Black Theatre Research Articles

Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun

Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to <i>Raisin in the Sun</i>

Black Water Women Collective: A Theatre of Care Syllabus (Redux)

This care syllabus was first presented at the 2023 conference for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), Building from the Rubble: Centering Care, in Austin, Texas, as part of an interactive workshop titled, “Black Water Women Collective: A Theatre of Care.” The session, chaired by Dr. Mysia Anderson (UC San Diego), sought to consider the ways theatre has and can operate as a space for reflection, healing, and collective reconsideration for Black women. Across the African Diaspora, the element of water has been a conduit for such intentions, and our session conjured its cross-generational embodied epistemologies as they appeared in works and ways of Black theatre. The goals of the session were to create a space that embodied care through Black feminist rituals, performances, and studying and creating care together; to support academics, artists, and activists who believe that theatre, theory, art, and spirit can reside in one place; and to share works of care and pedagogies of care.

Editor-in-Chief: Introduction to the Black Theatre Review, Environmentalism

the Black Theatre Review takes up the theme of environmentalism for Vol. 2.2. The contributors to this issue and some of the agents they cover through their work offer readers several considerations for why theatre as a medium is an important mode through which to explore this theme, namely its power to raise awareness about environmental issues, spark dialogue and encourage audiences to act within their communities.

Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America From The Beginning to Raisin in the Sun by Clifford Mason (review)

Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America From The Beginning to Raisin in the Sun by Clifford Mason (review)

Black Theater, City Life: African American Art Institutions and Urban Cultural Ecologies by Macelle Mahala (review)

Black Theater, City Life: African American Art Institutions and Urban Cultural Ecologies by Macelle Mahala (review)

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett (review)

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett (review)

Macelle Mahala. Black Theater, City Life: African American Arts Institutions and Urban Cultural Ecologies

Macelle Mahala’s Black Theater, City Life: African American Art Institutions and Urban Cultural Ecologies demonstrates how the Black theatre companies and institutions it explores have transformed their respective communities into important sites of civic and artistic engagement.

M/S Innvik: A Ship with a View - Culture is who we are

The video works A Ship with a View and The Kitchen Garden were made during 2010 at the M/S Innvik, run by Nordic Black Theatre. This turned out to be the last year of the ship’s existence as an intercultural creative environment in the urban development Bjørvika. The works are created as montages with contributions of music, art and performance from people connected to the M/S Innvik. It shows glimpses of activities on board and the changing surroundings. This work pertains to the Sustainable Development Goal no 11: “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, and partly to the SDG no 7: “Clean and affordable energy”. It also suggests culture should be included in sustainability discourse. Cover image: video still by Kristin Bergaust Video work: A Ship with a View Video work: The Kitchen Garden

Contemporary Black Theater as a Possibility of Intersectional Critical Praxis

Since the Brazilian black theater groups are growing up in cities such as São Paulo and other capitals from Brazil, it becomes necessary to investigate the impact of their productions and organizations in aesthetic, political, and cultural perspectives. In the work of Abdias do Nascimento, black theater used to be proposed as a way to reflect on its identity. This characteristic remains until the present with different demands and prisms. The aim of this paper is to analyze the contemporary play IDA, a work that has the identity as theme for the Brazilian black women, considering identity in its fragmentations and intersections. As a result, it is expected to offer a better understanding of both the political and aesthetic possibilities of contemporary black performing arts, especially in the face of identity disputes as intersectional critical praxis.&#x0D;

