History

Dennis Leroy Kangalee in the final moments of “Krapp’s Last Tape” at the Carl Cherry Center, Carmel, CA 2025 [Photo: Manny Spinoza]

**A proud 2024-2025 Artist in Action Fellow**

Actor, monologist, storyteller, director, playwright, critic and the co-founder of the Kangalee Arts Ensemble, a theater group that fuses classical theater aesthetics with liberation politics.

A recent recipient of an Action Lab Fellowship and a commission from the Henry Miller Memorial Library, Kangalee is devoted to the anarchic spirit and the social consciousness of the artist. His life’s work has been the result of huge risks and dangerous experiments. He was the first artist to induct a Black Theater Seminar at the height of the Wilson-Brustein debate in 1995-1996, setting him at odds, ironically, with theater educators then– namely the Juilliard School and the theater establishment itself in NYC. What he has lost in a mainstream career, he gained in a rich and prolific life.

Best known for his 1999 revival of James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie at the National Black Theater in Harlem, his 2001 guerrilla cult classic movie about art, resistance and racism As an Act of Protest, his ceaseless workshopping and performing of Samuel Beckett’s monodrama Krapp’s Last Tape and his political plays, Gentrified Minds, his funky 2011 punk-rock monologue and the controversial drama, The Life & Death of Art (2024) — Kangalee has been a conscience for artists of his generation for three decades. His admiration for the Black Arts Movement and the Theater of the Absurd, two towering influences, is well known.

Dennis Leroy Kangalee is a staff writer for the Luminal Theater. One of the leading outsider theater & film theorists, his Visual Liberation pedagogy is the basis for his arts criticism and non-fiction writings.

His most recent piece, My Dying City, was workshopped with his ensemble in the spring of 2025 before being distilled into a solo piece: The Social Justice Suicide Hour, which seeks to interrogate the existential crisis of the Left and concerns from disgruntled radicals at the end of their tether. Part poem, confession, meditation, and provocation, this new monologue will premiere in February 2026.

In October, he shall perform a solo adaptation of Henry Miller’s haunting parable, The Smile at the Foot of The Ladder, which he is co-writing with poet/author Magus Magnus (Idylls for a Bare Stage). It shall premiere October 15th on the west coast as part of the Henry Miller in the 21st Century Symposium. Stay tuned for updates!

The Radical Spalding Gray: Dennis Leroy Kangalee underground radical radio DJ Godfrey Kafka in the May Day rehearsal of “My Dying City” (2025, Photo by Pamela Rozon)

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“In 2001, he created the best black film no one had the courage to distribute. But this encouraged him to go back to the stage years later. Somehow Kangalee combined the passion of Stanislavski with the decolonialist fury of Frantz Fanon and became an actor/director who has the courage to be himself. As a monologist he dares on stage the way poets or dancers do. He has more in common with a jazz artist than a typical actor.”

– Kam Williams, The New Jersey Herald, 2003

Dennis Leroy Kangalee, 2022, Studio 111 in Williamsburg, NY. (Kofi Yeboah)

FULL BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A “sit-down tragicomedian,” “a radical Spalding Gray,” “maverick,” “troublemaker,” “exasperating,” “passionate” – these are some of the phrases or words used to describe Dennis Leroy Kangalee.

Once known as THE NOMAD JUNKIE due to his peripatetic lifestyle and artistic promiscuity, DENNIS LEROY KANGALEE was an original member of Group 25 at The Juilliard School (as “Dennis Leroy Moore”) in 1994 before leaving to form his own theater company, Dionysus 2000. He established himself early as a theatrical outlaw and autodidact by presenting the very first Black Theater History seminar in Lincoln Center in 1996, on the heels of August Wilson’s provocative “The Ground on Which I Stand” manifesto, and later studying the footsteps of the Black Arts Movement and the Living Theater, two towering influences on his conception of radical art. He developed himself as a monologist, devouring works by Israel Horovitz, Samuel Beckett and Dick Gregory before finding his own voice as a writer.

While many of his contemporaries went Hollywood, Kangalee went neighborhood — and never wavered from his commitment to the social responsibility of the artist. An adept monologist and respected actor, he formally turned to directing in 1997, kick-started actors such as Damon Gupton and Morena Baccarin in the public eye. These early artistic experiments downtown at the Ohio Theater and Independent Art HERE led him to triumphs in Harlem at the National Black Theater with his 1999 revival of James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, starring Ward Nixon (their first collaboration).

Kangalee’s 2001 critically lauded independent film As an Act of Protest, was a powerful line in the sand against racism and police brutality that ruffled so many feathers, the Giuliani administration did their best to suppress the film in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It was the second of many acts of marginalization and erasure DLK has experienced. Such experiences only deepened his commitment to combining conscientious acting with radical politics.

Very much an “actor’s actor,” (he workshopped Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape successfully for nearly a whole year!) his performer instincts are extensions of his writing, which inform his approach to directing. Kangalee has been obsessed with the conscience and duty of the actor and acting itself — a forever lone, misunderstood and monastic art form.

A peer and contemporary of artists as diverse as Summer Hill Seven, Brian Alessandro, and Kofi Yeboah and inspired by 20th century artist-critics like Amiri Baraka, John Berger, Antonin Artaud, and Lester Bangs he writes for the Luminal Theater’s Wavelengths.

A recipient of honorariums, including one from Princeton in 2016, he is one of the leading outsider (“non-academic”) film theorists and independent scholars of Black protest drama. His contribution to the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 2021exemplifies his interest in mental health, trauma, and the healing power of art. His contribution to the critically acclaimed Fever Spores, a book about William S. Burroughs, with essays or interviews by Samuel Delaney, David Cronenberg, etc. – was published in 2022, the year he formed the Kangalee Arts Ensemble. The Ensemble is a non-profit repertory company devoted to the fusion of classical theater ideas and radical politics, both in service of the liberation of the actor as an artist in their own right.

His 2024 drama The Life & Death of Art was the first original drama in NYC to speak out against the genocide in Gaza and even more provocatively it saw the decimation of the colonized mirrored in the officious and venal culture of the fine art world, the terrain in which the play takes place. The play itself was a highlight in Kangalee’s personal development and aims as a playwright.

Kangalee is an advocate of artists and visionaries who build upon the hallmarks of art for social change in a way that is highly personal — and therefore a reflection of one’s own conscience. A 2024-2025 Artist-in-Action Fellow at The Action Lab, the Kangalee Arts Ensemble presented a rehearsal of his current work-in-progress, My Dying City on May Day, 2025.

Due to his success reviving two Samuel Beckett’s solo plays in Monterey, Dennis Leroy Kangalee was commissioned by the Henry Miller Memorial Library to adapt Miller’s exquisite parable about the artist’s struggle, The Smile at The Foot of The Ladder, to the stage for the Henry Miller in the 21st Century Symposium in Pacific Grove, California. It has been a lifelong goal to share with the public the insights, inspirations, and heartbreak he felt when first reading the short story over 25 years ago.

—- St. Clare Mulligan, 2025

OUTLAW STORYTELLER, REBEL PERFORMER

There are no more hospitals. There is just the wasteland that we have created. And I try, with words and performance, to bridge those worlds…But I can’t help feeling we are losing more and more…Push through the void, no matter what, and don’t turn back. Act on stage as if you are saving life, write on the page as if it’s your last confession. One of them will bring you transcendence. If it doesn’t keep trying. Your art may be the only bible someone may ever read. Leave it for someone to find.