Black Theatre Research Articles

What is Black Theatre? The African-American Season at the Tricycle Theatre

Kobna Holdbrook-Smith was a member of the repertory company formed by artistic director Nicolas Kent for the 2005–2006 African-American season at the Tricycle Theatre in north London. That company also included Jenny Jules, Joseph Marcell, Lucian Msamati, Carmen Munroe, and Nathan Osgood. In Walk Hard – Talk Loud by Abram Hill, a play originally produced in 1944 and set in New York in the late 1930s, Holdbrook-Smith played a young boxer who faces racism. In Lynn Nottage's contemporary satire Fabulation, he took on dual roles – the heroine's husband who absconds with her wealth, and the gentle ex-junkie who offers her love. And in August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean, set in Pittsburgh in 1904, his Citizen Barlow seeks purification from the 285-year-old spiritual adviser Aunt Ester and is taken on a symbolic rite of passage. The Ghanaian-born Holdbrook-Smith also appeared at the Tricycle in 2004–2005 in Mustapha Matura's Playboy of the West Indies. Terry Stoller, who teaches at Baruch College in New York City and is working on a book project about the Tricycle Theatre, spoke with Holdbrook-Smith in June 2006 in Covent Garden, London.

"Talking B(l)ack": Construction of Gender and Race in the Plays of Eulalie Spence

\ “Talking B(l)ack” Construction of Gender and Race in the Plays of Eulalie Spence —ADRIENNE C. MACKI Every dialect, every language, is a way of thinking. To speak means to assume a culture. —FRANTZ FANON, Black Skin, W hite Mask s Although Eulalie Spence was writing at the same time as other prominent black playwrights and authors, such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Weldon Johnson, her plays have often been overlooked by contemporary scholars, who tend to dismiss her work because of its inclusion of black dialect (with its echoes of minstrelsy) and because of her failure during her lifetime to sustain a career in theatre. However, by creating theatre for African American audiences through her work with the Little Negro Theatre movement in the 1920s, Spence provided an alternative to stereotypical black minstrelsy. Moreover , by codifying the performance of black identity through the use of dialect, she underscored race consciousness. According to linguist John Edwards, language serves as an instrument of communication and a system enabling communities to maintain their identity.1 Spence’s inclusion of dialect functions not only as a representation of African American identity but also as an act of resistance. “Talking black” enables Spence to dramatize self-actualized black women who ¤ght against oppression and consumption while struggling to maintain racial and gender subjectivity. Yet, at a time when black authors and artists were encouraged to think in terms { 86 } of racial uplift, and when black dialect was becoming a subject for anthropological study—a relic of folkways—the use of black dialect onstage was at once a bold and a dangerous choice. Her use of black dialect empowered Spence and her audience on two levels: she claimed both a racial and a feminist identity on the stage, and she created an intellectual and linguistic path for others to follow. Her theatricalcontributions as a dramatist, actress, and director have earned Spence a rightful place in literary and dramaturgical history. While her record of production is especially noteworthy within the context of the art theatre movement, where art was set against commercialism, it is more important in terms of African American theatre history.This history is characterized by multiple attempts to redress what Stuart Hall calls the “politics of representation” as well as to identify how images of blackness were produced and how representations of race were conveyed.2 Black theatre artists were continually aware that their racial representation and identi¤cation were simultaneously acts of social protest and artistic expression. Even so, con®ict surrounded the role and responsibility of black drama in terms of whether theatre should employ art for propaganda or create art for its own sake. As a result, interpretation and promotion of folk culture were especially vexed concerns for African Americans and the Little Negro Theatre. The inclusion of dialect only exacerbated these concerns . Although black audiences and practitioners contested folk dialect in the mid- to late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, it continued to appear in race drama. In fact, the connection of dialect with cultural history (particularly a diasporic history) and how dialect as a linguistic concept preserves memory emerge as signi¤cant facets of Spence’s dramaturgy. Spence’s work serves as a paradigm to examine the presence of dialect on the stage in black drama, taking into account how linguistic patterns con¤rm ethnicity onstage and what that suggests in performance. Whereas the dramas of Zora Neale Hurston present black dialect in the context of an anthropological experiment, and the comedies of Bert Williams and George Walker trade on its comic values, the dramas of Eulalie Spence position dialect at the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, and geography. Dialect enables her to subvert stereotypes, as in Her (1927): “we’re colored through an’ through . . . ’sceptin’ that we’s allus on time”;3 and to provide social commentary , as in Fool’s Errand (1927): “Ef such doins keeps on, reckon our young people’ll be jes’ as brazen’s white folks.”4 In Spence’s plays, dialect becomes not merely a historical object but a tool for pulling a fragmented past into a more coherent future. Spence creates a distinctive diasporic language...

