Playwriting

By: S. Richards

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Playwriting

“Sing a black girl's song.…/she's half-notes scattered/without rhythm/no tune.…/sing the song of her possibilities.” These lines from Ntozake Shange's 1975 play, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, poeticize the challenges black women have faced in their efforts to represent their stories onstage. Like other black Americans, they have had to confront racist representations and discriminatory employment practices. For much of the twentieth century, if they sought a professional career outside black communities, they also had to battle producers and audiences who assumed their lives were of no dramatic interest. Despite these formidable obstacles, black women persevered, increasing their numbers on and behind the stage, and diversifying their subject matter and dramatic approaches.

Early Inroads

Against blackface minstrelsy's depiction of fun-loving blacks totally devoted to their white masters, the earliest black playwrights sought to present alternative views. In 1880, at age twenty, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930) wrote the four-act musical drama Slaves' Escape; or the Underground Railroad, which she and her family, known as the Hopkins Colored Troubadours, performed to favorable reviews. Though Hopkins had not been a slave, her play—later re-titled Peculiar Sam; or the Underground Railroad—seemed to have been modeled on a play written by the fugitive slave William Wells Brown, whose works were well known on northern abolitionist stages. Hopkins dramatized not only a daring escape but, unlike Brown, also portrayed blacks as conductors on the Underground Railroad and as free people living in the North.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, a poster by Paul Davis for Ntozake Shange's play, 1976. Among other awards, the play won an Obie in 1977.

Library of Congress

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Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman (1870–1947?) celebrated the black progress that followed slavery in such plays as Thirty Years of Freedom (1902), Fifty Years of Freedom (1910), Aunt Betsy's Thanksgiving (1914), and The Spirit of Allen (1922). Published by the A.M.E. Book Concern, these plays dramatize a world in which hard work, professional training, disavowal of the materialistic “gaiety” of urban life, and strong family networks lead to racial progress. By performing these plays, members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church learned and reaffirmed an uplift agenda, but interestingly, moral integrity alone does not account for the success of Davis's characters, for at a crucial moment, the female protagonist—a former slave mother or a devoted daughter, for example—must overcome racism by relying on a personal relationship with a well-intentioned white person.

Theater as Propaganda or Entertainment?

The first three decades of the twentieth century saw an impressive increase in the numbers of women writing plays. Angelina Weld Grimké (1880–1958), Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877?–1966), Mary P. Burrill (1884–1946), and Myrtle Smith Livingston (1901–1973) tackled such issues as the extralegal practice of lynching, women's access to birth control, girls' education, and interracial liaisons; while Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935), May Miller (1899–1995), and Eulalie Spence (1894–1981) dramatized the discrimination that faced returning World War I veterans, scripted history plays as a response to racist representations, and poked gentle fun at blacks' foibles.

Angelina Weld Grimké's play Rachel is noteworthy because it pioneered a tradition of lynching plays and sparked controversy about the very purposes of theater when the NAACP Drama Committee first produced it in Washington, DC, in 1916. Active in the antilynching movement, Grimké used her play to tell the story of a northern teenager's growth toward adulthood. In the beginning, Rachel is bubbly and confident in her future, but when she grows older, she learns her father and older brother were lynched for resisting southern racism. Additionally, she encounters employment discrimination and tries in vain to protect children from internalizing racial hatred. As a consequence, Rachel rejects marriage and motherhood, vowing never to inflict such suffering on innocent babies. Though applauded by some for itspropagandistic objective of spotlighting conditions endured by black people, the production caused an uproar because many interpreted it as advocating a self-induced genocide and disavowing the NAACP's hallowed assumptions about the possibilities for black advancement. Grimké responded that she hoped the play's focus on blighted motherhood would encourage white women to join the antilynching campaign then being waged. (Doing so, she identified an issue that would recur particularly around second-wave feminism in the 1960s, namely the extent to which black and white women could unite around gender or would remain divided around race.) So disturbed were some viewers by Rachel's avowedly political stance that they argued the stage should offer more artistically crafted “folk plays” aimed at entertaining; in pursuit of that goal, they created Howard University's drama program, one of the first in the United States.

Angelina Grimké.  Her play Rachel is significant as an early use of drama to address the evils of lynching; she is also known for her lyric poetry.

