James Light (director)

These relationships led him to join the Provincetown Players as an actor; beginning with the role of the English teacher in Susan Glaspell's Close the Book.

In 1922 he succeeded George Cram Cook as director of Provincetown Players,[1] and along with O'Neill, Kenneth Macgowan, and Robert Edmond Jones was instrumental in transforming that group of creatives into the Experimental Theatre, Inc. in 1923.

[2] Light made his Broadway debut as an actor on February 4, 1921; portraying Captain Caleb Williams in the original production of O'Neill's Diff'rent at the Princess Theatre.

[5][6] He starred in only one more play on Broadway, the role of Baron Skansenkorge in August Strindberg's The Spook Sonata (1923),[7] before completely re-orienting his career away from acting into directing.

The decision by O'Neill and Light to portray a racially mixed couple was controversial for the time period, and both men received threats from the Ku Klux Klan and poison pen letters.

Cummings's Him (1928),[2] Kenneth Raisbeck's Rock Me, Julie (1931),[15] Archibald MacLeish's Panic (1935),[16] Virgil Geddes's Native Ground (1937),[17] Pedro Calderón de la Barca's The Mayor of Zalamea (1945),[18] and Sophocles's Oedipus Rex (1945) among others.

His final directing assignment on Broadway was a revival of Aristophanes's Lysistrata at the Belasco Theatre that starred an all-black cast led by Etta Moten Barnett in the title role and Sidney Poitier as Polydorus in 1946.