Brown received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Charles Revson Foundation. In film, Brown was the author of three screenplays, Dead Presidents, In Too Deep, and Freedomland, and two teleplays, Under One Roof and Laurel Avenue. Brown's plays include BLOOD IS THICKER, IN LOVE AND ANGER, DEADLY AIM OF THE STRAIGHT AND TRUE, KING OF COONS, BORDERS OF LOYALTY, OUTLAWS, PUSH, and GENERATIONS OF THE DEAD, OR INTO THE ABYSS OF CONEY ISLAND MADNESS. Brown's plays have been produced at theaters across the country, including Playwrights Horizons, the Mark Taper Forum, Long Wharf Theatre, and Penumbra Theatre.
His most successful productions have been THE DAY THE BRONX DIED, an examination of homophobia and black and Jewish relations, and ASCENSION DAY, a story of the Nat Turner slave rebellion of 1831. His work includes over 20 plays and numerous film scripts. He also studied at the Hammerstein Center for Theatre Studies. Fortenberry said the O’Hare story is one of three men a gangster who robbed, a lawyer who changed to do good and the lawyer’s son who turned from good to great by securing a victory during. He graduated from Lehman College and earned an MFA from Columbia University in 1987. It is a telling measure of what we have come to that the prison locale of these old movies has changed to a Coney Island housing project like these earlier works, GENERATIONS makes no bones about its social message, pointing a stern, warning finger at its audience for participating in a system that creates these ghetto prisons … I choose to call it daredevil playwriting, brimming with the dynamic stage language and swaggering confidence of a writer in complete control.” -Jan Stuart, Newsdayīorn in the Bronx, Michael Henry Brown was a playwright and screenwriter. The corruption of the good kid is the stuff of great American pop mythology, and Cody’s transformation from aspiring actor to gangster can be traced back to classic docu-melodramas like Caged and I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang. He is, in short, the American Dream, and the ineluctable path of GENERATIONS is that of the dream gone astray, as Cody’s resolve is slowly poisoned and eroded by the ghetto.
It may be the most corrosive and unsparing drama to emerge from the pen of an African American writer since the angry days of Ed Bullins and Richard Wesley … it is this young man who provides GENERATIONS with its thematic pivot: Cody Cooper is the great black hope, the son of a former maid and a one-time hustler who stashed their hard-earned money away so that their children could have a better life. “GENERATIONS imposes itself upon you with outrageous gestures and bold flights of language.
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