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

Ira Frederick Aldridge is often believed by historians to herald the zenith of Black theatre, but he may instead herald the nadir of Black theatre. So argues actor, director, dramatic critic, and playwright Clifford Mason in his book Macbeth in Harlem, which presents thoughtful and provocative interpretations of musicals and plays by and about Black people before, during, and after freedom.

The Art and Times of ABDIAS NASCIMENTO: QUILOMBOLA EXTRAORDINAIRE

This paper explores the aesthetic trajectory of Abdias Nascimento in the context of his life’s work, arguing that he has to be apprehended as a Quilombola warrior figure, through his entwinement of political and artistic agency. More specifically, it explores how Nascimento harnesses the creative matrix found in the lived history, myth and figuration from candomblé as a dramatist and as a painter. First, it delves into his creation of the Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN), the first black theater in Brazil and his use of candomblé as a template of dramaturgy in his play, Sortilégio. However, the main analysis centers on his paintings, which combines candomblé symbology, along with other African cultural forms, to create culturally meaningful aesthetic forms that affirmed Afro-Brazilian subjectivity and their historical belonging in the nation and connection to the larger Africana world.

Keepers of the Culture at 3201 Adeline Street

This article examines how the increase in the numbers of black-operated theaters between the 1960s and 1980s molded the character of black cultural and social movements in the West and nationally. The emphasis placed on institutionalizing black theater demonstrated a significant cultural front within the larger social, political, and economic conflicts of this era. These theatrical institutions were physical manifestations of the heart of Black Power campaigns, facilitating community outreach and sovereignty through separatism. Black theaters reflected local distinctions in leadership and ideology but within a broader, national call for black liberation and black autonomy. Professional theater impresarios Nora and Birel Vaughn began laying the foundations for their theater, the Black Repertory Group, in Oakland, California, in 1964. A repertory theater company performing in a fixed location, Black Rep would cycle through a repertoire of black-culture-specific plays, providing black performers and playwrights both recognition and income. Operating in a black-owned space gave Black Rep control over its productions and performance. Giving neighbors and community leaders the opportunity to participate behind the scenes or even perform in Black Rep theatrical productions endeared the troupe to its supporters, enmeshing Black Rep as a valued communal institution. Black Rep opened its space as an autonomous black community center, running voter registration drives, social and political gatherings, and classes in black culture and history that spread the values of the Black Arts and Black Power movements. In the right place at the right time, Black Rep led a black repertory theater movement that spanned the nation. More importantly, Black Rep survives to this day. It stands as a testament to the strength and vision of the women leaders of black theater, and to the values of coalition building, economic self-sufficiency, and community-based activism that guided its founders.

A Theatre of a History: Major Themes in Early African-American Theater and their Relations with the History

Although it is not the first literary type that comes to mind related to African-American literature, the drama has become an important form of black self-expression. The black theater, modernized with time and adapted to the popular formats of the era, has achieved rapid development in the after-slavery period. The Harlem Renaissance was especially a booming era in this respect. This genre sometimes appears as a reinterpretation of the classics like Shakespeare's works with a black point of view, but most often it appears as exclusive works, belonging to, and produced for black people. Black Nationalism, mentioned in this case, is a theme frequently used in theatrical works. Besides, subjects such as slavery, which blacks have suffered from for many years; their search for rights due to the unfair practices they have endured; the utopia of a new beginning as free blacks in another country; and the lives of historical personalities that have marked the blacks' struggle for freedom, are also among the themes that the black theater has used most frequently. In this study, the relationship between the history and the theater of blacks in America will be analyzed by exemplifying and discussing major themes used in the early African-American Theatre.

Theater in the 20th Century

Black theater in the 20th century comprises a wide array of dramatic productions by black Americans growing out of the legacies of minstrel-era performance of the 19th century. As a result, black theater has largely been driven by the desire to present depictions of black life that were not overdetermined by the white gaze. A dynamic corpus of literary, dramatic, and expressive art, black theater of the 20th century has been foundational to the development of black theater as it is known today. This period was also concerned with questions central to black theater such as: What should black plays be about? Where should black theaters be located? Who can write a black play? What is a black play? Various theater companies, playwrights, and artistic movements have forged responses to such questions with each deepening the textures of black theater. In a significant and early articulation of what black theater should be, W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in the July 1926 issue of The Crisis, established the governing mantra for the Harlem-based theater company the Krigwa Players and black theater more broadly. He states that it should be should be “About us by us . . . for us . . . [and] near us.” Voices such as Alain Locke and Theophilus Lewis would deepen these conversations with their own perspectives on the purpose of black theater with Locke advocating for a lessened emphasis on social issues and Lewis expressing the need to appeal to working-class black Americans whose support for black theater was unwavering. Moreover, theater companies; artistic and social movements; and the work of playwrights such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, August Wilson, George C. Wolfe, Adrienne Kennedy, and Suzan-Lori Parks would go on to develop a critical body of work that makes up black theater of the 20th century. Black theater of the 20th century is intrinsically tied to black performance histories of storytelling, improvisation, “signifyin’,” humor, and masking. This dramatic work has contributed greatly to the project of self-authorship and expression that sits at the heart of black literature. This entry traverses the many contours of 20th-century black theater moving from broader explorations of anthologies and theater histories to close analyses of playwrights and finally to emergent thematic examinations that signal future directions for the study of 20th-century black theater.

“A Poor, Washed Out, Pale Creature”: Passing, Dracula, and the Jazz Age Vampire

Although critics have repeatedly referenced the stagey or cinematic elements that characterize Passing’s (1929) narrative structure and occasionally observed its gothic aesthetics, thus far no critic has attempted to contextualize Nella Larsen’s novel within the American stage and film culture of the early twentieth century or the concurrent revitalization of America’s interest in the Gothic in film and theater. Situated primarily in New York and helmed by many of the same individuals, the Harlem and Gothic Renaissances of the interwar years cooperated to reframe racial and aesthetic discourses, as Harlem art absorbed and reimagined gothic art, culture, and slang and imbued Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and its successors with covert racial commentary. This essay studies Nella Larsen’s Passing within this context, paying special attention to the influence of American racial discourse on Horace Liveright’s 1927 stage version of Dracula and its mutually influential relationship with black theater, art, and discourse. Melding contemporary archetypes of the Jazz Age vamp and gothic vampire to construct its liminal heroine, Clare Kendry, as a gothic figure in the vamp/vampire paradigm, Passing repurposes gothic elements to challenge racial binaries and to destabilize the racist status quo. This study suggests the significant extent to which Harlem Renaissance authors not only adapted the Gothic within their own literature but also reinvented and redefined it in the popular discourses of the twentieth century.