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After years of rejections, Charlotte playwright Rory Sheriff finds festival spotlight 8%
By Gwendolyn Glenn8%
7/29/2026, 3:00:33 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 23 faulty reasoning types, including Halo Effect, Optimism Bias, and Appeal to Emotion, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 13.7% saturation with 148 hits. Analysis detected 949 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,077 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 20.4% and a BS Rank of 8% (23,218 of 25,185 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 92.20% of the article peer group.
For eight years straight, Charlotte theater director and playwright Rory Sheriff submitted videos of his productions for inclusion in Winston-Salem’s National Black Theatre Festival.
Each year he was turned down.
But in 2022, Sheriff’s Brand New Sheriff Theatre Company (BNS) got the green light to perform "Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom " during the annual festival.
“It’s hard to put into words, but it was a dream come true,” Sheriff said.
“I’d submitted so many plays and finally landed it.”
During this year’s festival, now called the International Black Theatre Festival (IBTF), not only will Sheriff’s BNS company be performing August Wilson’s "Joe Turner’s Come and Gone," but Sheriff is directing Wilson’s play "Fences."
“I’d prayed for a day like this, and to be doing both means a lot to me,” Sheriff said.
BNS Productions' presentation of August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at The National Black Theatre Festival in 2022.
Courtesy of BNS Production's Facebook.
In an email message, Jackie Alexander, artistic director for the North Carolina Black Repertory Company, the producer of the festival, said Sheriff was selected to direct "Fences" because of his "extraordinary ability to illuminate the emotional depth, humanity, and cultural significance of August Wilson's work.
"His vision, leadership, and deep respect for the text make him the ideal artist to bring this American classic to our stage,” she added.
This marks the 37th year that Winston-Salem has hosted the theater festival, which was founded by the late Larry Leon Hamlin and his wife, Sylvia Sprinkle-Hamlin.
The festival kicked off on June 27, with actress Phylicia Rashad receiving the Sidney Poitier Lifetime Achievement Award at the opening gala.
On Wednesday, Rashad narrated Wynton Marsalis’ "A Fiddler’s Tale."
As in past years, more than 30,000 people are expected to attend this year's festival, which features more than 100 theatrical performances, workshops, cultural events and community programs at venues citywide.
Stage plays include adaptations of Ossie Davis’s "Purlie Victorious," Athol Fugard’s "Sizwe Banzi is Dead, Lydia Diamond’s adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel "The Bluest Eye" and Zora Neale Hurston’s "Their Eyes Were Watching God."
Sheriff said his BNS company will perform "Joe Turner’s Come and Gone" this Friday and Saturday for four shows at the Reese Theatre, featuring the same cast that performed it in Charlotte in February 2025.
“I submitted it because of the quality of the actors’ performances and the level of the set (design).
I really wanted to share this production with audiences,” Sheriff said.
Alexander said they selected the play "because it stands as one of the cornerstone works in Wilson's Century Cycle.
Together with "Fences," it allows festival audiences to experience different chapters of the Black American journey through one of our greatest playwrights.”
Sheriff referred to himself as a scholar of Wilson, who grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and distinguished himself as one of America's great playwrights.
(Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize for "Fences" in 1987 and a second for "The Piano Lesson" in 1990.
"Fences" also won a Tony Award for Best Play in 1987.)
Sheriff said he not only studies Wilson's plays and characters, but he is also a member of the August Wilson Society, a national organization that works to preserve, study and advance Wilson’s legacy.
Rory Sheriff, founder of Brand New Sheriff Theatre Company.
"I grew up in neighborhoods like those in his plays, The Hill District (in Pittsburgh) and North Philly.
His characters feel like I know them because they are like my dad and uncles,” he said.
Sheriff founded BNS in 2013 after a career as a radio personality in Pennsylvania, Charleston, SC and with Power 98 in Charlotte.
He said he had been doing freelance writing on the side and had written some screenplays that were not picked up, but he still decided he wanted to work full-time in theater.
He produced plays with his own money and later sought grants.
He created BNS as a nonprofit organization, and it became a residency company at Charlotte's Spirit Square arts complex in 2014.
BNS is Charlotte’s only Black repertory company that performs a full season of four to five productions annually.
In 2016 it won the Taste of Theatre award in Chicago for Rory’s play, "Boys to Baghdad," which focuses on Rory’s experiences serving in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm.
Awards aside, Sheriff said it hasn’t been easy keeping BNS afloat financially.
"Be A Lion," a play he wrote, produced and directed, has been the company's biggest box office success, he said.
BNS Productions' presentation of "Be A Lion."
BNS Productions' Facebook.
“It’s a musical with gospel and hip hop songs that’s a sequel to "The Wiz," he said.
"It’s a story of what happens after Dorothy leaves Oz.
Shelly Garrett (actor and playwright) told me to put it on stage.
I did, and a review(ers) said they couldn’t tell if it was gospel or porn, and…Shelly said choose one.
He told me to rewrite it and make it a family play, and I listened to him.”
In 2021, BNS was forced to relocate after Spirit Square closed to make way for a planned development along Seventh and Tryon streets.
For a time, Sheriff said, the company staged productions at Booth Playhouse and Dale F.
Halton Theatre at Central Piedmont Community College, but those venues became too expensive.
“We went to the West End after bleeding so much money, and we saw the Arts Factory as the best place for us.
We are going to do our entire next season there,” Sheriff said.
Being selected to perform a second time at IBTF is not just about visibility.
“The festival is truly holy ground for Black theater, because it gives Black professionals a chance to learn from each other, to teach each other, be introduced to each other — all things that we need,” he said.
As for his take on directing "Fences," he said it will be pretty much what audiences have seen in other productions, with one exception.
“There’s not much space to play with on Fences, but one thing that gives creative space is the ending.
I want to put my signature on that,” he said.
"Fences" runs through Aug. 1 at Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts in the Hanesbrands Theater in Winston-Salem.
The BNS production of "Joe Turner’s Come and Gone" will be performed July 31 and Aug. 1 at the Reese Theatre in the Benton Convention Center.
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