African American Theatre

David Krasner: In surveying contemporary London theatre, New York Times critic Ben Brantley reported that the Tricycle Theatre hadinaugurated a season of African-American plays with the commandingly titled but obscure Walk Hard, Talk Loud, a play by Abram Hill from the early1940's. Abram who? The name meant nothing to me, but Abram Hill (1910–1986) was a founder and director of the American Negro Theater in New York (1940–1951) and a playwright, it seems, of considerable verve.3That Abram Hill and the American Negro Theatre—the most important black theatre company during the mid-twentieth century—has flown below the radar is indicative of how much work still needs to be accomplished.

Drama, theatre, and identity in the American New Republic

Introduction 1. American identities and the transatlantic stage Part I. Staging Revolution at the Margins of Celebration: 2. Revolution and unnatural identity in Crevecoeur's 'Landscapes' 3. British author, American text: The Poor Soldier in the New Republic 4. American author, British source: writing revolution in Murray's Traveller Returned 5. Patriotic interrogations: committees of safety in early American drama 6. Dunlap's Queer Andre: versions of revolution and manhood Part II. Coloring Identities: Race, Religion, and the Exotic: 7. Susannah Rowson and the dramatized Muslim 8. James Nelson Barker and the stage American native 9. American stage Irish in the Early Republic 10. Black theater, white theater, and the stage African Part III. Theatre, Culture, and Reflected Identity: 11. Tales of the Philadelphia theatre: Ormond, National performance, and supranational identity 12. A British or an American Tar? Play, player, and spectator in Norfolk, 1797-1800 13. After The Contrast: Tyler, civic virtue, and the Boston stage.

Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora (review)

Reviews Paul Carter Harrison,Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards, eds. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Pp. 418. $29.95. The impact on contemporaryAmerican and African-American theater attributable to August Wilson, whom we lost in October of 2005, will continue to be discernible for many years to come. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright's cycle of ten plays, each set in a different decade of the twentieth century, reasserts the necessity ofa playwright's attention to the modalities and cadences of spoken language and realizes our highest aspirations for the art form by bringing to the stage characters and situations that are finely crafted yet so immense that in hindsight they seem like myths or legends. Black Theatre: RitualPerformance in the African Diaspora is evidence of Wilson's influence on the interpretation and theorization of drama as well. In the book's preface, Paul Carter Harrison describes a 1996 speech thatWilson delivered at Princeton University entitled "The Ground on Which I Stand." In it, the author of plays such as Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom "dropped the gauntlet on skepticism about the validity ofBlackTheater" (1). Challenging the faulty assumption that drama by and about people ofAfrican descent is ofonly parochial interest, Wilson declared, "there is no idea that cannot be contained by black life" (1). Moreover, he demonstrated a sophisticated conceptualization of race and/as identity: "Black or African-American not only denote race, it denotes condition, and carries with it the vestige ofslavery and the social segregation and abuse of opportunity so vivid in our memory" (1). Perhaps his most significant statement was on the continued necessity of black dramatic artists to draw from the cultural traditions of the African diaspora for the sake of maintaining those traditions and making black theater a site of consistent innovation . According to Harrison,Wilson encouraged "jettisoning the aesthetic models ofWestern tradition" and embracing the "spiritual temperament ofthe ancestors whose songs, dances, and art were a manifest act of the creator from 125 126Comparative Drama whom life flowed" (1). Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, Harrison writes, was begun in part as a response to Wilson's speech. Harrison's own writing provides other antecedents to this volume; he is perhaps best known as the author of the Obie Award-winning play The Great MacDaddy (1973) and The Drama ofNommo (1972), the latter "a project designed to construct a foundation for identifying the continuity ofAfrican cultural underpinnings in the American experience that informed the aesthetics of Black Theatre" (8). In his essay contribution to Black Theatre, Harrison explains that "Nommo" comes from the Dogon people of Mali and is their name for"the creative force that gives form to all things" (316). Harrison's TheDrama ofNommo identifies the "Nommo force," a name for the power of the word to convey a"spiritual intensity"or to invoke the spiritual realm (or both),which is utilized in the rituals in black everyday life and in the theater that derives from it,charging them with vitality. Ritual—another keyconcept,whichAmiri Baraka calls "the oldest root of performance" (378)—is theorized as "a specific, formalized , activity that a people create in order to achieve a particular psychological , physical, or spiritual result for individuals and the community" (316). The goals ofritual are notjust to entertain the audience, therefore,but to transform it; ritual requires not only the audience's attention, but its participation as well. Harrison discusses the Ring Shout, and performances by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and even the Florida A&M University Marching Band as examples of Nommo and ritual. These principles, Black Theatre contends, are among the most distinguishing features of the theater produced within the African diaspora.With author Victor Leo Walker II, CEO ofthe African Grove Institute for the Arts—an organization also inspired by Wilson's speech—and playwright Gus Edwards, Harrison has edited a collection oftwenty-six essays, plus introductions to each offour sections, and an afterword. This volume extends the theories articulated in both Wilson's speech and Harrison's book, the latter of which is a touchstone for several of the pieces in Black...

