Thursday - September 24, 2020 - On this day in New York History: Take a Giant Step premiers at the Lyceum Theatre - 149 West 45th Street.

Take a Giant Step - Adapted into a 1959 film.

The playwright, Louis S. Peterson, holds the distinction as the first African-American to have a dramatic play produced on Broadway: Take a Giant Step, which premiered at Broadway’s oldest continually operating theatre, the Lyceum (149 West 45th Street), on September 24th, 1953.

Peterson, who was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1922, graduated from Morehouse College in 1944, and earned a Masters of Arts in Drama from New York University in 1947. His parents both worked in banking.

Take a Giant Step, which starred Louis Gosset Jr. as a seventeen-year-old high school senior, Spence Scott, is a loosely autobiographical work for Peterson, as its set in a New England town, and Scott’s father is a banker. The play explores the social and societal pressures ––– along with the mounting loneliness ––– of a young African-American man who is growing up in an all-white community.

Although the play received criticism for dealing too directly, and without space for more nuanced and complicated characters with the tensions and isolation that Peterson must have felt growing up, the work, nonetheless, made an impact, as it was adapted into a film in 1959.

Clips from the 1959 film, starring Johnny Nash (“I Can See Clearly Now”), are available on YouTube; and Turner Classic Movies will show the work on November 18th, 2020 at 2:00pm.