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Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans – The Recent Period 1935-Today
This revised and expanded Black Theatre USA broadens its collection to fifty-one outstanding plays, enhancing its status as the most authoritative anthology of African American drama with twenty-two new selections.
This collection features plays written between 1935 and 1996.
This collection features plays written between 1935 and 1996.
507 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 14, 2022
This is an enormous anthology, and if you're reading it, you're probably reading it for a class on Black theatre history. But this is also a pretty superb collection of Black theatre that takes us through (most importantly) the 1940s through the 1980s. This is a very good collection for the pre-August Wilson Black theatre. There are twenty-three plays in this anthology, but I'll try to give detailed descriptions of all but the most popular.
Langston Hughes's Mulatto is a well-crafted melodrama fully in the mode of The Little Foxes or other overripe Southern dramas. I found this thoroughly enjoyable, and one can see why it was as popular as it was with audiences. The central female role (played originally by Rose McClendon) is incredible.
I've always liked Richard Wright & Paul Green's Native Son adaptation, and it is as incendiary as the book is. This play is an important precursor to Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun with its Chicago tenement setting, family issues, and anti-capitalist point of view.
Louis Peterson's Take a Giant Step is a realist comedy–drama about a young black man who lives in a predominantly white neighborhood and has to deal with the oh-so-polite racism of the people in his community. This coming-of-age tale has some quality jokes – I rather enjoyed the first two scenes of act one – but it doesn't really go anywhere, and the play's second act doesn't deliver on the promise of the first.
If you haven't read A Raisin in the Sun then you should just go do that.
Lonne Elder's Ceremonies in Dark Old Men has some serious problems. Chief among these is the way the characters are drawn: there are four members of the Parker family, and all of them are very, very different in act one and act two – almost unrecognizably so. This character shift is supposed to be because of "vice" or somesuch moral judgment that Elder is making, but the flaws in character development actually undermine Elder's arguments about vice. His situations aren't realistic enough for the actual social analysis his realism intends to do. The other immense problem with Ceremonies in Dark Old Men is that it actually doesn't do any social analysis. This play doesn't really have any critiques to level. Are liquor and women the problem here? White labor freeze-outs? Laziness? Government support of the bourgeoisie rather than workers? This play doesn't actually analyze any of these things. Now, a play doesn't need to analyze anything, but that is what Ceremonies purports to do. As family drama, the play certainly moves toward tragedy and tragic theatre, but this isn't a play that has anything to say, as far as I can tell. If you're going to kill off a major character at the play's end, the writing needs to justify that death a bit better. The death at the end of this play felt completely arbitrary.
Thomas Pawley's The Tumult and the Shouting is also pretty bad. I think this is supposed to be a kind of Black Southern Death of a Salesman. Attention must be paid, the play seems to say, to a generation of Black men who decided to be educators and who worked under rather terrible conditions for very low wages and were then discarded by their employers once they reached their dotage. The main character in Tumult, however, makes this demand for respect difficult. The trouble is that the play undercuts him throughout. The problems with which he ends up having to cope, as it turns out, are mostly problems of his own making - due to his outdated and stubborn gender politics, his need for control over his children, and his absolute refusal to listen to any of his young wife's ideas. This makes the play difficult to understand, in many ways. What I think Pawley was trying to write is 1) a play honoring these men and 2) a play critiquing the conditions under which these men had to work, what he does instead is write a kind of tragedy of a man's bad decisions and outdated ideas. It's not difficult to pity such a man, but it's very hard to identify with him.
Langston Hughes's Limitations of Life is a classic comic satire of old Hollywood movies. It's a gem.
Abram Hill's On Strivers Row is also a classic satire of the Black bourgeoisie in the 1930s. This play was probably hilarious in its day. It's a broad, delightful farce with so many funny characters. The comedy is now 80 years old, and the characters it's satirizing long dead, so this just doesn't hold up as a drama on the page. Even on stage, there's no way the satire could any longer hit its aim.