Separate Theaters: Bethlem ("Bedlam") Hospital and the Shakespearean Stage (review)

Reviews131 American" as identity categories with meanings specific to the social and political contexts in which they are articulated appears to have had an influence on Black Theatre. Other contributions to Black Theatre—most, though not all ofwhich,were written for this volume—come from Nobel laureates Derek Walcott and WoIe Soyinka, stalwarts of the black literary tradition such as Amiri Baraka and Ntozake Shange, contemporary dramatists Keith Antar Mason and awardwinning playwright-producer-director George C. Wolfe, and highly regarded literary scholars such as William W. Cook and Keith L.Walker.Walcott's "Overture " to What the Twilight Says (1998) sees recent performances ofCarnival in Trinidad not as true theater but as "the art of brochure" (105), folk forms corrupted by politics and commerce that are displayed for the sake of tourists. Deborah Wood Holton's essay explicates the role of the dramaturg using the figure ofthe cartographer.And Cook contributes greatly to the study ofAugust Wilson by identifying how bearing witness to memories and experiences of disruption, in a communal context,functions as a blueslike"logotherapy" (391), an "eruption of words" (395) that is ritualized within Wilson's plays. Published before that playwright's death, this volume is a fitting tribute to Wilson and more.A book ofsuch scope would be well served by an index, however ("There oughtta be a law ..." ), without which it is much harder to trace the citations and influence of Harrison's Nommo. Nevertheless, Black Theatre remains a powerfully useful resource. Dramatists and scholars of the history of theater and ofAfrican and African-American studies will find it useful because it takes on the nuts-and-bolts-type work ofexplicating African-derived cultural traditions and provides specific examples of their influence on and continuation within dramatic works of the African diaspora. Jeffrey Allen Tucker University ofRochester Ken Jackson. Separate Theaters: Bethlem ("Bedlam") Hospital andtheShakespearean Stage.Newark:UniversityofDelaware Press, 2005. Pp. 309. $57.50. What makes Ken Jackson's study ofBethlem Hospital and Bedlam dramas particularly convincing is his own experience as a health professional in various mental institutions. The author's proximity to mad patients (he wrote much of the book during his night shifts) lends his work a credibility and sensitivity often lacking in purely historical and/or literary approaches to Renaissance madness. Especially striking is Jackson's argument, doubtless informed by his 132Comparative Drama own sympathies for the mentally insane, that Bethlem Hospital, for all its entertainment value, was first and foremost a place ofcharity. It was designed, he reminds us, to elicit charitable donations, and ifvisitors to the hospital were confused, disgusted, or amused by what they saw, such feelings did not eclipse their charitable acts. Contemporary readers may find it difficult to reconcile the exploitative practice oftouring a madhouse with the benevolent gesture of sponsoring itspatients; ourpost-Enlightenment sensibilities dictate that we hide any impulse to scorn or laugh openly at those less fortunate than ourselves. (Jackson suggests that our efforts to avoid such improper responses to madness are perhaps why today's charitable acts typically involve little or no physical contact between givers and their recipients.) But Bethlem Hospital, he contends , was a place where charity and spectatorship intersected; madmen were housed and publicly displayed, both separated from and integrally related to Tudor/Stuart society. The author offers an articulate summary ofthe contested place ofBethlem Hospital in Renaissance England, and ofthe contested concept of"charity" in a Protestant society. He condenses complex historical evidence to comprise a lucid account of local governments' attempts to maintain management of the madhouse , even as the 1598 Poor Laws threatened to grantjurisdiction increasingly to Church and Crown. Jackson highlights a move by King James in 1618 to replace the hospital's keeper ofsome nineteen years with his own court physician , in what seems a transparent attempt to exercise court control from inside Bethlem's walls. That Londoners stubbornly resisted this and other national efforts to centralize and regulate both the hospital and its charitable contributions runs counter to conventional interpretations ofBethlem as an emblem of state authority and power, a view largely predicated on Michel Foucault's tacit assessment of Bethlem Hospital as an English precursor to the eighteenthcentury hôpitauxgén...

