![]() The Village Voice called her "unforgettable" John Simon said "Miss Foster was magnificent" and the New York Times' Howard Taubman declared, "Someone should write a play for Miss Foster."Īnd, indeed, many plays were offered to her, but she chose to remain with In White America for a year. She made an indelible impression upon audiences and critics. The actress won the job, though, and played several parts in the drama, including a woman whose husband had been lynched, Sojourner Truth, and, most memorably, an Arkansas girl who tries to enter her Little Rock school following the Supreme Court ruling forbidding segregation, only to be faced with a rabidly angry racist mob. Foster's agent, Ernestine McClendon, sent her to a cold reading of the play, though she didn't think her client was right for the project. Duberman endeavored to relate, through a chronological patchwork of texts, the untold history of blacks in this country. Foster first made her mark, however, in the Off-Broadway historical drama, In White America, in which author Martin B. She went on to portray other classical parts, including The Cherry Orchard's Madame Ranevskaya, Long Day's Journey Into Night's Mary Tyrone, Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, the title role in Brecht's Mother Courage, Volumnia in Coriolanus and both Titania and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1965, she became the first black performer to play Medea in New York. Foster came to New York City from the Midwest in 1961 and quickly established herself as a powerful performer able to play characters far beyond her young years and scant life experience. Gloria Foster, an imposing and uncompromising stage actress who, during the 1960s and '70s, played many roles previously inaccessible to African Americans, died Sept. Gloria Foster as the title roles in Mother Courage and Medea Photo by Mother Courage Photo by Martha Swope
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