Black Drama Research Articles

Checklist of Black Playwrights: 1823–1970

i first began to develop a list of black American playwrights (about ten years ago, in response to a question by a student), I would not have believed the problems that apparently minor task would provide: • Historians of American black theater rarely distinguish between plays about blacks and plays by blacks. • Countless plays are listed under three or more variant forms of the title (in one case, at least, in a book on drama by the author of the play). • Many playwrights are flatly identified as black in one authoritative source, as non-black in another.

Black Power in the Caribbean

Black Power rage, drama, and style, as revolutionary jargon, offers something to everybody: to the unemployed, the idealistic, the dropout, the communist, the politically frustrated, the anarchist, the angry student returning from humiliations abroad, the racialist, the old-fashioned black preacher who has for years said at street corners that after Israel it was to be the turn of Africa. Black Power means Cuba and China; it also means clearing the Chinese and the Jews and the tourists out of Jamaica.

The Delicate World of Reprobation: A Note on the Black Revolutionary Theatre

W ith this pronouncement Leon Trotsky,' the very archetype of a revolutionary, elucidated the shifting collective impulses that shape and reshape imaginative literature. Trotsky's interpretation of the way literary forms organically correspond to social-psychologic demands illuminates with remarkable clarity the growing body of drama that thus far constitutes the Black Revolutionary Theatre.2 In the past decade several black playwrights have attempted to dramatize the inner need of their people in order to shape the drama of their lives, and have coincidentally reshaped the life of their drama. More than anything else the demands for authentic black self-expression dictate the form of this drama, and the success of that cultural definition distinguishes the achievement of the Black Revolutionary Theatre.

Contemporary Black Drama from "A Raisin in the Sun" to "No Place to be Somebody" ed. by Clinton F. Oliver and Stephanie Sills (review)

Contemporary Black Drama from "A Raisin in the Sun" to "No Place to be Somebody" ed. by Clinton F. Oliver and Stephanie Sills (review)

All Black Showcase: The Effectiveness of a Negro Theatre Production

C ontemporary theater is vitalized by the works of black playwrights expressing the feelings and frustrations of black people. To their audiences they say more than just enjoy, they say look, feel, understand, and change! This is theater as a social force. How successful are these plays? How strong is their impact? this theater produce Experimental research to investigate audience responses is common in other communication areas; it is rare in the theater. This doesn't have to be the case. It doesn't detract from the integrity of a production to try to measure its effects in more specific terms than critical reaction. It may tell us a great deal we want to know about the production, especially when we expect responses other than appreciation and enjoyment. It is important when we want to answer the question, Did this theater experience do what we expected it to do? This is a report of the use of communication research techniques applied to the black theater production, A Hand is on the Gate, presented to a predominantly white college community to see how effective the production was with respect to key social and entertainment dimensions. It also looks toward the broader question: Can entertaining theater be an effective agent for social change? And it suggests that communication research methods can be profitably used in the theater.