Insert [Chitlin Circuit] Here: Teaching an Inclusive African American Theatre Course

Abstract

Insert [Chitlin Circuit] Here: Teaching an Inclusive African American Theatre Course Rashida Z. Shaw (bio) David Krasner: Do you teach . . . the Chitlin Circuit, and should black theater courses discuss this theater that is truly—or perhaps—“by, for, and about black people”? Why or why not? Margaret Wilkerson: I would applaud it. I’ve taught a little bit about [Chitlin Circuit plays], because I’m intrigued with the fact that they are so popular. Whenever something is that popular with a developing black audience, we who are in black theater and are attentive to it need not look down our noses at it but try to understand their standpoint.1 The above exchange between David Krasner and Margaret Wilkerson took place during a roundtable panel discussion on the “state” of African American Theater at the 1997 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference (ATHE). Twelve years later, the contemporary narratives of African American urban life contained within the gospel musical theatre productions of the Chitlin Circuit have grown in popularity. There are more productions. Circuit routes have been extended. Recordings of plays are widely available in VHS and DVD formats, and the plays themselves have been successfully adapted into network television shows and major Hollywood films. These developments necessitate a reconsideration of Krasner’s question. If, as Wilkerson replied, the plays and productions of the Chitlin Circuit should be addressed in African American theatre courses, then the question becomes, how and in what ways are they to be incorporated? Stated differently, how do we create inclusive African American theatre courses that take into account not only what we have established as the plays, playwrights, and critical perspectives that are fundamental to the discipline, but also those plays and performances, like those of the Chitlin Circuit, that seemingly fall outside of our purview? In this essay, I offer my upper-division undergraduate course, “African American Musicals in Theatre and Film,” as a model of an inclusive approach to teaching African American theatre as it considers the ways in which the contemporary Chitlin Circuit participates in the history and development of African American musicals since the late 1930s. A Forgotten Substitution In his famous 1996 keynote address titled “The Ground on Which I Stand”2 at the Theatre Communications Group’s eleventh biannual conference, playwright August Wilson seemed to assert that black theatre could be divided into two categories: 1) theatre, in Du Boisian terms3—that is “by us,” “for us,” and “about us”; and 2) theatre that is created for the entertainment of whites. Wilson stated: There are and have always been two distinct and parallel traditions in black art. That is art that is conceived and designed to entertain white society and art that feeds the spirit and celebrates the life of Black America by designing its strategies for survival and prosperity. . . . This entertainment for whites consisted of whatever the slave imagined or knew that his master wanted to see and hear. This tradition has its present counterpart in the crossover artists that slant their material [End Page 67] for white consumption. The second tradition occurred when the African in the confines of the slave quarters sought to invest his spirit with the strength of his ancestors by conceiving in his art, in his song and dance, a world in which he was the spiritual center and his existence was a manifest act of the creator from whom life flowed. He then could create art that was functional and furnished him with a spiritual temperament necessary for his survival as property and the dehumanizing status that was attendant to that.4 Wilson positioned his work “squarely” within the category of the “second tradition.”5 He used his address as a platform to demand funding for the support and development of black theatres that would cater to the work of black artists, proclaiming: “We do not need colorblind casting. We need some theatres to develop our playwrights. We need those misguided financial resources to be put to a better use. We cannot develop our playwrights with the meager resources at our disposal.”6 Furthermore, he condemned the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) system for having only one member theatre dedicated...