Black Women Playwrights: Exorcising Myths

Abstract

A LICE CHILDRESS, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ntozake Shange, three outstanding contemporary black women playwrights, are crucial links in development of black women playwriting in America. These three playwrights, whose perspectives and portraits are decidedly different from those of black males and white playwrights, have created images of blacks which dispel myths of the contented slave, the tragic mulatto, the comic Negro, the exotic primitive, and the spiritual singing, toe-tapping, faithful servant. Childress, Hansberry, and Shange have created credible images of blacks, such as the black militant, the black peacemaker, the black assimilationist, the optimistic black capitalist, the struggling black artist, and the contemporary black matriarch. However, three images which appear most frequently in plays of these black women are the black male in search of his the black male as a walking wounded and the evolving black woman. The black male in search of his manhood, a product of ambivalence fostered mainly by continued disinheritence of blacks after World War II and Korean War, is a major new image in contemporary literature. Functioning in this role, black male struggles to realize who he is and what his function in life is to be. In his essay, Visions of Love and Manliness in a Blackening World: Dramas of Black Life from 1953-1970, Darwin T. Turner states: