Editorial Comment: "A Black Thing"

Abstract

Click for larger view Figure 1 [End Page viii] This special issue of Theatre Journal on Black Performance is dedicated toDr. Marvin Leon Sims, who died unexpectedly on Christmas day, 2003. At the time of his passing, Dr. Sims was President of the Black Theatre Network, the leading professional organization for scholars, teachers, and practitioners of black theatre, and incoming President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the parent organization of Theatre Journal. Born on 9 July 1948, Dr. Sims attained a BA from Capital University, an MA from Miami University, an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, and a PhD from Michigan State University. He taught at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign and Eastern Michigan University before becoming Head of Performance at Virginia Commonwealth University. At VCU, he taught courses on acting, directing, African American theatre history, and dramatic theory and criticism. Marvin was a leader, a colleague, a scholar, a teacher, a mentor, and a friend, whose life, wisdom, work, and infectious energy impacted so many. This special issue of Theatre Journal that investigates when, if, and how black theatre and performance constitute a particularly "black thing" celebrates Dr. Sims's spirit and his enduring commitment to black expressive culture. With these essays, articles, reviews, and reports contained, we pour libations in his honor. As I write these words in August 2005 for Marvin Leon Sims, I am very conscious of the sobering news which playwright August Wilson made public this month: that he is suffering from liver cancer and his doctors suggest that he has only months to live.1 With two Pulitzer Prizes, numerous New York Drama Circle Critics Awards, and other accolades, August Wilson has changed the face of contemporary American theatre, of black theatre, most certainly, and of black theatre scholarship as well. Wilson was the most produced American playwright in the 1990s. Already there are seven published studies of Wilson's work, including my own. With Radio Golf—which premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre on 28 April 2005, and then played at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in August and September 2005—Wilson realized his bold and ambitious, self-ascribed, dramaturgical project: to write a play for each decade of African American life within the twentieth century. While other American playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill and Ed Bullins have attempted to construct historical cycles, Wilson stands alone in having achieved this aspiration. Thus, his history cycle will live on as his enduring legacy. Relevant to this special issue, Wilson—in his theatrical life and letters, in his cycle of plays, and in his famous speech to the Theatre Communication Group (TCG) conference in 1996—explores provocatively the adage, "It's a black thing." But for Wilson this black thing is not something you just wouldn't understand. Rather, what Wilson claims through his cycle is that this is a black thing that we need to understand. We need to appreciate the endurance, the pride, the struggle, and the survival that constitute African American history and experience. Over the course of ten plays, Wilson explores the quotidian existence of ordinary black people and rights—or rewrites—African American history. As a result, his dramaturgy impacts how we think about the very construction of history. Even as Wilson considers the specifics of the African American past, his playwriting reaches beyond the particular to touch the cross-cultural. Wilson's work and his words, his spirit and special insight will continue to enrich us. When we read or view his plays, his so-called "400-year-old autobiography that is the black [End Page ix] experience,"2 when we savor his lines, we too can be renewed. These works will never stagnate, for even as they speak to the past, they resonate in the present. Fittingly, on October 17, 2005, the Virginia Theater at 245 West 42nd Street became the August Wilson Theater, and Wilson became the first African American to have a Broadway theater...