Photo by Chris Buck
George C. Wolfe
George C. Wolfe, one of the most celebrated playwrights and directors in theater and film, is more famous as a director than a writer.
The Frankfort native has directed 17 Broadways plays and musicals, for which he has won three Tony Awards and received eight more nominations. Those included two of the most acclaimed dramas of the past three decades: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Topdog/Underdog, the 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner by fellow Kentuckian Suzan-Lori Parks from Fort Knox.
Wolfe also has directed six movies, including two recent films for Netflix: Rustin, a biographical drama about civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a 2020 adaptation of the August Wilson play that explored racism and exploitation.
But writing has always been central to Wolfe’s storytelling art and craft. He earned four more Tony nominations for his writing and won a 1992 Drama Desk writing award for his hit Broadway musical Jelly’s Last Jam, about the great jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton.
“I love language; I love how characters use language,” Wolfe said in an interview. “Everything I do is storytelling to me. Directing is storytelling. Writing is storytelling. And so, I love how people use language to reveal themselves. I also love how people use language to conceal who they really are. I love playing with all of those dynamics.”
George Costello Wolfe was born Sept. 23, 1954, to Costello Wolfe, a state government clerk, and Anna Lindsey Wolfe, an educator. He attended Kentucky State University’s all-Black Rosenwald Laboratory School, where his mother taught and was later principal. “Frankfort being segregated for the first eight years of my life, I was very protected and treated in a safe and special way by the Black community,” he said.
Wolfe was 12 when he accompanied his mother to New York City, where she attended a seminar. He saw his first three Broadway plays—Hello Dolly, West Side Story and Hamlet—and became obsessed with theater. He graduated from Frankfort High School, where he acted in and directed plays, wrote for the school newspaper and literary journal, and was the marching band’s first Black drum major.
Wolfe said his love of language came from his childhood in Frankfort.
“Just the way people talked and the things that they said and how they said them was very interesting,” he said. “It was a small town, so the details mattered. Language was always something to empower you, a weapon you could use, a weapon that could be used against you. I knew words mattered, how you used words mattered, from a very, very early age. A lot of those rhythms are about my childhood and are still playing in my head.”
For Wolfe, writing is a way to search for deeper meaning. “You are digging at the truth that is underneath the truth that is underneath the truth,” he said. “And the process of that I find exhilarating and exhausting and overwhelming and thrilling at the exact same time.”
After a year at Kentucky State University, Wolfe headed to Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he studied acting and directing. During his junior year, he wrote a play that was produced for a student festival. But it took a while to acknowledge himself as a writer.
“I would say for the longest time, ‘Oh, I’m just writing things to give myself something to direct,’” he said. “So, I kept on avoiding saying I was a writer. And at one point. I just said, ‘Shut up, George. Call yourself a writer. Claim it; own it; and go on the journey.’ ”
Wolfe earned an MFA from New York University in 1983, studying both dramatic writing and musical theater. Two grad-school projects were produced off-Broadway.
“I was working on this musical that I knew was going to be a hit, and then I was working on this project that was just something I was doing for me,” he said. “The musical [Paradise] got violently trashed, and the thing that I was working on just for myself turned into this play called The Colored Museum that launched my career. So, it was very valuable to learn very early on that you do what you do because you must, not because you’re thinking about how it’s going to be received.”
Wolfe won an Obie Award for his 1990 play Spunk, an adaptation of three stories by Zora Neale Hurston, then hit it big the next year with Jelly’s Last Jam. His first Tony Award came for directing Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, a lengthy examination of homosexuality in 1980s America. He directed the second part of Angels, called Perestroika, the next year. He co-wrote and directed the Broadway musical The Wild Party (2000).
Wolfe was artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and The Public Theater from 1993-2004. In 1996, he created the musical Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk, a big financial success that won him a second Tony Award.
While Wolfe continued directing plays, including Topdog/Underdog (2002) and the Broadway revival of The Iceman Cometh (2018), he launched a film-directing career in 2004 with the successful HBO film Lackawanna Blues. He directed two more movies—Nights in Rodanthe (2008) and You’re Not You (2014)—before writing and directing the acclaimed HBO production The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2017). He has appeared as an actor in several films, including The Devil Wears Prada (2006).
His latest movie, Rustin, released on Netflix in November 2023, was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions. Obama had appointed Wolfe to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 2009, and the president posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
“There were certain aspects of the story that were very important to him,” such as Rustin’s skills as an organizer, Wolfe said of Obama. “He gave me notes, and the ones that made sense to me I abided.”
Wolfe was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2013. He also serves as creative director for the Center for Civil & Human Rights in Atlanta.
With Rustin finished, Wolfe thinks his next project will be a play. “I like working on something that is completely different from the thing I’ve just done,” he said.
Wolfe tries to write daily, drawing on ideas he learned as a director collaborating with such writers as Kushner and Arthur Miller and producing the work of such writers as Shakespeare and Wilson.
What of Wolfe’s own writing is he most proud? “Probably the writing I haven’t done yet,” he said. “Probably in two or three years, I’ll write a novel.”
Wolfe’s writing often leans into the kind of humor and satire that first got him noticed with The Colored Museum.
“I think that there is a satirist who lives inside of me naturally,” he said. “So, I love the power of humor. I often tell actors, ‘You’ve got to invite me to the party if you want me to stick around for the pain.’
“A sense of buoyancy is crucial so that an audience is laughing and relaxed and feeling a part of the event, so that when a dart gets thrown—a political dart or an emotional dart—they are as vulnerable to it as the characters are.”
One key to success, Wolfe said, is pushing past rejection. “I remember when the bad reviews for Paradise came out being devastated, but at the same time I had to quickly say, ‘Now, get back to work,’ ” he said. “Committing to writing, committing to the work is saying yes to yourself. There’s a [Stephen] Sondheim line in Sunday in the Park with George, which is, ‘Stop worrying if your vision is new. Let others make that decision—they usually do.’ ”
His best advice to writers? Write daily, as if exercising a muscle.
“You have to invest in the rigor of the job at hand,” Wolfe said. “And stand still and be quiet and cut out any unnecessary noise so that you can hear yourself think, so that you can hear your characters talk, so that you can listen to rhythms that have been imbedded in you since the day you were born.”