Incendiary Dramas: Black Theatre Classics and Afrofuturism

How do Afrofuturism and Black Theatre fit together? A provocative question worthy of deep thought! Loosely construed, Afrofuturism provides a critical descriptive lens to explore black culture that questions the commingling of race, science, and technology, with a dash of the supernatural thrown into the mix from a largely African American context which impacts how we perceive literature, music, and film. From a theatrical standpoint, live performance provides a place to see Afrofuturism at work. The live performance element, the bringing of an imagined reality to real-life, in a sense, with real people, playing the parts in front of other real people, generates amazing stories of black experience. The dynamism of Black Theatre certainly lends itself to Afrofuturist speculation and critical thought. Theatre amplifies the stuff of life--joy, sadness, oppression, violence, laughter, love, emotions that cannot otherwise be described. The beauty is in the sparked thoughts firing in resistance to being made to feel lesser.Replete with Afrofuturism, Black Theatre provokes many future visions. Douglas Turner Ward's Day of Absence: A Satirical Fantasy (1965), Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Amiri Baraka's Dutchman (1964), August Wilson's The Janitor (1985), and Lynn Nottage's Poof! (1993) represent five such disparate visions ranging from a sudden mass disappearance to changing neighborhoods, to a subway ride, to a speech, to spousal abuse. Each play represents the creative force of Afrofuturism and the desire to make better futures by exploring possibilities. Afrofuturism offers both emancipatory visions and cultural alarums--lightness and dark.

From the Desk of the Editor: Introduction to the Black Theatre Review, Afrofuturism

From the Desk of the Editor: Introduction to the Black Theatre Review, Afrofuturism

Black Theatre, City Life: African American Art Institutions and Urban Ecologies by Macelle Mahala (review)

Black Theatre, City Life: African American Art Institutions and Urban Ecologies by Macelle Mahala (review)

Dancing grounds, bloody grounds: Pearl Primus and Michael Row the Boat Ashore (1979)

The Journal of American CultureEarly View ORIGINAL ARTICLE Dancing grounds, bloody grounds: Pearl Primus and Michael Row the Boat Ashore (1979) Ninoska M’bewe Escobar, Corresponding Author Ninoska M’bewe Escobar [email protected] Department of Theatre and Dance, The University of New Mexico Correspondence Ninoska M’bewe Escobar Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Ninoska M’bewe Escobar, Corresponding Author Ninoska M’bewe Escobar [email protected] Department of Theatre and Dance, The University of New Mexico Correspondence Ninoska M’bewe Escobar Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 11 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13459Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Works Cited Amin, Takiyah Nur. “A Terminology of Difference: Making the Case for Black Dance in the 21st Century and Beyond.” Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 4, no. 6, 2011, pp. 7– 15. Anderson, Jack. “Dance: Pearl Primus Presents 'Earth Theater'.” New York Times, 21 Aug. 1979, https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/21/archives/dance-pearl-primus-presents-earth-theater.html. Cleage, Pearl. “A Hollering Place.” Dramatists Guild Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 2, 1994. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.” Social Problems, vol. 33, no. 6, 1986, pp. S14– 32. DeFrantz, Thomas F. Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Dennis, Paul. Interview. Conducted by Ninoska M'bewe Escobar, 18 May 2021. Dennis, Paul. “Pearl Primus, 'Omowale,' Child Returned Home.” The Massachusetts Review, 14 Feb. 2021. Dixon-Gottschild, Brenda. "The Power of Dance as Political Protest." Dance Magazine, 29 Oct. 2020. Elam, Harry and David Krasner. " The Device of Race." African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 3– 16. Escobar, Ninoska M'bewe. Wrought with Light and Dreams: Auto/body/graphy and the Persistence of Pearl Primus. 2019. The University of Texas at Austin, PhD dissertation. Estrada, Ric and Sigrid. “3 Leading Negro Artists, and How They Feel About Dance in the Community: 1. Eleo Pomare 2. Arthur Mitchell 3. Pearl Primus.” Dance Magazine. vol. 42, no.11, 1968. Gere, David. “Dances of Sorrow, Dances of Hope.” Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext), 1994. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “ Pearl Primus: Dancing Freedom.” Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists & Progressive Politics during World War II, Basic Civitas, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2013. hooks, bell. “ Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition.” Let's Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance. Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1995. Hughes, Langton. " On Leaping and Shouting." The Chicago Defender, 3 Jul. 1943. King, Martin Luther, et al. A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. IPM (Intellectual Properties Management), in Association with Warner Books, 2001. Kisselgoff, Anna. "Pearl Primus Offering Program Of Dance Called 'Earth Theater'." New York Times, 24 Mar. 1979. ---. “DANCE VIEW,” New York Times (New York), 17 Dec. 1978, p. 2. Kourlas, Gia. "Could Dance Be a Weapon All Over Again?" The New York Times, 28 Oct. 2020. Krasner, David. "Walter Benjamin and the Lynching Play: Allegory and Mourning in Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel." Text & Presentation, 1997, pp. 64– 80. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press, 1982. Pearl Primus #1363. Secure Media Network. Dance Heritage Coalition, Accessed May 2016. http://archive.danceheritage.org/. Pearl Primus, " Omowale," Child Returned Home. Directed by Stan Sherer. 2020. Robertson, Michael. “Pearl Primus, Ph.D., Returns,” New York Times, 18 Mar. 1979, 2. Proquest. Web. Accessed 18 Mar. 2018. Schwartz, Peggy and Murray. The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus. Yale University Press, 2011. Sitton, Claude. "Birmingham Bomb Kills 4 Negro Girls." New York Times, 16 Sep. 1963, https://www.nytimes.com/1963/09/16/archives/birmingham-bomb-kills-4-negro-girls-in-church-riots-flare-2-boys.html. Schechner, Richard, and Willa Appel. By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Waithe, Mary. Interview. Conducted by Paul Dennis, 2020. Watson, Elbert. Interview. Conducted by Ninoska M'bewe Escobar, 8 Apr. 2022. Wolfe, George C. " Performance Method." Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. edited by Carter Harrison Paul, Leo Walker Victor, and Edwards Gus. Temple University Press, 2002, pp. 4400– 405. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

