entr'actes. White audience members were confined to a separate section because, in the words of the theater's management, "whites do not know how to conduct themselves at entertainments for ladies and gentlemen of color." The most popular plays were Richard III and Othello. James Hewlett was the first black man of record to play the leading role in Othello. As was common at the time, the producers adapted Shakespeare's plays. Small casts and smaller budgets required expedients such as that described by the reviewer George Odell, writing of an 1821 performance of Richard III: "A dapper, wooly haired waiter at the City Hotel personated the royal Plantagenet in robes made up from discarded merino curtains of the ballroom. Owing to the smallness of the company King Henry and the Duchess were played by one person, and Lady Anne and Catesby by another. Lady Anne, in Act III, sang quite incongruously." The scholar Laura V. Blanchard identifies Odell's "dapper waiter" as the actor James Hewlett. Frequently harassed by the police, and facing increasing hostility from the white populace, the company moved several times, from Thomas Street north to Bleecker and Mercer Streets. At the time this was the edge of the developed parts of New York City. When Brown moved his theatre from 38 Thomas Street to Bleecker and Mercer Streets, he had a dilemma. Realizing that his theatre now was located too far from its core audience ("free persons of color"), he constructed a theatre building which was near a popular white theater called the Park Theatre. When the Park Theatre—New York City's leading theater of the time— put on Richard III starring the English tragedian Junius Brutus Booth, the African Company rented a hall next door for its own production of the same play the same night. Theatrical competition was stiff; Stephen Price, owner of the Park, orchestrated (and paid for) a disturbance over the rival productions so that the police would shut down the African Grove. In addition to Shakespeare, the African Company performed original works, which included William A. Brown's now-lost play, The Drama of King Shotaway. It was about a 1795 Black Carib revolt against British Navy forces on the island of Saint Vincent. Produced by the African Company in 1823, Drama is believed to have been the first full-length play by a black American performed in the United States. Despite the frequent changes in location