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The Dunbar Repertory Company: Thriving Beyond New York City's Glow
For thirty-eight years, the Dunbar Repertory Com-pany's co-founder and artistic director, Darrell Lawrence Willis Sr., has created exceptional per-formances in New Jersey, starting in 1987, when he and Ramon James Morris founded the company and mounted a production of Samm-Art Williams's Home, at Brookdale Community College, in Lincroft. Today, Willis and only one other of the original company, Mark Antonio Henderson, remain a part of the current company in their present site at the Mid-dletown Arts Center in Middletown Township, minutes away from the Jersey Shore. Significantly, the Dunbar Repertory has mounted over one hundred productions to date, playing to some 50,000 patrons.
A New Jersey native, Willis was born on May 13, 1952, in Long Branch, New Jersey, fewer than ten miles away from Middletown. His father was a career military man in the U.S. Army, who met, fell in love with and married his South Carolinian sweetheart, who was working at the Fort Monmouth U.S. Army Base in New Jersey. Willis eventually became the middle son of eight brothers, surrounded by three older siblings and four younger.
As a young man he was very athletic. Playing football and running track kept him in good stead throughout his high school years. His interest in theatre began after he went with his high school class on an outing to New York City, where he attended a Broadway performance of Fiddler On The Roof. He later pan-tomimed, to great success, the role of the fiddler in a school production. He was also asked to fill in as a character in a school production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible and performed the role of John Proctor. His early theatre experiences opened up a curiosity that became a life-long obsession.
In his senior year, like the character Proctor, Willis found himself torn, in his case, between a desire to enter West Point to follow in his father's footsteps and the possibility of attending a local college on an athletic scholarship. His father encouraged him to go to college and finish his education. Willis followed his father's advice and went on to earn a BA in Com-munications and Theatre Arts from Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania; an MA in Theatre Arts from Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey; and a Masters in Theatre Arts in Acting and Directing from Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts (MGSA) in New Brunswick, New Jersey....(cont.)
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Count Stovall is an actor, director, producer and a poet, who has been active in the theatre com-munity since 1967. He has performed in six Broadway plays including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire. He is the recipient of three AUDELCO Awards and their Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the International Black Theatre Festival's Living Legend Award. (www.countstovall.com).
Autumn 2025
This article is featured in
Vol. 30, No. 3
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Darrell Lawrence Willis Sr. (3rd from left) and the Dunbar Rep-ertory Company's cast for a previous production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun.
Still acting on occsion, Darrell Lawrence Willis Sr. is pictured backstage as Narrator/Stage Manager in a recent Ocean County College production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town.