Austin/Thompson Collection, by permission of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center

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The debate about the desirability of “race” or “propaganda” plays over “folk” plays would later dominate scholarly discussion about black theater, but a close look at the women's networks of association and dramas indicates that these categories were never as distinct as proponents and scholars contended. Women sought dramatic training with Alain Locke at Howard University and production opportunities through W. E. B. Du Bois's editorial sponsorship of playwriting contests in the NAACP's Crisis magazine, even though those men were popularly identified, respectively, with the opposing folk and propaganda philosophies of art. Georgia Douglas Johnson's representations of southern, rural religiosity in A Sunday Morning in the South (1925) and in Plumes (1927) or May Miller's depiction of festival practices among Baltimore blacks in Riding the Goat (1929) seem to conform to the folk play's goal of offering aesthetically pleasing and socially inoffensive fare, but they also dramatize issues of critical importance to black communities. A Sunday Morning in the South deals with the lynching of a young man falsely accused of rape; Plumes depicts a poor mother who must choose between expensive, inadequate Western medicine for her sick daughter or burial practices that seem superstitious because their African roots are unrecognized; while Riding the Goat raises subtle questions about the relationship of Du Bois's “talented tenth,” or professional black class, to the masses it is supposed to “uplift” from their quaint practices into greater social acceptability.

Better known as a Harlem Renaissance novelist than as a playwright, Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) used her experiences of growing up in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, to represent rural people with a complexity that delved below their seemingly simple ways and easy laughter. As its name suggests, Color Struck—which placed second in the National Urban League's Opportunity magazine contest in 1925—dramatizes the deadly consequences of colorism, or prejudice based upon skin color, within black communities. In its contrast of this serious issue with the verbal banter and displays of dance agility among cakewalk contestants, Hurston merged the folk and race play genres. In 1930 Hurston collaborated with the poet Langston Hughes on Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life to dramatize tensions over religious practices and gender-based roles of women in a small, southern town. Unfortunately, just as in the play in which former friends become enemies, so too did Hurston and Hughes quarrel about plot development and authorship. The play was never produced in their lifetimes.

Reconstructed from drafts left dormant in university archives, Mule Bone finally was produced in 1991 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway, where it garnered mixed reviews. Hurston and Hughes had hoped to pioneer a theater in which the “blues stance” of black people or their laughing-to-keep-from-crying approach to life could be dramatized, but some sixty years later, it appeared that audiences, still haunted by the grinning faces of blackface minstrelsy, could not discern the gritty significance behind the laughter. Within the last decade of the twentieth century, Hurston's theater career received more critical attention when a number of her one-act plays were rediscovered in the Library of Congress, and scholars reconstructed Hurston's translations of her anthropological research in the southern United States and the Caribbean into such diasporic dance-dramas as The Great Day (1932), subsequently revised as From Sun to Sun and Singing Steel.

Departures from Form

. Marita Bonner's (1899–1971) The Purple Flower (1928) and Exit: An Illusion (1929) departed radically from the realistic style used by both the so-called propaganda and folk dramatists. Winner of the 1927 Crisis best play award, The Purple Flower is a highly abstract representation of the black “U.S.'s” struggles against appealing, though wily “Sundry White Devils” in order to move up the hill to where the purple “Flower-of-Life-at-Its-Fullest” grows. In its allegorical allusiveness and overt militancy, the play seems typical of the black arts nationalism of the 1960s. Bonner's essay, “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” (1925), registered the intersection of race and gender, contending that in order to be viewed as respectable, a black woman had to “sit quietly without a [racial] chip” on her shoulder, observe life flowing into herself, and wait for the moment when she could rise to her full potential. Unrecognized in the essay is the possibility that in remaining still “like Buddha,” the woman may find that her creative gifts have atrophied.

In contrast to Bonner's position, the theater career of Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896–1977) suggests a greater intellectual and physical mobility than was available to some black women in the 1930s. Long before she married W. E. B. Du Bois in 1951, Graham studied music at the Sorbonne in Paris. She chaired the Fine Arts department at Tennessee A&I State College in Nashville before heading the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago from 1936 to 1938; after completing a creative writing fellowship at Yale University in Connecticut, she wrote five plays in only two years: Dust to Earth, I Gotta Home, It's Morning, Track Thirteen, and Elijah's Raven. Graham also composed the first black opera in the United States to be performed by a professional cast. Her Tom-Tom was produced in 1932 at the Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, where some ten thousand people saw the opera that featured five hundred blacks recruited from local church choirs. Sketching black history from pastoral African beginnings, through American slavery, to the desired return to Africa represented by Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the opera skillfully represents philosophically diverse black communities in which, for example, Africans abjure traditional rituals, and their African American descendants adopt the UNIA program for reasons both noble and selfish. Because Graham's father and brother had worked in Liberia, and Graham had befriended Senegalese musicians in Paris, she was able to incorporate authentic African music into Tom-Tom. While she focused on political causes after her marriage to Du Bois, Shirley Graham maintained an interest in performance even in Ghana, to which the couple emigrated in 1961.

