parent might be sleeping. The children learned to play noiselessly, communicating through an elaborate system of facial expressions and body language. Perhaps because of this enforced quiet, Franklin developed an extraordinarily keen appreciation of the sounds in her environment. When she visited her grandparents, who lived in the country, she could mimic the clucking of their chickens so accurately that her grandparents thought that the birds themselves were present. She also learned how to pay attention to human communication, recalling later that she could remember the smallest details of conversations—a talent that would serve her well in her career as a writer.

Franklin’s passion for stories emerged at an early age. “When I learned how to write at school, nothing could pull me away from putting pencil to paper, or even to the walls and sidewalks,” she observed in her book Black Girl: From Genesis to Revelations. Since writing materials were expensive, “I hoarded hard-to-get pencils and tablets, and kept up with them as much as I could…. The few sheets of paper in each tablet disappeared almost as fast as I got my hands on them. To put such a quantity of paper in a tablet for a writer was a cruel jest. And that is what I was now, a writer, and I had to find a way to keep myself in tools to record the many dramas I had collected over the years.” She remembered scavenging the neighborhood for any stray pencils and pens, and filling every square inch of paper with her words. “Paperbags, napkins, the insides of boxes after the foodstuffs had been eaten—all existed for my use. And, even today, I can barely check the impulse to pick up lost pens and pencils when I see them lying around. Poverty has a way of making one form habits.”

Despite economic hardships, Franklin enjoyed a relatively innocent childhood. She enthusiastically devoured the discarded books her mother brought home for the family, nurturing her imagination on the fairy tales, folk stories, and fables contained in their pages. She was shocked when she encountered neighborhood children who described absent fathers and abusive families, for her own experience had been stable.

At a Glance…

Born Jennie Elizabeth Franklin on August 10, 1937, in Houston, TX; married Lawrence Seigel, 1964 (deceased); children: Malike. Education: University of Texas, BA, 1964; attended Union Theological Seminary.

Career: Playwright, 1964-; Freedom School, Carthage, MS, primary school teacher, summer, 1964; Neighborhood House Association, Buffalo, NY, youth director, 1964-65; U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, New York, NY, analyst, 1967-68; Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York, New York City, lecturer in education, 1969-75; Zora Neale Hurston Writer’s Workshop of the New Federal Theatre, New York, NY, director, 1970s; Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, director, 179-80; Brown University, resident playwright, 1982-89; Harlem School of the Arts, New York, NY, faculty member, 1990s-; Blackgirl Ensemble Theatre, founder and artistic director, 1990s-.

Awards: Media Women Award, 1971; Drama Desk Award, 1971; Drama Desk Award, 1971; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1979; Rockefeller Fellowship, 1980.

Addresses: Agent— Victoria Lucas Associates, 888 Seventh Ave., Suite 400, New York, NY 10030.

“Black children,” she learned, “belonged to everyone in general and no one in particular,” as she recalled in Black Girl.

Established Reputation With Black Girl

At the University of Texas, Franklin took several creative writing courses focusing on the short story. But she found it confining to work within the conventional strictures of that form, and discovered that writing for the stage—which she had not been “taught” to do—allowed her greater artistic freedom. As a playwright, Franklin experienced early success. Her first major dramatic work, Black Girl, was chosen for a television production, then enjoyed a successful theater run, and was finally made into a Hollywood film. The work generated much critical notice and established Franklin as a serious new talent.

Yet the experience of bringing Black Girl from inspiration to final execution was hardly easy. Franklin began piecing together material for the project in late 1968 when a producer of the television series On Being Black solicited scripts for new programs. Too many dramas that attempted to deal with race at that time simply placed black faces in conventional white middle-class scenarios; this producer was looking for work that presented the black experience in authentic ways. He chose Franklin’s script, which told the emotionally complex story of an aspiring dancer whose ambitions are thwarted by her unsympathetic family. But the producer insisted on substantial revisions. “Writing a play was not what I had thought it would be,” Franklin recalled in her book Black Girl. “Somehow I had imagined that a play was a re-play of some life happening which took on its own sequential flow with the transitions inherent within the action. I had been told that a writer must have a good memory, and so I had trained my memory to retain the smallest details…. Little was ever said to me of the need to cultivate the imagination. Now I would have to start from scratch and do it on my own,” she noted in Black Girl.

Black Girl, which had been taped in Boston, aired to mixed reviews. But Woodie King, Jr., who had produced Franklin’s In Crowd in New York City for the Mobilization for Youth, was interested in bringing the new piece to the Off-Broadway stage in New York. Again Franklin reworked the script, never fully satisfied that her initial intentions for Black Girl would be realized to her satisfaction. But when the play opened, she was pleased to discover that it held together. Audiences agreed, filling the theater for every performance. Soon Franklin had a contract with another producer to take the play on the road to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and Detroit. The play received critical praise and won awards.

So successful was Black Girl that a movie producer arranged to make a film version, with Franklin adapting the script. Once again, the process proved frustrating. Her payments were delayed, and her preferences for casting were often overlooked in favor of established stars. In addition, the producer had found ways to emphasize sex and violence in the film, even though Franklin believed that none had existed in her original work. She eventually left Hollywood in frustration: “After all I had other work to do, other bridges to cross. And on top of that I had my original creation, against which the gates of hell could not prevail. And finally I was finished with the whole thing.”

Chose to Risk Telling Truth

Franklin returned to New York, where many of her other plays have subsequently been produced in small theaters and where Black Girl was staged again in 1984-85 as part of the McGinn-Cazale/Second Stage’s American Classics revival series. When asked whether her work is autobiographical, Franklin explained that the relationship between writing and environment is complex. “Writers are born into specific environments,” she wrote in the book Black Girl, “If the environment is harsh and uncompromising, then writers will attempt to strike back with a power and force equal to that which greeted them, whether sweet, bitter, or bitter-sweet. Very often, then, writers give back to the people what the people have given them. To do differently would be inauthentic and unreal.”

“Though some readers,” she added, “want escapism in art, others are willing to risk hearing the truth.” Pressured to make her art conform to prevailing ideas about politics, social consciousness, or morality, Franklin insists that the most authentic writing must come from life itself. In her case, this experience frames the essential question at the core of all of her work: “to become or not to become?”