August Wilson’s relationship to black theatre: community, aesthetics, history and race

Abstract

Before the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, the Federal Theatre Project (1935-9), and the American Negro Theatre and the Negro Playwrights' Company in the 1940s, where was black theatre? There were minstrel shows conceived by whites and performed by whites in black face in the early nineteenth century, such as E. P. Christy's Minstrels. Then, after the Civil War, black actors were seen on stage performing in such shows as Haverly's Colored Minstrels. Undeniably, however, these, whether performed by white or by black actors, perpetuated derogatory caricatures of African Americans. Before minstrel shows there were plays written by black playwrights, but their titles and creators are not well-known to most American theatregoers: James Brown's King Shotaway (1823), William Wells Brown's Escape, or Leap of Faith (1858) and Angelina W. Ginkle's Rachel (1916). In the 1920s Willis Richardson's The Chipwoman's Fortune (1923) and Garland Anderson's Appearances (1925) reached the Broadway stage, still the 'Great White Way' (although this was a reference to the lights on theatre marquees, it had a symbolic truth with respect to race), but these, too, were beset by ubiquitous caricatures. In the 1930s, though, Langston Hughes's play Mulatto (1935) achieved considerable success, focusing in a serious way on racial identity and establishing a record run for a black play on Broadway not beaten until Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959). The latter constituted a crucial moment in black theatrical history, launching the career of a number of black actors and that of a man who would go on to direct August Wilson's plays, Lloyd Richards, the first African American to direct a Broadway play.