Realism and Social Change

Though her career as a dramatist lasted four decades, Alice Childress (1916–1994) is often overshadowed by Lorraine Hansberry's meteoric trajectory and, later, by the public's lack of interest in the realistic style that both women employed. Like Hurston before her, Childress focused on the dignity of ordinary black folks. But unlike Hurston, she favored realism, a literary genre in which characters onstage behave in much the same way as do people offstage, the relationship between the cause of social problems and their effects is clear, and spectators can identify ways to improve conditions. In addition, Childress often situated her social critique within the world of art. For example, her first play, Florence, produced in 1949 by New York's American Negro Theatre, concerns a mother who decides to travel “up North” to convince her adult daughter, an aspiring actress, to return home and pursue occupations deemed more suitable for black women. An encounter with a white actress in a segregated waiting room changes the mother's resolve as she realizes that whites, based on biased observations, will only continue to produce demeaning dramatic representations of black life, and so the mother comes to see the validity of her daughter's choice of profession.

The critical role that black women played in articulating more positive visions is also apparent in Trouble in Mind, which premiered in 1955 and made Childress the first black woman playwright to win an Obie (off-Broadway) Award. Set backstage among a group of black actors and a white director, Trouble in Mind critiques lynching as imagined by the white mainstream. But Childress's play extends her critique to northern middle class blacks, for among the characters is a young actor who, ignorant of black traditions of resistance, is willing to embrace stereotypical behavior as the price of his hoped-for entry into professional theater. Ironically, Childress was pressured by her white producers to rewrite the ambiguous ending so that audiences might experience a happy picture of racial unity. Mirroring the racial militancy of the period, Childress in Wine in the Wilderness (1969) told the story of a painter who, though he espouses nationalist rhetoric, holds such stereotypical views of working class black folk that he cannot see their dignity, wit, and survival skills. Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (1966) explores interracial marriage in 1918 in Charleston, South Carolina, where it was legally forbidden. Though the play dramatizes the painful legacy of racism, it seemed curiously out of step with its contemporary audience, as black communities in the 1960s and 1970s became increasingly invested in a separate black identity. During the 2002–2003 theater season, however, after more multicultural perspectives had achieved dominance, Wedding Band was successfully revived by the Congo Square Theatre Company in association with the Steppenwolf Theatre of Chicago. Childress was recognized in 1993 with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

Adrienne Kennedy is considered a poet of the theater. Her early play Funnyhouse of a Negro received an Obie Award.

Courtesy of University of Minnesota Press, by permission of Adrienne Kennedy

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Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) is often regarded as the mother of contemporary black theater. Her Raisin in the Sun won the 1959 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best drama and was the first play by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. The story of a Chicago family struggling to break out of the emotional and physical confines of its tenement apartment, Raisin brought ordinary black folk's aspirations for full citizenship into the national spotlight only five years after the landmark Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated public schools. The play was visionary in its inclusion of such women's issues as abortion and entry into male-dominated professions and in its positive representation of newly independent African nations. In the years after Raisin, Hansberry surprised everyone by authoring The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964), an attack on the glib disavowal of social concerns by white bohemians living in New York City's Greenwich Village. The critical reception of this work was decidedly less than enthusiastic, and despite the valiant efforts of artist-activists, it closed after a relatively short run. Hansberry's other dramatic works include The Drinking Gourd, written for television in 1960 but never produced because of studio fears that her representation of slaveholders would alienate some viewers. Hansberry returned to the topic of African liberation struggles in Les Blancs, adapted and brought to the stage in 1970 by her former husband and literary executor Robert Nemiroff five years after her death from cancer at age thirty-four. To Be Young, Gifted and Black, compiled from her writings, was produced posthumously in 1969. What Use Are Flowers? was written in 1961 but not fully produced until the 1994 National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, Georgia.

