SOURCE: "Amiri Baraka on Directing," in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 21, No. 4, Winter, 1987, pp. 425-33.

In the following interview, Baraka discusses his work as a director and his views on directing.

Amiri Baraks is an artist of the 1960s' political scene still hard at work in the 1980s. Playwright, poet, political activist, Marxist, anti-Semitic, anti-feminist have all been used to label him, yet a less controversial label is often ignored—director. Most noted for his plays Dutchman and The Stave, Baraka has done some of his own directing and collaborated with directors such as Gilbert Moses, Jerry Benjamin, Jim Malette, Kdward Parone, Ernie McClintock, Irving Vincent, and Leo Garen in staging his Revolutionary Theater of the 1960s' Black Arts and Civil Rights movements.

In a recent interview at his office at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he is Director of Africana Studies, Baraka...