THE QUEST FOR UTOPIA IN BLACK THEATRE: AN ANALYTICAL STUDY OF NGUGI WA THING’O’S THE BLACK HERMIT

Utopia, the idea of a perfect society, has been a central theme in literature, philosophy, and art for centuries. The desire for utopia has inspired countless visionaries and reformers, who have sought to create a better world through various means, such as religion, ideology, science, or art. However, utopia has also been criticized and ridiculed as an impossible or even dangerous dream, that distracts us from the reality of our imperfect and flawed world.&#x0D; Ngugi Wa Thing’o, a prominent Kenyan writer and activist, has addressed the theme of utopia in many of his works, including his play The Black Hermit. Written in the 1960s, at a time of great political and cultural upheaval in Africa and beyond, The Black Hermit offers a complex and nuanced exploration of the quest for utopia in the context of black theatre. Through the character of the Black Hermit, a revolutionary who withdraws from the world to live in solitude, Ngugi raises questions about the nature and meaning of utopia, and its relationship to the struggles and aspirations of black people.&#x0D; The aim of this research is to deepen our understanding of Ngugi's work and thought by analysing The Black Hermit as a text that engages with the theme of utopia in a creative and thought-provoking way. It also examines how Ngugi uses the play to critique and challenge various utopia-building projects, and to propose his own vision of utopia as a process of becoming. The research also considers the relevance and significance of Ngugi's utopia to the contemporary world and the ways in which it speaks to universal human concerns.

Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation by Julius B. Fleming Jr

