All Pawtucket All The Time

Mixed Magic Theatre Pawtucket

During the 2009-2010 school year, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley has been named a Martin Luther King Visiting Scholar at MIT in Cambridge, MA. During his year long appointment, Mr. Pitts-Wiley will teach several classes in the Literature and Theater deparments, in addition to working with student groups to develop new works. In 2003 Ricardo Pitts-Wiley and his wife Bernadet formed Mixed Magic Theatre & Cultural Events, a non-profit arts organization, whose mission is ”to build more literate and arts active communities and to present a diversity of ideas and images on the stage.”
 
As the company’s Artistic Director Ricardo has garnered national and international acclaim for his page-to-stage adaptations of Moby Dick, Don Quixote, Frankenstein, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave and the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar.
 
He is also the author of ‘When Fate Comes Knocking’, about the people who witnessed the life and times of Martin Luther King, a choreopoem with music ‘The Well of Woman’, a one-man show ‘35 Miles From Detroit’, and a legal drama ‘On The First Day’.  
 
He has also written the script and lyrics and co-composed the score for the musicals, Celebrations: An African Odyssey, The Spirit Warrior’s Dream, Sara’s Jukebox, Night Voices, Man/Woman/Chaos, A Secret Meeting of Black Men, and A Kwanzaa Song. Ricardo also wrote Waiting for Bessie Smith, which features songs made popular by the legendary blues singer. He collaborated with his son Jonathan, a Yale University graduate, to create From the Bard to the Bounce: A Hip-Hop and Shakespeare Experience.
  
Ricardo Pitts-Wiley is an accomplished actor who has performed at theaters throughout the United States including The Actor’s Shakespeare Project in Boston, Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, RI, The Old Globe Theater and San Diego Repertory in San Diego, North Carolina Black Repertory, Rites and Reason and Perishable Theater. He has also performed at the North Shore Music Theatre, Foxborough Orpheum, New Repertory Theatre, Worcester Forum, Westerly Shakespeare in the Park, The People’s Light and Theatre in Westchester, PA and the Providence Black Repertory.
 
Ricardo has played feature roles in Othello, Fences, Macbeth, Master Harold and the Boys, Driving Miss Daisy, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, The Dumbwaiter, Piano Lesson, The Tempest, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Spunk, Boseman and Lena, A Winter’s Tale, The Good Times Are Killing Me, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Island, Threepenny Opera and John Brown’s Body. He has also appeared in productions of The Emperor Jones, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Hamlet, Of Mice and Men, The Taming of the Shrew, Only In America, The Colored Museum, A Raisin In The Sun and many others.
 
He has directed over 40 plays and musicals that include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Emperor Jones, The Tempest, Day of Absence, Romeo and Juliet, Lysistrata, Frankenstein, Moby Dick, The Spoon River Anthology, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Driving Miss Daisy.  
 
Ricardo has been Artist in Residence at the University of Rhode Island and Long Island University at Southampton, where he directed and taught acting. He has been a guest artist at Eastern Michigan University, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, Suffolk Community College, and Johnson & Wales University.