I don't feel the same way about Douglas Turner Ward's Day of Absence, though. It's a whiteface comedy about a southern town that descends into total chaos and pandemonium when all of the town's black residents disappear one morning. The white folks just do not know what to do. This is a bit of a one-joke show, not quite as funny as Ward's Happy Ending, but it's a scathing critique and enjoyable all the same.
James Baldwin's The Amen Corner is a really interesting meditation on religion, morality, and growing up in the church in the U.S.
Owen Dodson's The Confession Stone is a song cycle that reimagines Jesus, Mary, Judas, Joseph, Mary Magdalene, and Martha, Lazarus's sister as contemporary Black folks. This is a beautiful show, and Hatch & Shine attach three different possible directorial interpretations to the text with the aim of inspiring some intrepid producers to put on The Confession Stone. It deserves production. Its great.
You don't need me to tell you about Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro or Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. You probably also know how totally brilliant Robbie McCauley's Sally's Rape is. Let me just say here that McCauley's play is an absolutely fascinating theatrical treatment of sexual violence, freedom, the relationship between whiteness and Blackness, and the legacies of enslavement in the body.
Alice Childress's Wine in the Wilderness is genius. Not enough people are talking about Alice Childress. It's baffling to me that we have been sleeping on this brilliant playwright for so long. She is now finally on Broadway in 2021, and Wine in the Wilderness is probably just as superb a play as Trouble in Mind. This play moves with lightning speed. It's a realist consideration of Black folks and class attitudes, and it's an incisive analysis of the way economics can shape personalities, dreams, and even who we love. I don't have enough good words to say about this.
The section of the anthology on the Black Arts Movement is this book's key contribution, to my mind. It includes 5 plays: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, Ed Bullins' Goin' a Buffalo, Ben Caldwell's Prayer Meeting: or, The First Militant Preacher, Ted Shine's Contribution, and Kalamu ya Salaam's Blk Love Song #1.
I'm not gonna say anything about Dutchman. You can find it in every Black anthology everywhere. But I will say this about Ed Bullins and Goin' a Buffalo. Y'all are sleeping on Ed Bullins. His work is so strange and good. He makes the formal choice of adding a kind of surrealist dreamscape thing in so many of his plays, and it makes the social critique that is central to the work seem like it's not central to the work, but it is. I'm fascinated by this man's writing. I do understand why white critics have preferred Adrienne Kennedy over Ed Bullins: it's because he portrays real people who are not abstractions, and their problems are social problems related to racist social policies rather than psychological problems rooted in the self. In any case Goin' a Buffalo is great - although it's fundamentally about the social problems of the 1960s.
Prayer Meeting is a delightfully funny, very angry play that skewers Black preachers for pushing non-violence on parishioners who are righteously angry about police violence and want to revolt. Contribution is a fabulous little realist drama about the lunch counter protests in the 1960s and (I must add) a perfect companion piece to Georgia Douglas Johnson's A Sunday Morning in the South. Blk Love Song #1 is an example of the trend in some Black Arts Movement pieces toward community building, consciousness raising, and audience participation. It's preachy and... well it's not my kind of thing, though it is a good example of this particular form. It's accompanied in this anthology by an essay/manifesto from Kalamu ya Salaam that goes with the show.
The last three plays are more well known and anthologized elsewhere: you can find reviews of George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum, Aishah Rahman's The Mojo and the Sayso, and Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror in plenty of other places.
Obviously this is a super-important anthology, so I'm not here to record its merits or anything, just to report on some of the plays that perhaps you haven't read and promote some of the obscure highlights (Contribution, Wine in the Wilderness, Goin' a Buffalo, Prayer Meeting, Sally's Rape).
Langston Hughes's Mulatto is a well-crafted melodrama fully in the mode of The Little Foxes or other overripe Southern dramas. I found this thoroughly enjoyable, and one can see why it was as popular as it was with audiences. The central female role (played originally by Rose McClendon) is incredible.
