Joseph A. Walker became one of the most honored black playwrights of the 1970s when his 1973 play The River Niger won an Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award, the Dramatist Guild's Elizabeth Hull-Kate Warriner Award, the First Annual Audelco Award, the Outer...

Albert Joseph Staudt of Batavia A funeral Mass for Albert Joseph "Albie" Staudt, 84, will be celebrated at 10:30 a.m. Friday, at Holy Cross Catholic Church, 2300 W. Main St., Batavia, where he will lie in state from 9:30 a.m. until the...

Portland Press Herald (Maine) 11-16-2001 Portland Press Herald (Maine) Friday, November 16, 2001 Edition: FINAL Section: Local & State Page: 5B TERRYVILLE, Conn.-- Albert Joseph Ashley, 86, a lifelong resident of East Main Street and a longtime summer visitor to Kennebunkport, Maine,...

Joseph A. Walker's Ododo (truth) is an unstructured, loosely hung kind of review, if anything. It is self-contradicting in both form and content. The first four of fourteen scenes are highly stylized symbolic conceptions of an African birth-of-man fable, and of the initial entrapment of Africans by predatory human animals…. Walker has trouble with his assessment of the Black man. To begin with, he uses symbolism which he seems unable to control. In one of the early stages of African life, the ...

If any single criticism were to be leveled against Joseph Walker's The River Niger … it might be that it contains too much. But that is a good fault—one that in this case is both an aspect of the play's exuberance and integral to its purpose. The River Niger depicts the morass of Harlem; it heaps together vitality, corruption, agony, aspiration, violence and a will to transcendence. No salient trait predominates, except ferment, a ferment of existence struggling confusedly and va...

Joseph Walker's The Harangues … is another example of impassioned black theatre which is interesting only because it is impassioned…. The first of the evening's harangues (there are two, which are emblematically pictorial and hymnal) is a short melodrama in which a young Negro plots the murder of his prospective white (Texan) millionaire father-in-law and is himself mowed down by the man (actually a Harlem Italian) and several of his black henchmen. In the second harangue, Asura,...