Editorial introduction

Editorial introduction

‘Black and female is some of who I am and I want to explore it’: black women's plays of the 1980s and 1990s

This article looks at the increasing number of plays by black female authors and tries to give explanations for such a development. Against this background, individual plays are examined which deal with such diverse topics as migration, unplanned pregnancy, drug trafficking, black lesbianism, the black community, ‘black’ health and the Christian nativity story. In the light of the ubiquity of many of these themes, a move of black women's theatre from fringe to mainstream seems possible.

Writing black back: an overview of black theatre and performance in Britain

Black people have lived in Britain longer than they have in the United States and yet, until the closing decade of the twentieth century, their contribution to British theatre has received limited and short-lived attention. In this essay I trace a trajectory of representation of black people in theatre from the early modern through to the pre-Windrush period to recognize that which has paved the way to the increasing visibility of contemporary black British playwrights of African descent in theatre of the new millennium.

Black Theatre's Closet Drama

Where do the early blackface plays collected in W. T. Lhamon's Jump Jim Crow belong in the genealogy of black performance?10 Nowhere, Shauneille Perry suggests.11 Contrasting blackface minstrelsy with black radicalism, Perry notes reprovingly, "Had there been a multitude of Nat Turners, Harriet Tubmans, Toussaint L'Ouvertures and Mary Princes in 19th-century America, there would have been no Jim Crow, then or now." Perry invokes these heroic names as talismans against Lhamon's restoration of Jim Crow as an icon of a circum-Atlantic, multiracial lumpenproletariat (literally, a proletariat in rags). In early Jim Crow he finds a performance effigy more subversive of white supremacy than abolitionism. Perry dismisses this argument along with the plays Lhamon has republished. Calling them "distorted remnants from a painful past," they do not represent identification across the color line for Perry, but rather a "soul-destroying force." In place of such grotesqueries, Perry substitutes prime symbols of what Victor Anderson calls "ontological blackness." Ontological blackness, Anderson writes, emphasizes "the heroic capacities of African Americans" and depicts black people "as surviving under unprecedented struggle by the development of a revolutionary consciousness that is itself representational of authentic black consciousness." But Anderson traces this racial ontology to the "Western aesthetic category of genius" and goes so far as to assert that "ontological blackness signifies the blackness that whiteness created." The rhetorical strategy Perry employs to reject the theft of black culture, Anderson might counter, is itself a "mirror" of Euro-American categories.12 This does not in itself invalidate Perry's reaction, but it does demonstrate the degree to which all attempts to specify pure origins inevitably reveal hybrid affiliations. The inverse relationship Perry posits between racial equality and blackface performance is a longstanding hypothesis in black letters. We hear an echo of it in an 1862 [End Page 590] article, "Jim Crow Exhibitions and Negro Extravaganzas," published in the black California newspaper, the Pacific Appeal. Terming minstrelsy "a moral ulcer" and calling for its "abolition," the Appeal made an early linkage between Jim Crow the performance and Jim Crow the segregation. "In the City of Boston," the Appeal wrote, "these Negro delineators cannot obtain permission of the city authorities to exhibit," while in San Francisco they are "of nightly occurrence." In Boston, "Colored and white children are educated at the public schools in common," while in San Francisco "Colored men are refused a seat in omnibuses." In places "where the rights of the Colored man are mostly respected," the Appeal concluded, "those burlesquing exhibitions are never tolerated," while in those "where their rights mostly are discarded, these exhibitions in ridicule are of common occurrence."13 With its twin emphasis on rights and respectability, the Appeal articulated the black uplift agenda, which values education, sobriety, and the upward mobility that lies at the heart of the myth of a classless democracy. Blackface performance yoked black people to the body and its disrespectable pursuits (dancing, sexuality, excretion). In its place, respectable black "performances"—attending school, riding in omnibuses, voting in elections—were propounded as the remedy for racial inequality. This eminently bourgeois agenda has much more in common