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African-American playwright and director Ricardo "Rick" Khan in Trinidad, January 2019.

Ricardo "Rick" Khan is an African-American playwright and theater director. He co-founded the influential Crossroads Theatre Company of New Jersey, Khan's piece Fly (play), which he directed, won multiple NAACP Theater Awards in 2018. The play, co-authored with writer Trey Ellis, is a multimedia production based on the Tuskegee Airmen.

Early life and education

Ricardo Khan was born in Washington, DC, on November 4, 1951, the first of five children of Mustapha Khan, an Indo-Trinidadian US immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago, and his African-American wife Jacqueline (nee Driver). The family settled in Camden, New Jersey, where Mustapha had a well-regarded family medical practice and a street named after him, Mustapha Khan Way, and Jacqueline was a nurse.

Khan said that after he discovered the story of the African-American fighter pilots from World War I, he learned he was related to one of them as.Jacqueline's cousin Elwood T. "Woody" Driver was a Tuskegee Airman.

He studied psychology and theater at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, graduating in 1973 and earning an MFA in 1977.

Career

Khan became active in his high school drama department after a class trip in which he saw a 1968 Broadway production of Hello, Dolly with an all-black cast. He studied theater and psychology as undergraduate at Rutgers University, and completed an MFA in acting and directing there in 1977.

With L. Kenneth Richardson, whom he knew from graduate studies, he founded Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1978. Khan and Richardson fleshed out the idea for the company in a restaurant and wrote their mission on a napkin: to change the environment for black theater and African-American theater practitioners.

Khan told the New York Times: ''To a certain degree, forming Crossroads was about changing the world. But it was really, really about wanting to be a part of a world -- not with us on the side, but a world that turns to glorify the human spirit. That's what we were about then, and that's what we're about now."

He served as artistic director of the company, which staged and commissioned plays by African-American playwrights with African-American characters. During his tenure the company introduced several important American plays, including works by August Wilson, George C Wolfe, Rita Dove and Ntozake Shange. American theater director and playwright Joseph Papp called Crossroads one of his two favorite theaters. Crossroads won a Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater in 1999.

Crossroads closed for a season in 2000, overwhelmed by one-and-a-half to two million US dollars' debt and a troubled relationship with its landlord. Khan left the company in 2000 on sabbatical. He returned in 2003.

He collaborated with writer Trey Ellis on Fly. The play was inspired by the story of the Tuskegee Airmen. Khan directed the play. It was originally a commissioned piece staged at the Lincoln Center Institute in New York in 2005, where Khan was artist-in-residence, after which Khan rewrote it based on feedback from Roscoe C. Brown, a Tuskegee Airman. The play debuted in 2009 at Crossroads. A 2016 co-production between Crossroads and the Pasadena Playhouse gave the play its final form, which included the Obama Inauguration, in which the Tuskegee Airmen were honored. Fly has since been re-staged several times. Its 2017 Off-Broadway staging was nominated for eight 2018 NAACP Theater Awards, winning three: Best Production, Best Lighting and Best Choreography. Khan said the play uses a video game style and a "tap griot" -- a tap dancer who acts as narrator -- as a way to reach younger audiences.

Khan was a faculty member at the University Missouri Kansas City for over ten years. His position and others were initially made redundant after budget cuts in 2017, but he was reinstated the same year along with one other staff member.