Kermit Frazier

Kermit Frazier has been a writer—especially playwright and television writer—as well as a teacher of writing, literature, and theater for nearly forty years.
This past June, 2020, his career as a playwright was featured in a New York Times arts section article about his very first play, Kernel of Sanity, appearing online in Paul Vogel’s Bard at the Gate series of presentations of “overlooked plays.” A month later, his latest play, Else, was presented online as a part of the Lower Depth Theatre Ensemble’s “Pandemic Plays” series. That play was his 25th.
His play, Modern Minstrelsy, was workshopped at LDTE and was a finalist for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. Plays produced in New York include Kernel of Sanity, Shadows and Echoes, Outside the Radio, Dinah...

Kermit Frazier has been a writer—especially playwright and television writer—as well as a teacher of writing, literature, and theater for nearly forty years.
This past June, 2020, his career as a playwright was featured in a New York Times arts section article about his very first play, Kernel of Sanity, appearing online in Paul Vogel’s Bard at the Gate series of presentations of “overlooked plays.” A month later, his latest play, Else, was presented online as a part of the Lower Depth Theatre Ensemble’s “Pandemic Plays” series. That play was his 25th.
His play, Modern Minstrelsy, was workshopped at LDTE and was a finalist for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. Plays produced in New York include Kernel of Sanity, Shadows and Echoes, Outside the Radio, Dinah Washington Is Dead, and Class Reunion. Those produced around country include Firepower, Legacies, Sacred Places, Interstices, An American Journey (commissioned by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater), Dream King (commissioned by Baltimore Center Stage), and Smoldering Fires (commissioned by First Stage Children’s Theater). Also Little Rock, a rock’n’roll musical inspired by events surrounding the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957, which was commissioned by the Seattle Children’s Theatre and performed in Seattle, Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, and Little Rock. He has also been commissioned to write living history plays for the Baltimore City Life Museum and the Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture.
He has written for such television series as the popular children’s mystery series Ghostwriter (which he helped to create and was a head writer), Gullah Gullah Island (co-producer and executive story editor), Married People, True Colors, The Cosby Mysteries, All My Children, The Misadventures of Maya and Miguel, The Magic School Bus, and The Wonder Pets. He created an animated children’s series, The Adventures of the Do-Stuff Club, with Blackside, Inc., the producers of the award-winning documentary, Eyes on the Prize.
His articles, reviews, and short stories have appeared in several magazines and journals, including Green Mountains Review, The Chicago Review, American Theatre, Black World, Essence, and The New York Times Book Review. "Drive,” the first chapter of his memoir, Piecing the Puzzle: Coming of Age in Anacostia, was published in Callaloo, the premier Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters. “Snow,” the second chapter of his memoir, was a runner up in the 2018 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in nonfiction and was published in The Missouri Review in summer 2019. Two other nonfiction pieces were recently published online in Consequence Magazine: “Ignobled in Indianapolis” in July 2020 and “The Third Battle of Manassas” in November 2020.
His play, Smoldering Fires, is published by Dramatic Publishing. Four other plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing: An American Journey, Legacies, Kernel of Sanity, and Firepower.
He has taught writing and literature at Chicago State, Morgan State, and New York Universities, Baruch and Williams Colleges, and the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, where he also served as acting president. He has also taught playwriting and acting in Maryland public and private schools (through a program he helped develop at Center Stage in Baltimore) and in New York City area public schools through the Lincoln Center Institute. He has been a writer-in-residence at Williams College and at the Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture. And he is Professor Emeritus at Adelphi University, where he taught in its MFA program in creative writing.
A recipient of a McKnight Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting, Mr. Frazier has also twice had a play workshopped at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.
He has had artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, Yaddo, Millay, Norton Island, and the Liguria Study Center for the Arts & Humanities in Bogliasco, Italy.
A member of the Writers Guild of America, the Dramatist Guild, SAG-AFTRA, Actors Equity Association, and the Ensemble Studio Theatre, Mr. Frazier received his B.A. and M.A. in English from Syracuse University and his M.F.A. in acting from the New York University School of the Arts Theater Program.

Scripts

Wheresoever They Lie

by Kermit Frazier

Synopsis

Reeling from a sudden, unanticipated breakup, a middle-aged gay Black man searches for deeper love and affection both inside and out.

Reeling from a sudden, unanticipated breakup, a middle-aged gay Black man searches for deeper love and affection both inside and out.

The Year of Return

by Kermit Frazier

Synopsis

Ever haunted by a tragic river accident when he was 15 and sparked by a promise made to a childhood friend, a 40-year-old African American man travels to Ghana, his first trip to Africa. Traveling with him in mind and spirit is his 80-year-old mother, whose journal entries and sporadic yet cogent memories mix and merge with the Twi of her son’s 30-year-old African guide, someone who’s haunted in his own...

Ever haunted by a tragic river accident when he was 15 and sparked by a promise made to a childhood friend, a 40-year-old African American man travels to Ghana, his first trip to Africa. Traveling with him in mind and spirit is his 80-year-old mother, whose journal entries and sporadic yet cogent memories mix and merge with the Twi of her son’s 30-year-old African guide, someone who’s haunted in his own particular way. . . . This is a three-character play that explores recovery, rescue, and possible redemption through history, kinship, and the need to return.

Sacred Places

by Kermit Frazier

Synopsis

Sacred Places is a political love story that takes place both in late September 1967 thru early June 1968, and spring of 1980. It’s a story about how two bright, independent, African American college students, sweetly meet in the fall of 1967, only to see their attraction and connection, their intimacy and love, severely tested by tumultuous times. It’s a story of how the private and the political can often...

Sacred Places is a political love story that takes place both in late September 1967 thru early June 1968, and spring of 1980. It’s a story about how two bright, independent, African American college students, sweetly meet in the fall of 1967, only to see their attraction and connection, their intimacy and love, severely tested by tumultuous times. It’s a story of how the private and the political can often spar with each other, creating a tangle of feelings, a complex, contentious web of emotions. It’s a play about space and place and our fundamental need for them both. It’s a dialectic, an argument, a debate about race and class and social change.

Firepower

by Kermit Frazier

Synopsis

With an important piece of legislation pending, treatment for a serious illness about to begin, and engagement to a woman half his age in the balance, a first-term City Councilman in Washington, D.C. is visited by his two adult sons, the younger one a closet gay man who must find a way to come out to his father, the older one an ex football star who has been living out of the country and out of touch for nearly...

With an important piece of legislation pending, treatment for a serious illness about to begin, and engagement to a woman half his age in the balance, a first-term City Councilman in Washington, D.C. is visited by his two adult sons, the younger one a closet gay man who must find a way to come out to his father, the older one an ex football star who has been living out of the country and out of touch for nearly twenty years. Both sons, in addition, carry a long-held secret agreement that is destined to explode in their father’s face.

Modern Minstrelsy

by Kermit Frazier

Synopsis

On a hot August night in a predominantly white community on Long Island, NY, an African American man shoots and kills a white teenager who with three friends has been chasing in their car that man’s 20-year-old son. That shooting triggers not only charges and trial but also the apparent “re-surfacing” of Nig and Jig, African American and Irish American figures respectively, who are locked in a seemingly never...

On a hot August night in a predominantly white community on Long Island, NY, an African American man shoots and kills a white teenager who with three friends has been chasing in their car that man’s 20-year-old son. That shooting triggers not only charges and trial but also the apparent “re-surfacing” of Nig and Jig, African American and Irish American figures respectively, who are locked in a seemingly never-ending struggle for agency, place, and point of view in America's history and psyche.