Ridgely Torrence (1874 to 1950) was an American poet, dramatist, and editor, born in Xenia, Ohio. He studied at Miami University in Ohio and at Princeton, and he worked for a time as a librarian at the Astor Library in New York. He later served as poetry editor of The New Republic, a post he held for many years, and he was a longtime friend and supporter of other poets, including Edwin Arlington Robinson. Torrence came to prominence with Three Plays for a Negro Theater, published in 1917 and produced by Emilie Hapgood's Stage Society at the Garden Theatre in New York. The volume contained Granny Maumee, The Rider of Dreams, and Simon the Cyrenian. These works are widely regarded as among the first serious dramas by a white American playwright to portray Black life and to be performed on Broadway by an all-Black cast. The performers included Opal Cooper, Inez Clough, and Andrew Bishop, and the productions were a milestone in the development of early twentieth-century Black theater. Granny Maumee treats an aged woman's visions and her family's tragedy. The Rider of Dreams is a short, lyrical piece centered on a dreamer and his family. Simon the Cyrenian retells the story of the man who carried Christ's cross. His earlier poetry collection, The House of a Hundred Lights (1900), and later volumes such as Hesperides (1925) and Poems (1941) established him as a lyric poet. He also wrote the verse dramas Abelard and Heloise (1907) and Eldorado (1903). His plays about Black characters, though now read with attention to the limits of an outsider's perspective, were notable in their time for rejecting minstrel caricature in favor of dignified, poetic treatment of their subjects.
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