The First Black Actors on the Great White Way (review)

Abstract

In The First Black Actors on the Great White Way, Susan Curtis provides an account of Ridgley Torrence's Three Plays for a Negro Theater. The focal point of her examination is the April 1917 opening of Torrence's one-act plays, The Rider of Dreams, Granny Maumee, and Simon, the Cyrenian. According to Curtis, the reception of these plays tells us a good deal about how "the ideas and values implied by Torrence's dramas were received, reworked, and partially incorporated into the thinking about race, America, and citizenship" (xii). Three Plays for a Negro Theater was the first Broadway production by a white author (Torrence), white producer (Emilie Hapgood), and white director (Robert Edmond Jones) to make use of an all-black cast. This production, Curtis explains, was significant because it uncovers "the crosscurrents, inequality, and ambiguity of cultural hybrids [that] emerge as clearly as the beautiful image of black and white artists joining hands across the color line" (14).