Tim Crawford is an African American playwright, actor, and director who served as the 2023-2024 Our Stage / Our Voices Artist-in-Residence. Originally from Chicago, Tim received his theatre training and a BA degree at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he was a multi-year member of the Straw Hat Players summer theatre program. He earned a Juris Doctor degree from George Washington University Law School. Tim has appeared in several productions locally, including as Roy Wilkins in Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way, and as “Hoke” in the Spencer Theatre Company’s production of Driving Miss Daisy.
As a playwright, Tim’s recent accomplishments include having his short play, The Consultant from Hell, his 10-minute play BLT Matters, his Nice One-Act You Got Here, Be a Shame if Anything Happened to It, and the first draft of his full-length play, The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves, performed as readings at the Valdez Theater Conference between 2018 and 2023. Several other plays of his have had readings and staged readings in various locations across the country. He directed acclaimed Baltimore-area premieres of both Fences by August Wilson and All in the Timing by David Ives.
During his Artist-in-Residency, Tim taught a three-session playwriting workshop to local aspiring playwrights. At the conclusion of the workshop, playwrights were invited to submit 10-minute plays for consideration to be included in a public staged reading in the UIS Studio Theatre. That event included three 10-minute plays from the local playwriting community and an early draft of Tim’s own play Outraged: Terror in Springfield 1908, written for the residency. After presenting and collecting audience feedback from that November 2023 “play-in-progress” event, Tim continued to revise Outraged and presented a more fully-produced version in February 2024.
In Outraged: Terror in Springfield 1908, we meet Bonaparte Baker, ten years after he survived a horrific attack on the Black community in Wilmington, N. C., in the previous century. On his way West, he steps off the train in Springfield, where he was born. Renowned as the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, Baker’s estranged brother-in-law tells him Springfield’s Black community feels protected, by Lincoln’s legacy, from the pogroms Black people are plagued with throughout the southern United States. In August 1908, Springfield is a place where terror and tragedy loom.
Press about Outraged:
NPR Illinois Community Voices / Outraged
Tim Crawford’s Concluding Artist Statement
