Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett

Abstract

Reviewed by: Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett Craig Peariso Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal. By Kate Dossett. John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xx, 338. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5442-3; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5441-6.) Much has been written about the Federal Theater Project (FTP), a part of the United States government's Works Progress Administration that from 1935 to 1939 paid out-of-work writers, actors, directors, and crews to stage theatrical productions. The segregated "Negro Units" within the FTP, however, have received less attention. In Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal, Kate Dossett offers a rich archival history of a number of Negro Unit productions, setting aside the question of white leadership within the Negro Units and highlighting the political complexity of Black-authored works produced by the FTP. As political opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal increased, its programs actually gained acceptance among many African American writers and activists for their potential to ensure at least a minimum standard of living for all Americans. For that reason, among others, the Negro Units were embraced by a number of playwrights as an opportunity to give form to a variety of political content. Through close study of manuscripts from local productions of Black-authored (or coauthored) plays, Dossett weaves an engaging narrative of the ways authors and performers (though her emphasis is clearly on the authors) used the theater to envision "radical paths to the future" (p. 39). [End Page 358] Dossett's study opens with a chapter on the 1934 play Stevedore, a play about the lives of working-class Blacks produced by members of New York's Theatre Union, a group of white leftist playwrights and directors. Though the play would seem to fall outside her specific focus on federally funded and Black-authored works, it is nevertheless important to her history, as it not only served as an important model for many in the FTP looking to produce socially and politically relevant work, but also "became important to a community of black theatre critics, audiences, and performers who were willing, skilled, and increasingly able to adapt white dramas in order to develop a politically useful black theatre" (p. 41). Having established Stevedore as a type of precedent, she goes on in the next chapter to discuss Black-authored works such as Stars and Bars (1937–1938) and Liberty Deferred (1937–1938), which adapted the Living Newspaper form as a means of "subjecting white spectators to the black gaze" (p. 121). With these first two studies in place, Dossett proceeds to devote the second half of the book to the various representations of Black heroism found in Negro Unit plays. She first offers a comparison of the characters of John Henry in Natural Man (1937) and Bigger Thomas in the stage adaptation of Native Son (1941) and then, in a different register, a consideration of Theodore Ward's Big White Fog (1937–1938). Looking to move beyond the now clichéd narrative that portrays Big White Fog as a "'pro-communist'" drama—noting that its labor politics are actually relatively anodyne—she chooses instead to focus on the play's gender politics, offering it almost as a partial counterpoint to the overwrought masculinity of Natural Man and Native Son (p. 165). Finally, she turns to Haiti (1938) and Go Down Moses (1938), two productions offering what she seems to see as a more hopeful model of Black male heroism by rooting it, respectively, in the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War and Underground Railroad. As a whole, Dossett's study makes an excellent contribution to our understanding of the history of African American theater, and American theater more generally. At a time when, as she notes, calls to improve and acknowledge the importance of Archives for Black Lives have become common on multiple social media platforms, Dossett returns to some of those archives to remind readers of their richness and intricacy. Craig Peariso Boise State University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association