with Perry's radical genealogy than is easily recognized. Both posit an inverse relationship between the spread of inauthentic "Negro delineators" and the flowering of authentic black culture. On this point, a generation of work on blackface minstrelsy, by scholars such as Eric Lott, Dale Cockrell, Annemarie Bean, and Lhamon himself, has been both revelatory and frustrating. This work—often loosely allied with the project of critical white studies—has not managed to unsettle a basic division of labor between the study of performance seen as "representational of authentic black consciousness" on the one hand and, on the other, of the "Negro delineators" whose persistent attraction to and co-optations of the styles and sounds of that authenticity have been prime movers in American culture. This division is replicated in the body scholastic, with black scholars working primarily on...

Black (Play) Is. .. Black Play (Ain't): The Gumbo of Theatrical Blackness

In Marlon Riggs's brilliant and under-heralded film, Black Is . . . Black Ain't (1995), Riggs narrates part of the work from his hospital bed, IV drip dangling. Houston Baker, Jr. has called Riggs a black hero for his performance and, ostensibly, for the craft of his final project. A meditation on what Riggs had contemplated throughout his too-short life as to what might be "black" and what might not be, Black Is . . .Black Ain't confronts the arts of performance (film, dance, theatre, spoken word poetry) which exhibit limited and narrow definitions of blackness. Blackness, Riggs asserts, is a creolization, a virtual gumbo where the multiple ingredients work in tandem much more tastily than when they are separate. (Riggs does indeed make a pot of gumbo in the film.) I am invoking Riggs's film work in the beginning of this essay on black theatre because I feel Riggs articulates a longing that I myself have felt. Is it possible in a theatre production to create a gumbo of theatrical blackness? By this, I mean: Has blackness on stage mixed up, played with, and disturbed what we, as a theatre-going audience, are comfortable with and expect of performed blackness? I am here speaking not exclusively of the lasting images of stereotyped blackness that we have cultivated on the American stage, particularly on the popular stage. Rather, I am thinking of how black actors and playwrights have, to continue with Riggs's gumbo metaphor, seasoned blackness on stage. The basic ingredients are the ways in which blackness has been played on the American stage—through stereotype, but, also, with innovation, playfulness, mastery. All are in the gumbo of theatrical blackness, palatable and challenging at the same time. I have had some exciting theatre experiences in the past few years. For the purposes of this essay, I have now been thinking of some as possible examples of 1) black plays, and 2) the playing of (and, I would like to add, with) black. I have chosen two widely divergent performances. The first example that came to my mind of playing with black was Gloria Foster's portrayal of Mama Younger in the Williamstown Theatre Festival's summer 1999 production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. Foster fused her famed classically trained voice and body to Mama's Chicago/Up South worn-out body frame. It was quite the wonder: Mama Younger met Lady Macbeth through Foster, and together they clasped their hands and wondered about the struggle of life. The acting moment I remember most strongly was at the conclusion of act one, scene one. Foster as Mama Younger has just slapped her daughter, Beneatha, played by Kimberly Elise. The agnostic Beneatha tried to deny the power of God, and her mother, horrified, physically reprimands her with the slap. Then, Foster goes to the [End Page 608] window to water a tiny, sad-looking plant that has survived because of "spirit." She gives this short speech: "Well, I always wanted me a garden like I used to see sometimes at the back of the houses down home. This plant is close as I ever got to having one. Lord, ain't nothing as dreary as the view from this window on a dreary day, is there?"38 My memory of Gloria Foster's rendering of these lines is that she contradicted the "down home" language of Mama Younger with her precise diction and grand carriage. Foster as Mama Younger watering the plant, if I had held my hands over my ears, had the look of Lady Macbeth attempting to wash her hands of blood. The movement and cadence of Mama Younger was infused with Foster's classical training, and what emerged from Foster was a bizarre, resistant performance. Foster played the blackness of Mama Younger as a struggle with the simultaneous physicality of Western classical theatre training with the demands of...

