By Wes Cipolla | Pilot Staff

BOSTON — Father Oscar Pratt was finally ready to step into the limelight.

For years, Father Pratt, pastor of St. Katharine Drexel Parish in Roxbury, wanted to participate in a production of “Black Nativity” in Boston. The Roxbury-based National Center of Afro-American Artists has performed Langston Hughes’s “song-play,” which retells the Nativity story with gospel music and an all-Black cast, for 53 straight years.