Paul Carter Harrison, the noted playwright, director, and educator died late last month at a retirement home in Atlanta. He was 85 years old.
A native of New York City, Harrison earned a bachelor’s degree at Indiana University and a master’s degree in psychology at the New School in New York City.
After spending seven years in Europe writing and directing theater, he returned to the United States to teach theater at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He later taught at California State University, Sacramento, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and finally Columbia College in Chicago where he taught for more than a quarter century until his retirement in 2002.
Harrison is perhaps best known for his play The Great MacDaddy, which won an Obie Award in 1973. He was the author of The Drama of the Nommo: Black Theatre in the African Continuum (Ultramarine Publishing, 1972) and the co-editor of Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora (Temple University Press, 2002).