Editorial Comment: "A Black Thing"

Click for larger view Figure 1 [End Page viii] This special issue of Theatre Journal on Black Performance is dedicated toDr. Marvin Leon Sims, who died unexpectedly on Christmas day, 2003. At the time of his passing, Dr. Sims was President of the Black Theatre Network, the leading professional organization for scholars, teachers, and practitioners of black theatre, and incoming President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the parent organization of Theatre Journal. Born on 9 July 1948, Dr. Sims attained a BA from Capital University, an MA from Miami University, an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, and a PhD from Michigan State University. He taught at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign and Eastern Michigan University before becoming Head of Performance at Virginia Commonwealth University. At VCU, he taught courses on acting, directing, African American theatre history, and dramatic theory and criticism. Marvin was a leader, a colleague, a scholar, a teacher, a mentor, and a friend, whose life, wisdom, work, and infectious energy impacted so many. This special issue of Theatre Journal that investigates when, if, and how black theatre and performance constitute a particularly "black thing" celebrates Dr. Sims's spirit and his enduring commitment to black expressive culture. With these essays, articles, reviews, and reports contained, we pour libations in his honor. As I write these words in August 2005 for Marvin Leon Sims, I am very conscious of the sobering news which playwright August Wilson made public this month: that he is suffering from liver cancer and his doctors suggest that he has only months to live.1 With two Pulitzer Prizes, numerous New York Drama Circle Critics Awards, and other accolades, August Wilson has changed the face of contemporary American theatre, of black theatre, most certainly, and of black theatre scholarship as well. Wilson was the most produced American playwright in the 1990s. Already there are seven published studies of Wilson's work, including my own. With Radio Golf—which premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre on 28 April 2005, and then played at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in August and September 2005—Wilson realized his bold and ambitious, self-ascribed, dramaturgical project: to write a play for each decade of African American life within the twentieth century. While other American playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill and Ed Bullins have attempted to construct historical cycles, Wilson stands alone in having achieved this aspiration. Thus, his history cycle will live on as his enduring legacy. Relevant to this special issue, Wilson—in his theatrical life and letters, in his cycle of plays, and in his famous speech to the Theatre Communication Group (TCG) conference in 1996—explores provocatively the adage, "It's a black thing." But for Wilson this black thing is not something you just wouldn't understand. Rather, what Wilson claims through his cycle is that this is a black thing that we need to understand. We need to appreciate the endurance, the pride, the struggle, and the survival that constitute African American history and experience. Over the course of ten plays, Wilson explores the quotidian existence of ordinary black people and rights—or rewrites—African American history. As a result, his dramaturgy impacts how we think about the very construction of history. Even as Wilson considers the specifics of the African American past, his playwriting reaches beyond the particular to touch the cross-cultural. Wilson's work and his words, his spirit and special insight will continue to enrich us. When we read or view his plays, his so-called "400-year-old autobiography that is the black [End Page ix] experience,"2 when we savor his lines, we too can be renewed. These works will never stagnate, for even as they speak to the past, they resonate in the present. Fittingly, on October 17, 2005, the Virginia Theater at 245 West 42nd Street became the August Wilson Theater, and Wilson became the first African American to have a Broadway theater...