Reviewed by: Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation by Julius B. Fleming Jr Mary Rizzo Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. By Julius B. Fleming Jr. Performance and American Cultures. (New York: New York University Press, 2022. Pp. [vi], 301. Paper, $29.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-0684-3; cloth, $89.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-0682-9.) What was the affective register of the civil rights movement? From the joyful singing of freedom songs to the palpable anger of Anne Moody’s memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), civil rights activists felt their movement as much as they intellectualized or strategized about it. In the ambitious and generative Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, Julius B. Fleming Jr. asserts that scholars have ignored a key affect of the civil rights movement—patience. As he argues, historically when Black Americans have been told to be patient—defined as bearing suffering with equanimity—it has supported white supremacy. Time becomes a key framework through which to understand a movement defined by competing calls for “freedom now” and, as Nina Simone contemptuously sang, “go slow” (pp. 9, 114). Fleming suggests that we can apprehend the workings of Black patience through Black performance, particularly the time-based medium of theater. Focusing on the “‘classical’ phase” of the civil rights movement (1954–1965), he suggests that “black theatre in the Civil Rights Movement forwarded and energized the Black Radical Tradition—not by attaching itself to communism per se, but by working to disassemble the modern structures of racial time and racial affect that energize the violent cultures of black patience” (pp. 22, 24). Through analysis of theater and performance in the civil rights movement, we see not only the functioning of Black patience but also the depiction of its other, a “fugitive affect” that “strain[s] against the affective protocols of black patience” (p. 33). Fleming examines these ideas through chapters on famous and forgotten cultural productions. Chapter 1 focuses on the little-remembered centennial [End Page 389] commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963, which included a revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, an exhibition in Chicago, and a performance of a musical drama by Duke Ellington. The temporal and geographic meanings of the Free Southern Theater’s performances throughout the rural South are the subject of chapter 2. Amiri Baraka’s “black queer trilogy” of plays is the core of the next chapter, which examines the meaning of queerness and an eroticized Black body in the movement (p. 171). Chapter 4 turns to the performance of fugitive affect in Black plays that center “white impatience” rather than Black patience (p. 183). The book concludes with a chapter that parallels the public civil rights performances of sit-ins and jail-ins with theater pieces that depict these movement tactics on stage, a kind of doubled performance. Creating a new framework to understand the classical phase of the civil rights movement is no easy task given the number of published books on the topic. However, through his focus on temporality and the links between time and affect—patience is, definitionally, about time—Fleming has done just that. Black patience is a tool of racial oppression by forever putting freedom in the future (Fleming offers a critique of Afro-futurism as counterintuitively functioning similarly). His work urges historians to think about time beyond our usual mantra of change over time to consider how time structured how activists saw themselves and their movement. Some historians may be troubled by Fleming’s definition of radicalism. While scholars like Robin D. G. Kelley, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, and Peniel E. Joseph argue that radicalism in the movement was related to labor organizing and leftist political movements, Fleming sees radicalism in theatrical and other performances that “fostered different ways of seeing, feeling, and ultimately of being black, posing a formidable challenge to the violent enterprise of black patience” (p. 24). There is little discussion here of the direct outcomes of these performances on policy. Instead, the emphasis is on how performance reveals counterhegemonic ideas within the Black artistic community...

An arts-based autoethnographic exploration of a Black woman witnessing Slave Play: The audience’s the thing

This autoethnographic arts-based study explores how racial composition of theatre audiences impacts a Black woman’s witnessing experience during a play that contends with racial trauma. Employing Christine Mayor’s embodied tableau method, it examines the experience of a Black drama therapist viewing Jeremy O’Harris’ Slave Play three different times – twice in the context of predominantly white audiences and once with a predominantly Black audience. The research question was ‘how does racial composition of the audience impact the experience of witnessing Slave Play for the Black drama therapist?’ What I found was that witnessing performances about racial trauma in predominantly white audiences increased my feelings of discomfort, invasive exposure and decreased capacity for presence. Conversely, witnessing performances about racial trauma during a BLACK OUT theatre performance fostered and inspired connection, joy and presence. These relational–cultural complexities underscore the necessity of considering audience composition, engagement and responses when exploring topics related to racial trauma in performance. They furthermore underscore the relational potentials of theatre audiences for drama therapy performances and beyond.

Trouble In Mind by Alice Childress, and: Wedding Band by Alice Childress (review)

