![]() ![]() We had cousins who had the “big house,” and there were all these swords in the front hall, and of course they were rusted, and I would frighten my brother to death and say blood curdling and dried on these swords. Of course, they didn’t know it was called Reconstruction, so I grew up hearing all that “after the war” stuff, and it was very scary. I don’t know, in the 1870s? They had early memories of Reconstruction. We have nothing to do but drink and talk. If you’re the first of three things, they’re going to let you live. That’s how to protect a little gay child in North Carolina. I was the first son, first grandson, and first great-grandson. I was lucky enough to have one great-grandmother alive and one grandmother. My brother is now a theater designer-Robert Long Associations-and my sister sings in the choir with The Lost Colony every summer.Įverybody tells stories down. my brother and I went to Yale Drama School. Talk around the dinner table was always about actors, plays, fellow directors, and careers. We were denuded of our parlors-the paintings all the furniture. Well, the front room went and was on stage. I remember once my father was directing a production of The Heiress. The front hall became the scene dock, and the dining room table was where my mother made costumes, literally. The family work in The Lost Colony in the summers-every summer-and in the winter my parents were at the Raleigh Little Theater in Raleigh, then at Chapel Hill with Playmakers, and then we went to Rock Hill, South Carolina, where my father founded the theater program-the department of dramatic art at Winthrop College, now Winthrop University. My brother and sister and I have been working with The Lost Colony for decades. His master’s thesis director was Paul Green, who wrote The Lost Colony, and my mother and father met at The Lost Colony. He went to Chapel Hill his undergraduate and graduate. To say that this changed the lives of this one part of a farm family is completely true. Can you imagine? After four years of working with her, he was given the very first scholarship in playwriting to UNC as a high school student. Bernice Kelly was her name, and my father was in her very first playwriting class. One of her classmates was the great Paul Green and his wife Elizabeth Lay. The lady who came to teach playwriting had graduated from the Carolina Playmakers early on. In this little town, Seaboard, the town fathers and mothers decided they wanted their kids to have some refinement, so in the 1920s they taught elocution, Greek, and playwriting. My father was the youngest of eleven children. ![]() I’m from a farm family in Northampton County. When it comes to his career path, Long says, “Yes, the apple fell directly beneath the tree.” William Ivey Long The family spent every summer in Manteo working on The Lost Colony and even lived in the stage left dressing room of Raleigh Little Theatre for a number of years in the late 1940s. His father was a drama professor and stage director, and his mother was a playwright, actress, and drama teacher. And in the Tar Heel State, he’s celebrated for a forty-five-year relationship with America’s longest-running outdoor symphonic drama, The Lost Colony. ![]() Long, a six-time Tony Award–winning costume designer, is nationally known for his work on Broadway hits including The Producers, Young Frankenstein, Hairspray, Nine, Grey Gardens, and Cinderella. ![]() Not because he wandered away from his native Seaboard, North Carolina, for a studio in New York’s Tribeca, but because he consistently returns home. You could say there’s something lost about William Ivey Long. ![]()
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