Free Friends: A Love Story by Angela Bassett

college I started to perform in a lot of plays. There are twelve different colleges at Yale. Each had its own drama society and would put on different productions. Then there was the University Theater, which was beautiful and reserved for the biggest plays. I was doing plays every semester—myself and one other black girl, Cheryl Rogers. Our friends would come see us in Hedda Gabler, Uncommon Women and other plays they ordinarily wouldn’t have come to see, and enjoy them. I also performed at antiapartheid demonstrations to pressure Yale into divesting from South Africa, which were going on all the time. I didn’t know a lot about the politics. I couldn’t run down the statistics. But I could find poems thatwould relate and get up and perform them in the Commons area of campus. It would go over very well and when I was performing, I was in my element!
    At one point Auntie Golden advised me not to waste a Yale education on a theater degree. By then I was aware that it was the graduate drama school, not the undergraduate theater program, that was the best in the world. Still, I thought, I’m here and the drama school is right up the street! Thank you, Lord! And I’d walk down the street and—Hey, that looks like James Earl Jones! and it was. He was performing at the Yale Rep in A Lesson from Aloes. So for the first three years I tried not to major in theater. Instead, I studied administrative science—business. That seemed to be more practical. But I was just not into statistics and trigonometry and math that looked like artwork—squiggle, squiggle, triangle, equals sign. At one point I told myself I needed to put my priorities in order and focus on my studies. I didn’t do any plays that semester, but I found myself still doing all-nighters. I thought, Well, I might as well do my plays if I’m going to do all-nighters anyway.
    Eventually I went down the list in the Yale course directory: classical studies, women’s studies, history, molecular biophysics…None of those seemed to be much more practical than theater, and it seemed like a B.A. or B.S. didn’t get you too far and that everyone would need an advanced degree. Otherwise, what were you going to do with political science or economics? I wondered. I had heard that you could get into business school with a degree in any major, so I decided to throw myself into theater. If it didn’t work out at least I’d tried, then perhaps I’d apply to Wharton, a prestigious business school.
    By the time I figured all this out, it was too late to change my major to theater. So I majored in African-American studies/ theater, which caused my appreciation of black people, our culture, achievements and struggles—some of the most dramatic of which had unfolded during my childhood—to deepen. Myknowledge of our history and culture would shape my attitudes and beliefs about the opportunities I would later seek and accept. I also squeezed in a lot of drama courses and did a performance thesis in addition to my regular thesis on the history of the Negro Ensemble Company, down in New York, the first major theater company to focus on black life, and offer black writers, directors, producers, actors, playwrights and craftspeople the opportunity to produce works that reflected their cultural values and determine their own destiny. Lloyd Richards, one of its founding members, had just come to Yale to become the dean of the drama school. I got to meet him and asked him to get me an introduction to Douglas Turner Ward, head of the Negro Ensemble Company. The folks at NEC opened their files to me.
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    I didn’t get the chance to come to New York often; however, as I traveled in and out of the city during my college years, I did get to spend a little time with my father. He lived in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Several times I spent the weekend with him and his longtime, live-in girlfriend. We’d