Building a community-focused arts mecca in Harlem

Sade Lythcott is the CEO of the National Black Theatre, which says it’s the country’s first revenue-generating Black arts complex. Lythcott is also the daughter of Barbara Ann Teer, who founded the National Black Theatre and was a civil rights champion.

Lythcott was the chair of Coalition of Theaters of Color for 10 years and brought millions of dollars to its budget. Lythcott’s National Black Theatre co-produced the Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-nominated play “Fat Ham,” and brought the show to Broadway.

The National Black Theatre is currently undergoing construction and will reopen its doors in 2026. New York Nonprofit Media spoke with Lythcott to learn about the history of the National Black Theatre, its contributions to its community and what New Yorkers can expect when the theater reopens. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

How did the National Black Theatre come to be?

So National Black Theatre is the longest running Black theater in New York City, founded in 1968 by my mother, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, and is the first revenue-generating Black Arts complex in the country. We were founded in 1968 with a focus on centering and course-correcting stories of Black life. This time in 1968 where there was a real movement for civil rights, human rights and for Black artists in particular, a reclamation of their identity from the kind of flat, two-dimensional caricatures that often mainstream media, theater, film, television portrayed African Americans. So she moved up to Harlem, began renting space in an old jewelry factory, a loft style building on 125th (Street) and Fifth Avenue. And soon after NBT was founded, she realized the challenges that this kind of this liberatory practice or expression of storytelling, how challenging it was to find funders and supporters of a revolutionary way of reclaiming Black life in its wholeness.

In 1986, the building that we were renting space in burned down and she had this incredible idea to use the opportunity to buy the city block, which had been decimated by both the fire and just all of the vestiges of what Harlem was in the early ’80s. Also really just how devastated the art world and the theater world in particular had been by HIV/AIDS, and so there was this real kind of need to create something of permanence, watching how impermanent and how underinvested our communities were. Who we are as a people, as a nation, how we belong to each other, it’s all shaped by the stories we tell each other, the histories that we relay to each other. So she just saw it as an opportunity to not only create a deeply critical theater company, but a way in which to help shape African American culture nationally.

So we are a nonprofit theater that uses and leverages our real estate in order to subsidize our art and create an intersection of accessibility, workforce, development and creativity by leveraging the earned revenue from our real estate. (Teer’s) untimely passing left the organization at a crossroads, and the board asked me to come on for six months and I’ve been there ever since. So about 15 years and ushering in a new chapter for NBT.

Tell me about the latest reconstruction that is currently underway.

Our latest capital project, which we’re reimagining the city block that she purchased as ultimately what she wanted to build, which was an ecosystem for artists to live, work and serve. So while we are building this building, NBT has been itinerant, producing shows all over the country. But in particular, all throughout New York City, partnering with other theaters like The Public Theater, the New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, Park Avenue Armory, New York Theatre Workshop, the Vineyard Theater, the Apollo. It’s a really exciting time for us because as we’re building our new home, we’re gaining new audience members, community members and new patrons and we’re really excited to bring all of that energy back uptown to Harlem when we open in 2026.

In 2022 during the pandemic, our first show back from the pandemic was a show that we developed called “Fat Ham.” We co-produced it with The Public Theater and it won the Pulitzer. It really was one of those shows that has been heralded for bringing theater back to New York after the really challenging space of COVID. That show transferred to Broadway and ultimately got nominated for five Tony nominations. And that’s how NBT made its Broadway debut, making us the first Black theater to transfer anything to Broadway in almost two generations.

When some New Yorkers talk about 125th Street in Harlem, they focus on the crime and drug addiction issues. How can we bring the art back into the conversation about 125th Street?

It’s really challenging, you know. The thing that I fight the hardest for is the thing that feels the most basic, and the thing that people take for granted. The dignity of our stories, and the dignity of our lives. Like, we are building the craziest building. A building that no one thought we could build, that we could afford, that we should have access to those resources because of those narratives around “Zombieland.” We are the beginning of East Harlem. We are the crossroad between Central Harlem and East Harlem right there on Fifth Avenue. No one is really having the roll up your sleeves conversation about the disproportionate lack of social services.

East Harlem is the space in which the buses from Roosevelt Island, where all of the shelters are, drop off all of these homeless people every day since they can’t spend the day there. They only can spend the night, and if those populations want to get back on that bus to have a place to sleep at night, they have to stay within that local area. So 125th isn’t “Zombieland” for no reason. Nobody wants those social service offices in their own community, so they’ve punted it to us, and it is unfair.

And so what we’re trying to do, as the cultural arts sector, is to bring the dignity back that the disinvestment has kind of robbed us of. You see these shiny new theaters that go up in the Wall Street area, and you know, the Hudson Yards. Well, they don’t have any of those challenges. So they can be these, like examples and models of opulence. What we’re trying to do while telling our stories is what Dr. Teer understood in 1968, is that we’re actually trying to save our own lives because left up to the hands of those in our government, they would leave us to die. So we work with Uptown Grand Central, and we program underneath the Metro-North on 125th Street with free family programming. It’s important to see, as kids grow up in our neighborhoods and they have to see themselves reflected back, and if all that they have to point to are those headlines, what does that say about what they think their future holds? We feel like this is not just artistic work, it’s our civic responsibility.

What can the community expect when NBT reopens in 2026?

We’re building an incredible space that’s not brand new, but brand true. We rezoned our building that was three stories, which is now 22 stories, which is no small feat, especially in a community like East Harlem that’s very wary of developers. It was nine public hearings that unanimously said that the National Black Theatre should be able to rezone its building, and that’s partially because myself and our board chair showed up to every single hearing to listen to the concerns of the community and to make certain promises. I think that our good name and our reputation of programs like workforce development, programs like space subsidy, so that if you’re a small business or you are an individual artist, that you have access to our theater spaces, you have access to our meeting spaces, our community spaces, in order to be able to help bolster your own business, or to be able to put on your own show. We support folks by offering below-market rents and on many occasions, donating the space. So we’re bringing that back, and we feel really proud about that. I mean, it will be a big lift for us, because the space will be exponentially more expensive to operate. But you know, in this conversation about affordable housing, there also has to be affordable space for small businesses, for individual artists to be able to call a place home, and so folks can look forward to that program coming back. Our performing spaces will rival those that you see down in Lincoln Center.