I've always liked Richard Wright & Paul Green's Native Son adaptation, and it is as incendiary as the book is. This play is an important precursor to Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun with its Chicago tenement setting, family issues, and anti-capitalist point of view.
Louis Peterson's Take a Giant Step is a realist comedy–drama about a young black man who lives in a predominantly white neighborhood and has to deal with the oh-so-polite racism of the people in his community. This coming-of-age tale has some quality jokes – I rather enjoyed the first two scenes of act one – but it doesn't really go anywhere, and the play's second act doesn't deliver on the promise of the first.
If you haven't read A Raisin in the Sun then you should just go do that.
Lonne Elder's Ceremonies in Dark Old Men has some serious problems. Chief among these is the way the characters are drawn: there are four members of the Parker family, and all of them are very, very different in act one and act two – almost unrecognizably so. This character shift is supposed to be because of "vice" or somesuch moral judgment that Elder is making, but the flaws in character development actually undermine Elder's arguments about vice. His situations aren't realistic enough for the actual social analysis his realism intends to do. The other immense problem with Ceremonies in Dark Old Men is that it actually doesn't do any social analysis. This play doesn't really have any critiques to level. Are liquor and women the problem here? White labor freeze-outs? Laziness? Government support of the bourgeoisie rather than workers? This play doesn't actually analyze any of these things. Now, a play doesn't need to analyze anything, but that is what Ceremonies purports to do. As family drama, the play certainly moves toward tragedy and tragic theatre, but this isn't a play that has anything to say, as far as I can tell. If you're going to kill off a major character at the play's end, the writing needs to justify that death a bit better. The death at the end of this play felt completely arbitrary.
Thomas Pawley's The Tumult and the Shouting is also pretty bad. I think this is supposed to be a kind of Black Southern Death of a Salesman. Attention must be paid, the play seems to say, to a generation of Black men who decided to be educators and who worked under rather terrible conditions for very low wages and were then discarded by their employers once they reached their dotage. The main character in Tumult, however, makes this demand for respect difficult. The trouble is that the play undercuts him throughout. The problems with which he ends up having to cope, as it turns out, are mostly problems of his own making - due to his outdated and stubborn gender politics, his need for control over his children, and his absolute refusal to listen to any of his young wife's ideas. This makes the play difficult to understand, in many ways. What I think Pawley was trying to write is 1) a play honoring these men and 2) a play critiquing the conditions under which these men had to work, what he does instead is write a kind of tragedy of a man's bad decisions and outdated ideas. It's not difficult to pity such a man, but it's very hard to identify with him.
Langston Hughes's Limitations of Life is a classic comic satire of old Hollywood movies. It's a gem.
Abram Hill's On Strivers Row is also a classic satire of the Black bourgeoisie in the 1930s. This play was probably hilarious in its day. It's a broad, delightful farce with so many funny characters. The comedy is now 80 years old, and the characters it's satirizing long dead, so this just doesn't hold up as a drama on the page. Even on stage, there's no way the satire could any longer hit its aim.
I don't feel the same way about Douglas Turner Ward's Day of Absence, though. It's a whiteface comedy about a southern town that descends into total chaos and pandemonium when all of the town's black residents disappear one morning. The white folks just do not know what to do. This is a bit of a one-joke show, not quite as funny as Ward's Happy Ending, but it's a scathing critique and enjoyable all the same.
James Baldwin's The Amen Corner is a really interesting meditation on religion, morality, and growing up in the church in the U.S.
Owen Dodson's The Confession Stone is a song cycle that reimagines Jesus, Mary, Judas, Joseph, Mary Magdalene, and Martha, Lazarus's sister as contemporary Black folks. This is a beautiful show, and Hatch & Shine attach three different possible directorial interpretations to the text with the aim of inspiring some intrepid producers to put on The Confession Stone. It deserves production. Its great.
You don't need me to tell you about Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro or Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. You probably also know how totally brilliant Robbie McCauley's Sally's Rape is. Let me just say here that McCauley's play is an absolutely fascinating theatrical treatment of sexual violence, freedom, the relationship between whiteness and Blackness, and the legacies of enslavement in the body.