14th Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, 2005 Black Box Theater, Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA, 7–9 April 2005.

14^th Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, 2005 Black Box Theater, Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA, 7–9 April 2005.

What Have We Learned?

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...

Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain. By Gabriele Griffin. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. x + 291. $75 cloth.

Gabriele Griffin's study of black and Asian women playwrights in contemporary Britain fills a gap in British theatre studies. Although a comprehensive study of black British theatre has yet to see print, two developments have, in the past decade or so, begun to stimulate critical attention in the field. One is the publication of plays by black and Asian authors, including collections of plays exclusively by women (such as Khadija George's edition of Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers of 1993), as well as the more systematic inclusion of works by writers such as Winsome Pinnock and Trish Cooke in anthologies of plays by new British dramatists. A second is the work of British cultural-studies scholars and sociologists during the same period, which has offered theatre historians some new approaches and challenges: Kobena Mercer's Welcome to the Jungle (1994); Catherine Ugwu's Let's Get It On (1995); Baker et al.'s Black British Cultural Studies (1996); Heidi Mirza's edited volume Black British Feminism (1997)—not to mention a vast body of work by Stuart Hall, Avtar Brah, Paul Gilroy, and others. Still, as Griffin notes at the outset, while immigrant and second-generation novels and films have received attention and accolades, black British theatre has tended to be ignored except by a handful of feminist theatre scholars.

A History of African American Theatre. By Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. 608. $130 cloth.

Over the more than twenty years since the publication of two profoundly influential collections—Errol Hill's two-volume anthology of critical essays The Theatre of Black Americans (1980) and James V. Hatch's first edition of the play anthology Black Theatre USA (1974)—there has been considerable activity in African American theatre scholarship. Yet even as scholars have produced new collections of historical and critical essays that cover a wide range of African American theatre history, book-length studies that document particular moments in the historical continuum such as the Harlem Renaissance, and Samuel Hay's broader study African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis (1994), no one until now has written a comprehensive study of African American theatre history. Into this void have stepped two of the aforementioned distinguished scholars of African American theatre, Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch. To be certain, writing a comprehensive history of African American theatre poses a daunting challenge for anyone hearty enough to undertake it. Where to begin? What to include and exclude? With their study, A History of African American Theatre, Hill and Hatch show themselves indeed worthy of the challenge. They explore the evolution of African American theatre across time and space, documenting the particular efforts of artists, writers, scholars, and practitioners, from inside as well as outside the United States, that have had an impact on our understanding of African American theatre. The authors make clear that the definition of African American theatre from the beginning has been in constant flux and that it has been affected by the changing social times in American as much as it has influenced those times.

Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora (review)

