What Have We Learned?

Abstract

W. E. B. Du Bois's profoundly important "four fundamental principles" of "a real Negro theatre" in 1926—"About us, By us, For us, and Near us"1 —were hardly written in a vacuum. One of the goals of the Harlem Renaissance was to define a "black play." The emergence of an African American theatre movement during the Harlem Renaissance raised questions about the meaning of black theatre. Drama critic Theophilus [End Page 585] Lewis put it succinctly when he remarked in 1927 that there "must be a clear understanding of what the term Negro drama means."2 The demand for a precise definition was the concern of journals, newspapers, and periodicals; requests were sent to playwrights and scholars for their opinions. The period's buzzword "real Negro theatre" was debated and scrutinized by nearly everyone. The desire to know the definition of a "black play" prompted activist Anna Julia Cooper to invite Howard Professor Alain Locke to attend a gathering in order to "tell us just what constitutes a race drama and how may we know it when we find it?"3 The thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance understood two fundamental points: that theatre is a unique form of expression, and that racism determines why the question "What is a black play?" requires asking. First, theatre is more than merely author and content. At the risk of over-simplification, in theatre the identity of the role and the actor are just as important. These factors—author, role, actor, subject matter, and audience, too—increase the vectors and combinations of what constitutes a "black play." Second, James V. Hatch contends that racism "lies behind the question," because "if there was no racism, the question wouldn't be discussed."4 The noxious residue of racial injustice that began with slavery, was exacerbated by minstrelsy, and continued through segregation and lynching must factor into the meaning of race in the theatre. The fact that the referential symbol of segregation derives from the theatrical character Jim Crow—the most popular minstrel caricature—tells us just how profound and costly a burden theatre carries. Add canon formation to the question's complexity. Sandra L. Richards astutely asks, "What do you teach when you teach a course in African American theater? Do you, in effect, teach a canon?"5 Should the history of minstrelsy be included in African American theatre history? If productions are a concern, should color-blind casting inform decisions? Does a production of an all-white cast of Shange's for colored girls deracinate the play? If these queries are not exhaustive enough, then there is the history of white blackface performers who established what Winona L. Fletcher calls "the stronghold of stereotypical images."6 The history of racism onstage (including stereotyping Asian, Native, and Latino/a Americans) must be taken into account in any attempt at cross-racial casting. However, if casting remains fixed and limited to the predictable, then the slippery slope of identity politics emerges. This can lead to a kind of stereotyping in perpetuity, resulting in what Terry Eagleton calls "the familiar emotional blackmail of the postmodern left," in which only private experience and unalloyed ideological pronouncements certify identity.7 These questions have weighed heavily on black performers, playwrights, producers, designers, critics, and dramaturgs who have endured the "burden of representation." [End Page 586] Rather than asking "What is a black play?," it might be useful to split the terms in relation to separate projects: what is "black" (or red, yellow, brown, white, or Christian, Moslem, Jew, Buddhist, etc.), and what is a "play"? However, what makes the question vexing and compelling is precisely that it represents the intersection of these two concerns. A play is never merely dialogue, gesture, people, and sets. It is a composite incorporating conflict, passion, and identity, or rather the creation of these entities. In The Ethics of Identity, Kwame Anthony Appiah eloquently advocates a paradigm of living that takes into consideration identity's uniqueness and reciprocity. He recommends a "rooted cosmopolitanism" in...