Alice Childress's Wine in the Wilderness is genius. Not enough people are talking about Alice Childress. It's baffling to me that we have been sleeping on this brilliant playwright for so long. She is now finally on Broadway in 2021, and Wine in the Wilderness is probably just as superb a play as Trouble in Mind. This play moves with lightning speed. It's a realist consideration of Black folks and class attitudes, and it's an incisive analysis of the way economics can shape personalities, dreams, and even who we love. I don't have enough good words to say about this.
The section of the anthology on the Black Arts Movement is this book's key contribution, to my mind. It includes 5 plays: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, Ed Bullins' Goin' a Buffalo, Ben Caldwell's Prayer Meeting: or, The First Militant Preacher, Ted Shine's Contribution, and Kalamu ya Salaam's Blk Love Song #1.
I'm not gonna say anything about Dutchman. You can find it in every Black anthology everywhere. But I will say this about Ed Bullins and Goin' a Buffalo. Y'all are sleeping on Ed Bullins. His work is so strange and good. He makes the formal choice of adding a kind of surrealist dreamscape thing in so many of his plays, and it makes the social critique that is central to the work seem like it's not central to the work, but it is. I'm fascinated by this man's writing. I do understand why white critics have preferred Adrienne Kennedy over Ed Bullins: it's because he portrays real people who are not abstractions, and their problems are social problems related to racist social policies rather than psychological problems rooted in the self. In any case Goin' a Buffalo is great - although it's fundamentally about the social problems of the 1960s.
Prayer Meeting is a delightfully funny, very angry play that skewers Black preachers for pushing non-violence on parishioners who are righteously angry about police violence and want to revolt. Contribution is a fabulous little realist drama about the lunch counter protests in the 1960s and (I must add) a perfect companion piece to Georgia Douglas Johnson's A Sunday Morning in the South. Blk Love Song #1 is an example of the trend in some Black Arts Movement pieces toward community building, consciousness raising, and audience participation. It's preachy and... well it's not my kind of thing, though it is a good example of this particular form. It's accompanied in this anthology by an essay/manifesto from Kalamu ya Salaam that goes with the show.
The last three plays are more well known and anthologized elsewhere: you can find reviews of George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum, Aishah Rahman's The Mojo and the Sayso, and Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror in plenty of other places.
Obviously this is a super-important anthology, so I'm not here to record its merits or anything, just to report on some of the plays that perhaps you haven't read and promote some of the obscure highlights (Contribution, Wine in the Wilderness, Goin' a Buffalo, Prayer Meeting, Sally's Rape).
November 6, 2019
Native Son *** -- This is a gripping story of a young man, a malformed product of a racist society, striking out against the injustice in order to have some control over his life.
The play moved along well until the trial when Max goes into a strange monologue about the injustices faced by African Americans. It’s too bad these were not woven into the story as it unfolds. The exciting story comes to a complete stop while the larger social issues are explained.
Overall, though, a moving piece of theatre.
May 3, 2024
Read for Staging Blackness course.
The plays within this collection play off of one another and the themes they propose are heavy and intelligent.
The plays within this collection play off of one another and the themes they propose are heavy and intelligent.
September 18, 2018
We used this anthology in a class. A couple of my favorites in this one:
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry - Obviously, it's just SO good!
The First Militant Preacher by Ben Caldwell - Short and funny!
But so many others I enjoyed I find it hard to pick more.
And most of these are probably not very well known to a general audience now except for "Raisin in the Sun", "For Colored Girls" and "Native Son"
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry - Obviously, it's just SO good!
The First Militant Preacher by Ben Caldwell - Short and funny!
But so many others I enjoyed I find it hard to pick more.
And most of these are probably not very well known to a general audience now except for "Raisin in the Sun", "For Colored Girls" and "Native Son"
February 10, 2021
A collection of African American plays I had to read for one of my classes. Was full of some good ones as well as ones that weren’t as great. Worth the read though
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews