NEW YORK — Gene Persson, a movie and theater producer best known for a controversial racial drama, “Dutchman,” and a charming children’s musical, “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” died June 6 in Manhattan, where he lived. He was 74.

The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Ruby.

Persson began as an actor. In the 1950s, he appeared on several television shows, including the crime series “The Walter Winchell File” and “Dragnet.”

By the end of the decade, however, he was married to the actress Shirley Knight and had begun to turn his attention to producing, starting with early plays by LeRoi Jones, who later became known as Amiri Baraka.

The next year he produced “Dutchman” in Los Angeles, where the play, a two-character drama set in an empty subway car in which a white woman (played by Knight) provokes a black man to fury, was barred from one theater, then temporarily shut down by the police in another. Objecting to the subject matter and the script, which was liberally salted with obscenities, The Los Angeles Times and The Hollywood Citizens-News refused to accept ads for the play. Persson then produced a film of the play in London; he was prohibited from filming on the New York City subway because of the film’s content.

In 1967, within weeks of the New York opening of the brutal “Dutchman” film, the cheerful musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” an adaptation of Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” comic strip, opened at Theater 80 St. Marks in Manhattan. It was an instant hit and ran nearly four years.