An Avant-Garde Feminism

. Hansberry's contemporary, Adrienne Kennedy (1931– ), pursued a radically different conception of theater. Considered a poet of the theater, she eschewed linear plot development, preferring instead to create characters who surrealistically metamorphose into different personae, inhabit shifting worlds of the real and the fantasized, and struggle with their gendered, racial, and cultural identities. Her early plays—Obie winner Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), The Owl Answers (1965), and The Rat's Mass (1966)—won recognition from avant-garde audiences but were largely ignored by black theatergoers who, during that period of the Black Power and Black Arts movements, were not prepared to engage the seemingly hallucinatory narratives of women deeply troubled by their antithetical African and European cultural heritages or by sexism within both black and white communities. After the “second-wave” of feminism of the 1970s and 1980s had opened a space for women to examine gender, black and white feminists rediscovered Kennedy, giving her, so she later said, the inspiration to continue writing for the theater. Interweaving elements of her fictionalized biography, fragments from her own plays, current events, and popular culture, Kennedy wrote such other plays as A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976) and The Alexander Plays (1992), a cycle with character Suzanne Alexander reappearing in She Talks to Beethoven (1989), The Ohio State Murders (1992), and The Film Club, a monologue re-scripted for radio as The Dramatic Circle.

The Next Wave

To a limited extent, one can view Lorraine Hansberry and Adrienne Kennedy as two ends of a continuum along which later women playwrights could locate themselves. Hansberry was the realist for whom theater was a public sphere in which issues of social importance could be debated and performances served as a catalyst for action. Kennedy offered a denser, imagistic theater, in which the elusiveness of character and form meant that spectators are less likely to align performances with a political project.

Younger women learned from these elders and produced work indebted to them in novel ways. For example, Ntozake Shange (1948– ) devised what she termed a “choreopoem,” a combination of narrative poetry and dance, to celebrate young women's freedom and action. Her Obie-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf burst onto the national scene in 1976 when it was produced off Broadway at Woodie King Jr.'s New Federal Theatre and later on Broadway at the Booth Theatre. This all-female play ignited debate within black communities. Proponents lauded its articulation of gender issues, silenced during the Black Power and Black Arts period, while detractors equated its woman-centered viewpoint with racial betrayal and confirmation of already dominant, largely negative stereotypes about black men. Though subsequent dramas like A Photograph (1977) and Spell #7 (1979) include men's narratives, Shange continued to center on women (Liliane, 1994), experiment with nonlinear forms (The Love Space Demands, 1992), and provocatively juxtapose the real and the magical. But like Hansberry, Shange was committed to theater as a medium for social change.

Playwright-performers like Anna Deavere Smith (1950– ) and Robbie McCauley (1942– ) also blended Kennedy's and Hansberry's visions in their works. Best known for her one-woman shows in which she performed across gender and race, Smith repeats verbatim sections of interviews conducted with various members of a community in crisis in Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities (1992). The play explores deadly tensions between African American and Caribbean residents on the one hand and their Hasidic Jewish neighbors on the other, while Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) probes, in nonlinear fashion, tensions between whites, blacks, Koreans, and Latinos in the aftermath of urban rebellions. Smith won Obies for both plays and in 1996 was honored with a MacArthur Foundation Fellows Award (the “Genius Award”). While indebted to Kennedy for demonstrating that language, rather than character-centered psychological realism, can offer a route to identity, Smith's objective of fostering civic dialogue about race draws from Hansberry's insistence that all art is political.

Robbie McCauley, who acted in a number of Kennedy plays and in the first Broadway cast of for colored girls, merged painful familial and national histories in such works as My Father and the Wars (1985) and the Obie-winning Sally's Rape (1992). Her site-specific pieces, like “The Mississippi Project” (1992) or the “Stories Exchange Project” (1994), which deals with the Czech and Romany peoples, aim to promote individual introspection and community dialogue as part of both the rehearsal process and the performance itself. Similarly, the playwright-performer Rhodessa Jones sought to empower women prisoners to enact their own narratives with her San Francisco–based Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, and she performed some of their stories in Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women (1989). As a solo performance artist, creating ephemeral, process-oriented work that challenges the assumed boundary between the deeply personal and the artistic, Jones produced such pieces as The Legend of Lily Overstreet (1979) and Hot Flashes, Power Surges, and Private Summers (2000).

