Editor’s note: This story is one of more than 55 profiles of influential Seattle artists past and present who are featured in our Black Arts Legacies project. Explore more dancers, painters, poets, musicians, actors, DJs, sculptors and creatives of all kinds.
You could say Andrew Lee Creech was made for the stage.
Born on December 22, 1988, he made his theater debut not three days later — as Baby Jesus in the manger in his family church’s Christmas play. Of course Creech remembers nothing of his stage debut, but considering his career as an actor and playwright, it’s hard not to see his starring role as Baby Jesus as anything other than an auspicious beginning.
For more than a decade, Creech has been making a name for himself on Seattle’s theater scene and beyond. In critically acclaimed acting roles and, especially, as the author of five new plays, Creech plumbs the depths of his characters and their relationships with an imaginative mix of humor and drama. On stage and off, his career is about elevating and promoting roles that don’t simply fill a quota, but give Black actors something meaty to bite into.
“I love interpersonal stuff,” Creech gushes during an interview at ACT Theatre. “I love conversations about race, too, because I always want to make sure we’re keeping those conversations alive … I think it’s really important to have a variety of stories that show the vast, full experience of Blackness.”
Creech’s splashiest and most ambitious undertaking is his Legacy Plays Project, a nine-play cycle tracing the arc of Black American life over the past 300 years. So far, he has written three installments: Men of Mettle, set in Reconstruction-era Louisiana; Last Drive to Dodge, a Black-cowboy Western; and Golden, a 2008 Great Recession period piece that premiered in May 2025 at ACT Theatre.
The idea behind the project, Creech says, is to “use specific moments in American history as these cultural touchstones to examine the Black American experience in that particular time period.”
Top row from left to right: Andrew Lee Creech at the first rehearsal for ‘Golden’ at ACT Theatre (Photo by Giao Nguyen, courtesy of ACT Contemporary Theatre); Creech during a photoshoot at ACT Theatre in March 2025 (M. Scott Brauer/Cascade PBS); A young Creech performs in a Kentlake High School production of ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’ (Courtesy of Andrew Lee Creech). Bottom row from left to right: Creech sits below the marquee at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute as it advertises the 2022 production of Creech’s play ‘Riverwood’ (Courtesy of Andrew Lee Creech); the 2018 production of Creech’s ‘Journey West!’ (Photo by Brett Love, courtesy of Copious Love Productions).
The plays in this cycle are often tinged with magical realism that amplifies the profundity of his characters and stories. In Golden, a powerful, mysterious coin machine represents a wild hope for a failing business. In Last Drive to Dodge, a windstorm stirs up surreal visions of the past, present and future, adding emotional heft to the play.
Another throughline: the concept of home for Black Americans. Where is it? And how can we get there?
“The Black American experience is one shaped by migration, either forcibly or voluntarily,” he says of the impermanence of place in Black culture. “Within that is this bid for stability, for ownership, because all generational wealth is tied into that. Needing to have a place that I can call mine, to build and pass down.”
For many, a play cycle focused on Black American life brings to mind August Wilson, the Seattle-by-way-of-Pittsburgh playwright whose Century Cycle has become a mainstay of American theater. Creech says his Legacy Plays Project is in conversation with Wilson’s cycle, but is part of a new wave of Black playwrights like Katori Hall (The Mountaintop, The Hot Wing King) and Erika Dickerson-Despenza (cullud wattah) who are writing in Wilson’s wake.
In telling Black American stories, Creech frequently collaborates with other Black theatermakers, including Valerie Curtis-Newton, who directed Last Drive to Dodge for Taproot Theatre Company. She sees Creech as one of a kind.
“It is not an easy time to make art and dream big — the times actually encourage us to think really small and be afraid and anxious,” she says. “But Andrew is being audacious, and he's saying, I want to make nine plays. I want to talk about different eras of Black life, and I want to do it with honesty and love for my people. That’s a bold statement to make, and it takes a measure of courage.…
“The other thing about Andrew’s work,” Curtis-Newton continues, “is that he’s growing while he’s doing it. He’s writing himself to a higher level of performance, which is another form of audacity.”
Creech spent most of his childhood and young adulthood in Seattle’s Columbia City and Hillman City neighborhoods. Growing up, he had a knack for telling stories and would constantly reenact his favorite movies and TV shows.
“I like to joke and say that I was probably the only 9-year-old in my apartment building with a typewriter,” he says. Everything was fodder for Creech’s childhood writing, from dreams and nightmares to frogs to school trips to the Hoh Rainforest. Each experience he transformed into stories all their own, even making up his own Goosebumps-adjacent series.
“I don’t know that I was ever fully aware of how much it actually meant, but thinking back on it,” Creech says, “it seemed to be really, deeply important to my soul to tell stories.”
Landing a speaking role on stage (beyond the manger, that is) came later. As a student at Kentlake High School — his family had moved to Covington in south King County to pursue his father’s dream of owning a house — he and his first girlfriend challenged each other to audition for their school’s theater program. He got in. Onstage, Creech found his raison d’etre, starring in productions like The Beauty and the Beast and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
His high school sometimes traveled to Seattle to catch productions at The 5th Avenue Theater — experiences that, for Creech, ended up being transformative. In one production he saw a performance by Seattle actor and director Timothy McCuen Piggee, who later became Creech’s mentor.