Reviewed by: Trouble In Mind by Alice Childress, and: Wedding Band by Alice Childress Melissa Barton TROUBLE IN MIND. By Alice Childress. Directed by Charles Randolph-Wright. Roundabout Theatre Company, New York. December 11, 2021. WEDDING BAND. By Alice Childress. Directed by Awoye Timpo. Theatre for a New Audience, Brooklyn. May 14, 2022. If Alice Childress is having a moment, one can’t help but wonder what she herself would have to say about it. There’s no doubt that Childress deserves to be remembered, most of all as the author of plays and fiction freighted with irony and wit, shimmering with hope, shot through with ambivalence and ambiguity. She felt her career to have been thwarted by prejudice, and she certainly craved the Broadway marquee she never graced in her lifetime. Yet it’s difficult to know how she would greet her Broadway premiere in 2021, framed as a rescue from a half-century of obscurity. The 2021–2022 season in New York City saw, seemingly coincidentally, two major revivals of Childress’s plays, each marketed as the resurrection of a lost genius. Both productions were couched in larger, overarching efforts by their sponsoring organizations to bring more Black plays to prominent stages—Roundabout’s “Refocus Project” collaboration with Black Theatre United, and Awoye Timpo’s organization CLASSIX. Both productions could be seen as responding, as well, to “We See [End Page 93] Click for larger view View full resolution LaChanze as Wiletta in Trouble in Mind. Photo by Joan Marcus. [End Page 94] You, White American Theater,” a manifesto issued in 2020 by a broad coalition of theatre makers calling for greater diversity both backstage and onstage. To be fair, director Randolph-Wright, a Roundabout board member, had long wanted to stage Trouble in Mind; he directed a workshop reading 15 years ago, and Timpo similarly has had a longstanding interest in Childress. But when organizations committed to the classics resurrect old plays that are suddenly considered of the moment, it invites the question: are Childress’s plays newly timely, or are they newly timeless? Childress herself has a lot to teach us about the difference. The plays certainly have a timely topicality, reminding us that white supremacy remains very much with us. And yet what is perhaps the most time-worn about the selection of these plays is their use as diversity programming: as Childress told James V. Hatch in 1972, the Greenwich Mews Theater produced Trouble in Mind in 1955 because “people were demanding that they do something Black.” The producers pressured Childress to make the play’s ambivalent resolution more cheerful and hopeful, and Childress capitulated, though she soon regretted it. Two years slogging through rewrites caused her to abandon a Broadway transfer, even though it would have made her the first Black woman playwright to be produced on the Great White Way—four years ahead of Lorraine Hansberry. Life very closely imitated art, since Trouble in Mind is a backstage “comedy-drama,” depicting a similar argument in rehearsals for Chaos in Belleville, a fictionalized, putatively anti-racist play. The director “Al Manners,” a pious mid-century liberal partly modeled on Elia Kazan and other Actors Studio contemporaries, and played in the Roundabout production by a wonderfully unctuous Michael Zegen, tells his cast, “We’re making one, beautiful, clear, point…violence is wrong […] It does not matter to me that they’re Negroes. Black, white, green, or purple, I maintain there is only one race…the human race.” The statement rings like the cocking of Chekhov’s gun. Before the play’s end, Manners has been exposed as a racist, and the star, Wiletta, has refused to perform, causing the production to crumble. Trouble in Mind is a tonal masterpiece, and director Randolph-Wright and the nine-member cast nimbly handled the play’s comedic opening beats of interwoven banter. Chaos in Belleville, the play being produced within Trouble in Mind, is an anti-lynching melodrama in the vein of white southerner Paul Green’s work from the 1920s. Both 1955 and 2021 audiences winkingly recognized the play as “problematic.” Trouble in Mind is not an anti-lynching play per se, even though it includes...

Black Theater, under Pressure

Black Theater, under Pressure

Josephine Stiles and Her House of Feature Films: Innovations of a Black Theater Proprietor

ABSTRACT: This essay explores the contributions of Josephine Stiles, a Black entrepre neur from Savannah, Georgia, to the history of film exhibition. She owned and operated the Pekin Theatre (1909–29), and I examine how Stiles responded to Jim Crow challenges and the movies' growing popularity by converting her theater into a palace at the same time as the moguls commonly associated with this phenomenon. The story of Stiles and the Pekin not only makes race central to the narrative of the movie palace's origins, but her accomplishments also highlight Black achievement as meaningful, not marginal, to that history.

Josephine Stiles and Her House of Feature Films: Innovations of a Black Theater Proprietor

ABSTRACT: This essay explores the contributions of Josephine Stiles, a Black entrepre neur from Savannah, Georgia, to the history of film exhibition. She owned and operated the Pekin Theatre (1909–29), and I examine how Stiles responded to Jim Crow challenges and the movies' growing popularity by converting her theater into a palace at the same time as the moguls commonly associated with this phenomenon. The story of Stiles and the Pekin not only makes race central to the narrative of the movie palace's origins, but her accomplishments also highlight Black achievement as meaningful, not marginal, to that history.