Cheryl West (1950– ), Pearl Cleage (1948– ), and Kia Cothron (1961– ) continued in Hansberry's realist tradition. West, who is also an adept comic writer, addressed family issues in the context of AIDS, homosexuality, and child abuse in such plays as Before It Hits Home (1991), Jar the Floor (1992), Holiday Heart (1993), and Puddin n' Pete (1993). Pearl Cleage often infuses seemingly contemporary perspectives into historical plays. Her Flyin' West (1992) focuses on a family of women who move to the American West in the 1890s; Blues for an Alabama Sky (1995) tells the story of a gay designer and a birth control advocate during the twilight years of the Harlem Renaissance; while Bourbon at the Border (1997) examines the silenced legacy of the psychological trauma suffered by civil rights activists. In a hyperrealistic style replete with sociological data and a somewhat incongruous cinematic structure, Kia Corthron tackled current issues like family planning, the medication of supposedly violent black boys, and police brutality in plays like Come Down Burning (1993), Seeking the Genesis (1996), and Force Continuum (2001).

Closer to the Kennedy end of the continuum is the work of Aishah Rahman (1936– ), Regina Taylor (c. 1960 – ) and Suzan-Lori Parks (1964– ). Translating the polyrhythmic structures of jazz to theater and dramatizing the spiritual as a powerful, transformative energy, Rahman wrote such plays as Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage (1977), The Mojo and the Sayso (1987), and later, Public Spaces, a collection of one-acts. Of all the dramatists working in theater at the turn of the twenty-first century, Regina Taylor was unique in her additional roles as a stage and film actress, an adapter of European texts, and an artistic associate who introduced new work to Goodman Theatre audiences in Chicago. Her plays include the one-acts Watermelon Rinds and Inside the Belly of the Beast, collectively titled The Ties that Bind (1994). Her 1999 Oo-Blah-Dee, about a World War II women's jazz band, escapes the strictures of realism in its use of a timeless muse figure and through elliptical reference to the Bette Davis film, Now, Voyager, which had also served as the setting for Kennedy's meditations on women's mobility and subjectivity in A Movie Star. In 2000 Taylor signaled her interest in Kennedy even more directly when she performed a collage of monologues by Kennedy, Shange, Corthron, and Parks entitled Millennium Mambo and later re-titled Urban Zulu Mambo.

In 2002, a year after receiving a MacArthur “Genius Award,” Suzan-Lori Parks became the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in drama and cited the novelist James Baldwin's challenge to consider writing for the theater as one of her inspirations. In plays such as the Obie-winning Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989), The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), and The America Play (1994), Parks sardonically reexamined the Middle Passage, racist, scientific taxonomies, such cultural icons as the Black Man with a Watermelon, or Abraham Lincoln's assassination, subjecting them to linguistic and gesture-based “rep and rev,” or repetition and revision that challenged audiences to discern how meaning is contingent upon context, potentially shifting with each iteration. Thus, the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, though he is lynched, shot, and subjected to all kinds of violence, continues to re-appear and recite his story. Likewise, the Lincoln impersonator of The America Play reappears in Topdog/Underdog (2001), this time located in the contemporary historical moment but feuding with his brother Booth in a reenactment of the rivalry of Cain and Abel. Like Kennedy before her, Parks often distributed one personality among several characters. Furthermore, characters often describe themselves in the third person so that, for example, the Kin-Seer in Imperceptible Mutabilities …reports waving at his “uther me” and discovering that his “uther me was wavin at my Self.” This subversion of conventional identity, in addition to the device of allowing characters to narrate to audiences while watching “themselves” in action insistently raises the question of what constitutes reality. Parks's answer appears to be that reality resides only in performance, which is not fiction, but rather the often-repeated behavior and narratives we enact for ourselves and others. Centering her dramas in black history, yet radically destabilizing concepts of narrative and identity, Parks seemed to deny the material consequences of socially constructed definitions of race and challenged her audience to reconsider the idea of theater as an arena for public dialogue about pressing social issues.

Against significant obstacles, black women have fashioned a range of styles to dramatize their understandings of the world. Despite limited opportunities to have their plays produced or published, black women playwrights have persisted. They remain confident in the unique perspective and artistic strength of their voices.

See also Black Theater Movement; Hansberry, Lorraine; Harlem Renaissance; Parks, Suzan-Lori; Smith, Anna Deavere; and Theater.

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