Before Halle Berry or Sidney Poitier, there was Hattie McDaniel. Eighty-three years ago this month, on Feb. 29, 1940, she became the first Black actor to win an Oscar.
Nominated as best supporting actress for her role in “Gone With the Wind,” the blockbuster film of 1939, McDaniel made history. But it came at a tremendous personal cost. LaDarrion Williams’ “The Boulevard of Bold Dreams,” now receiving a powerhouse, world-premiere staging at TimeLine Theatre, imagines McDaniel at a pivotal moment in her life, just hours before the Oscars. As she stops at a cocktail lounge to collect her thoughts, she ponders the existential question that poet Langston Hughes would sear into a nation’s consciousness a decade later: What happens to a dream deferred?
