"Kenny Leon" is an United States/American stage director/director notable for his work on Broadway theater/Broadway and in regional theater. Robert Simonson of Playbill described Leon as "arguably Broadway's leading African-American director".[http://www.playbill.com/celebritybuzz/article/104755.html Playbill News: PLAYBILL.COM'S BRIEF ENCOUNTER with Kenny Leon]

More Kenny Leon on Wikipedia.

August's accomplishments are unsurpassed - to me, the only writer to come close is Shakespeare, ... He has been the epitome of American theater for the last 23 years. He's defined it. His plays not only serve an artistic purpose, but they also serve a social purpose because they look at ourselves as Americans.

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It's the ultimate universally engaging play, ... It was important to have 20-year-olds and 80-year-olds in the audience, to have blacks and whites in the audience.

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When you have a chance to work on something that's live and the audience is breathing the same air as the performers, it makes the work seem more immediate and more alive than if we were watching it through a screen or a filter or a box. I love that.

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I love the feeling of the gathering.

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To try talking about my relationship with August and the contributions of that man, I get very emotional just thinking about it.

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By the end of the run, people were talking about the play, ... A young generation of people came to that play expecting to see Puffy or Clair Huxtable. When it was over, people were saying, 'Who is Lorraine Hansberry? I want to read her. I want to know who she is.'

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In casting somebody like Puffy and having him bring in all his fans, you get the people in the hip-hop generation to see the play.

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Absolutely, ... but he'd have to be totally committed and shut down the businesses. He couldn't do anything else. He'd have to say, 'For these five or six months, I have to be about looking at and studying August's work.' It would definitely take some work, but I think he could do it.

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I'm from the South and I really studied Tennessee Williams, ... I love plays that are poetry-based, but last year, when all those Williams plays went to Broadway ('A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'The Glass Menagerie'), it didn't occur to producers to ask me if I was interested.

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