“What was amazing about that experience was I got to see a massively talented Black man on stage,” Creech remembers. “I got to see him in his bag.”
After graduating from Kentlake in 2007, Creech attended Green River Community College. He had planned to get his associate’s degree in psychology, but ended up studying performance. In 2009 he transferred to Cornish College of the Arts, where he specialized in “original works” with a focus on playwriting.
Upon graduation, Creech assumed he’d dive headfirst into playwriting, but instead got an acting internship at Intiman Theatre. He made his professional acting debut in Intiman’s 2013 production of Trouble in Mind, directed by Curtis-Newton. For the next three years, he built up his acting resume, appearing in a wide range of shows, including the rock musical Passing Strange; the dark comedy Buzzer; Mr. Burns, a Simpsons-inspired comedy; Romeo and Juliet; and Wonderful Life, a one-man spin on Frank Capra’s classic Christmas film.
Though he was having a lot of success as an actor, he also found there simply weren’t enough juicy roles for Black actors.
“You’re all scrambling for one or two shows a season,” he says. He also found himself questioning the motivation behind certain casting calls. “Am I being called in because of what I, Andrew, can bring to the piece, or am I just being called in because you need a Black body?” he wondered. “If it wasn’t a specific Black story, then I feel like we’re getting called in for smaller roles that were sort of helping tell a white person’s story.”
Such experiences led Creech to return to playwriting — to create more leading roles for Black actors. The first two plays he produced — though vastly different — reflect his interest in telling the stories of people who are overlooked.
Journey West!, produced in 2018 at Theatre Off Jackson by Copious Love Productions, is a farcical musical that reimagines the experiences of the lesser-known travelers on the Lewis and Clark expedition, undermining the “white hero” trope by depicting Lewis as a mushroom-taking drunk. In Riverwood, which premiered in 2022 at Seattle Public Theater with Shermona Mitchell directing, five tenants at the Riverwood Park Apartments navigate gentrification and an existential threat to their building and livelihoods.
In 2019, Creech began developing his first play for the Legacy cycle, the 19th-century-set Men of Mettle, which follows a ploy to get a Black man elected the first mayor of Lochton, Louisiana. (The play has yet to premiere on any official stage, but was workshopped in 2023 at the prestigious Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis.)
The first of his Legacy plays to get a big production was Last Drive to Dodge, which saw him reunite with director Curtis-Newton in 2023 at Taproot, in collaboration with The Hansberry Project. Mining the broadly obscured history of Black cowboys in the American West, Last Drive is set in 1884 and centers on domestic worker Ro (played in the 2023 production by Seattle mainstay Dedra D. Woods) and cowboy Prophet (Yusef Seevers), a couple whose dream of owning a ranch together is thrown for a loop when the ranch fails and Prophet and his cowboy friends go on strike.
“In Last Drive to Dodge, we were working very hard on how to drive story with [Creech’s] language — not just let the language be beautiful,” director Curtis-Newton recalls. “The relationships between them became more clear and not described, but activated.”
For instance, Creech’s depiction of a fight between the play’s central couple: Prophet wants to flee the ranch to head north while Ro wants to choose the devil they know and stay put. The push and pull between the characters is beautifully explicated by Ro, who contextualizes the mental load of being a Black woman during that era:
And when I come home beaten from carryin their burdens all day, every day, I wanna rest, but I can’t because I got to carry your burdens, too. And it’s too much. I’m happy to carry em, Prophet, but not for free, not no more. You want me to carry your troubles, you got to do some liftin, too.
Creech’s most recent effort, Golden, is perhaps his most relationship-driven play. It’s both a humorously biting critique of the American Dream and a dark character study of a Black man trying to make a place for himself amid a divorce and a failing economy.
Set during the Great Recession when Obama sat in the Oval Office, former boxer Morris Golden (played in the ACT production by Ty Willis) is in the middle of juggling his failing laundromat, a split from his ex-wife Rheeda (Tracy Michelle Hughes) and missing mortgage payments. Creech renders both Golden and Rheeda as two deeply flawed individuals: Rheeda works to become a nurse and Golden bets big on the wrong things. The dissonance in their relationship drives the play.
Through all his plays, Creech puts Black stories and roles firmly within reach, mining relationships throughout history as a means to understand the human condition — specifically, the Black American condition. That mission extends to his social media accounts, where he’s become a go-to source for commentary on Black theater and Black theater history, guiding his followers to plays by playwrights of color. He says he started his accounts as a way to make people feel less alone — he’s very engaging and funny — but, as in all his work, Creech is really about pushing the dial forward and building community.
“I am really passionate about remaking the American theater canon,” he says. “When we think about the classic plays that you learn about in your high school or your theater programs, there’s a lot of [Eugene] O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman. We also get some August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry in there — but there are so many other plays that we could consider classics.”
Remaking the theater canon is ambitious, to say the least, but at the heart of Creech’s mission is a simple goal: “When we talk about the theater classics that we need to be reading, I would like more Black voices to be in that conversation.”