Reviewed by: Black Theatre: Ritual Performance In The African Diaspora Annemarie Bean Black Theatre: Ritual Performance In The African Diaspora Ed. Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. 412 pp. ISBN 1-56639-944-0 paper. On the gradual slope that was the informal ending of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in theater, Paul Carter Harrison wrote the powerful and influential The Drama of Nommo (Grove P, 1972). BAM had attempted to artistically and theoretically create revolutionary theater by blacks for blacks. Early grants of foundation support (in particular, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations) were quickly rescinded once the content and form of the plays generated were experimental, avant-garde, and confrontational to gender and class stereotypes, i.e., avoided the "thingification" (as coined by Frantz Fanon) of blackness in theater. When Harrison wrote Nommo, he identified the presence of "Nommo on the Block." Harrison's marking of Nommo reinscribes the Dogon god, representing the totality of the cosmos, as a force ("Nommo force") to be [End Page 122] channeled into the theater by having plays less dependent on presenting disadvantaged black families. In fact, for Harrison, "family" should be supplanted by "community," and community is maintained through performance forms that "reinforce[s] the stability of racial identity," such as style (word-magic, repetition, improvisation, change), storytelling (orality), trickstering, and ritual (30). All these performance practices support community, not the individual. The black theater artist, Harrison concludes, "is not a position aloof from the crowd; for if he should be out of earshot of the song, he will surely miss the 'A' train and face a lonely trip back home" (79). Given his authoring of Nommo thirty years ago, and his continued work on ritual theater as a playwright and editor of play anthologies, it is no surprise that Harrison, in 2002, teamed up with Victor Leo Walker II, head of the African Grove Institute for the Arts, Inc., and former Professor of Drama and Film Studies at Dartmouth College, and Gus Edwards, a teacher of film studies and director of a multi-ethnic theater program at Arizona State University, to produce an anthology on ritual performance and black theater. What is to be celebrated regarding this anthology, Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, is that it has been edited by black theater educators and practitioners. According to the Harrison's essay "Praise/Word," the idea of the anthology came about after the 1998 National Black Theatre Summit at Golden Pond (Dartmouth College). The summit itself was a response to August Wilson's Theatre Communications Group 1996 keynote address, "The Ground on Which I Stand." At the end of the summit, the African Grove Institute for the Arts (AGIA) was formed, with August Wilson as the chairman of the board and Victor Leo Walker II as the CEO and president. Black Theatre offers multiple objectives of Black Theatre as was voiced by Wilson, defined by the 1998 NBT Summit, and nurtured by the AGIA: Black Theatre is performative, not didactic, yet seeks collective self-definition. In both ensemble and solo work, the performance objectives rise above self-aggrandizement, recognizing the tension between I/we that subjects the individual self to collective responsibility. It is a preservative and transformative dramatic ritual that requires ritual ground as the space to focus centrality of spirit. [. . .] Black Theatre is joy, passion, and beauty, which lead to positive illumination. (9) Defining Black Theatre as performative, transformative, as based in ritual, and as needing a permanent place of practice most probably influenced the editors to organize the anthology Black Theatre in the following parts: African Roots, Mythology and Metaphysics, and Dramaturgical Practice. As Harrison states, the articles included are "essential texts" that continue the ideas promoted in the Drama of Nommo in 1972, geared toward critically supporting the centrality of "African memory" in the theatre of the African Diaspora. "Part I: African Roots" begins with a brief introductory essay by Walker. He specifies that the words "theatre" and "drama" include all types of, to borrow from Alan Lomax, "collective creation" (13). Of particular note in this section are the essays by the late Ghanaian playwright (Muntu) and...

Re-baptizing the World in Our Own Terms: Black Theatre and Live Arts in Britain

It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that the BBC, bastion of “balanced” broadcasting, decided it was time to take The Black and White Minstrel Show off the air. This program, based on the first American theatre tradition, says more about the hegemony of a colonial fantasy constructed in the nineteenth century as part of a racist ideology than about the Black subject. In this Eurocentric discourse, we were always more body than mind, and Black cultural traditions were represented as homogeneous, marginal to the European canon, unsophisticated derivatives of Western forms and traditions. This historical, cultural and political background provides a critical framework for discussing Black theatre as developed and practised in a British context. This framework facilitates a critique of Black theatre, live art (that is, performance art) and related practices, in the context of a postcolonial discourse. While the term “Black” has been defined politically, in other studies, to include the African Caribbean, Southeast Asian, Chinese and other communities of colour, signifying the shared experiences of colonialism and political resistance to it; in the present context, “Black theatre” refers to theatre of African Caribbean origin.

Black Theatre in Nova Scotia: In Search of a Sustainable and Viable Presence

Black Theatre was officially established in Nova Scotia in 1967, when the late Dr. Evelyn Garbary, a former Abbey Theatre and London stage actress and my great mentor, entertained the idea of bringing together a group of people to present the play Coming Here to Stay. Written by her friend David Griffin, it told the story of the refugee Blacks who immigrated to Nova Scotia from America between 1812 and 1830.

Black Theatre Canada: A Short History

It seems like there is something of a renaissance of late in the Black theatre movement in North America. And for many who found the penumbral period from the mid-1980s into the 1990s to be a mean-spirited time, this is good news indeed. As I write, two phenomenally successful examples of Black theatre in Toronto, Djanet Sears’s play The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God (which has been remounted this year as part of Mirvish Productions subscription season) and the CanStage production of Cookin’ at the Cookery, starring Jackie Richardson as blues singer Alberta Hunter, are both playing to full houses.