They Love to Watch Us Dance

The evolving relationship between Black performers, and white and Black spectators, is central to the story of Black federal theatre. Chapter 2 examines what happens when Black performance and white spectatorship become the focus of the drama itself. It examines Abram Hill and John Silvera’s Liberty Deferred, alongside Stars and Bars, a satirical newspaper developed by the Hartford Negro Unit but usually credited solely to the white dramatist Ward Courtney. Both newspapers position white and Black spectators as objects of the Black gaze and both mock the pretensions to radical innovation by white Living Newspapers such as One Third of a Nation. Scholarship on the Federal Theatre’s Living Newspaper relies almost entirely on Living Newspapers developed and staged by white theatre practitioners. This chapter argues that Black Living Newspapers developed a variety of techniques to unmask the performative devices used within white Living Newspapers that consolidate even as they critique the racial discourses which enforce Black subordination. In so doing, they compelled white FTP administrators to engage with the history and practice of Black performance and white spectatorship.

Introduction

The introduction explores the significance of Black theatre manuscripts for histories of the Federal Theatre Project, Black literary heritage and the Radical Black tradition. Black theatre manuscripts developed on the Federal Theatre Project were not always staged or published, but they document Black creativity and theatrical innovation in the 1930s and constitute a crucial if overlooked part of American cultural history. Theatre histories that only include plays staged or published will invariably be histories of what was interesting or acceptable to whites. This book examines what was important and necessary to African Americans. It develops the idea of the Black Performance Community, a temporary community which performance creates among spectators, performers, directors, writers and others whose backstage roles shape manuscripts and performance. It argues that histories of Black theatre need to consider variant manuscripts, the communities of unacknowledged collaborators that shaped them over time, and the role of the archives and anthologies in shaping knowledge production about Black theatre.

Free at Lass!

The final chapter examines the Harlem Negro Unit’s immensely popular production of Haiti. Authored by white New York journalist William Dubois, white theatre critics attempted to place Haiti within a white dramatic tradition of Black primitivism which included Emperor Jones and Orson Welles’ recent Voodoo version of Macbeth. By contrast, the Black performance community worked to transform Dubois’s racist play into a celebration of the Haitian Republic’s Black heroes. The success of Haiti helped the Black performance community push the Federal Theatre to invest in Black dramatists. On the eve of the FTP’s closure two new Black dramas were being prepared for production: Panyared, (1939) explores the origins of African slavery and was the first instalment of a historical trilogy by Hughes Allison; Theodore Browne’s Go Down Moses (1938), is a dramatization of Harriet Tubman’s life which examines Black agency in ending slavery. While neither drama made it to the stage, centering Black theatre manuscripts, and the performance communities who developed them, allows us to see how African Americans imagined radical paths to the future.

Conclusion

The conclusion considers the impact of Black Federal Theatre on the broader history of African Americans and the New Deal. It argues that African Americans did not wait to be inspired or reined in by New Deal programs, but rather devised new techniques and adapted existing dramatic forms to make space for Black authored dramas. The rich history of Black drama developed on the Federal Theatre Project has long been marginalized in histories of U.S. theatre and culture and isolated from the radical Black traditions it helped create. Knowledge producing practices of archival and academic institutions have long marginalized Black cultural histories. However the Black Arts Movement played a pivotal role in the recovery of Black Federal Theatre. The work of Theodore Ward was published for the first time in 1970s Black Theatre anthologies and celebrated by Black theatre artists such as Amiri Baraka. The history of the archive of the Federal Theatre Project is a reminder of how easily Black history can be buried as well as the long and rich theatre heritage which has shaped the radical Black tradition.

Wrestling with Heroes

This chapter and Chapters 4 and 5 consider how African Americans debated and dramatized the Black hero in Federal Theatre dramas. Chapter 3 focuses on the variant manuscripts of Theodore Browne’s John Henry drama, Natural Man. Written for and staged by the Seattle Negro Unit in 1937, it was significantly revised by the newly formed American Negro Theatre in Harlem in 1941. This chapter situates these manuscripts at the very center of a broader conversation about the problem of the hero that occupied Black writers in and beyond the Federal Theatre Project. In particular it compares the revisions made to Natural Man, with the stage adaptation of Richard Wright’s prize winning novel Native Son (1940). Running at St. James Theatre in Manhattan just as Natural Man opened in Harlem in spring 1941, the stage version was a collaboration between Wright, the white dramatist Paul Green, and the director-producer team of Orson Welles and John Houseman. While Wright had previously advocated for Green’s ‘Negro folk’ dramas when he worked on the Chicago Negro Unit, the two men came to have conflicting views about Wright’s hero, Bigger Thomas. Wright captured their troubled collaboration in a seven-page drama entitled “The Problem of the Hero.”

Garveyism, Communism, and Gender Trouble

In Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog, Vic Mason seeks a better life for his family in the Universal Negro Improvement Association. His son, Les, looks for answers in the interracial Communist movement. Both men and movements come undone for they rely on gender hierarchies which sustain racial capitalism in the United States. This chapter explores the controversy that began when Ward read a draft of his play before a South Side audience in January 1938 and continued through the Negro Playwrights Company’s staging of the play in Harlem in October 1940. Drawing on variant manuscripts, this chapter documents the role of the Black performance community in shaping the version of the play first staged by the Chicago Negro Unit at the Great Northern Theatre in April 1938. The responses of the local community make clear it was the staging of gender and racial divisions within Black families and political movements, rather than Communism, which made Big White Fog a provocative play in 1938. The sympathetic portrayal of the Garvey movement reminds us that communism was not the only radical path for African Americans in the 1930s, even if the legacy of anti-Communism has disproportionately shaped knowledge production about Black theatre.

Our Actors May Become Our Emancipators

This chapter examines how Black performance communities in New York City and Seattle transformed the political narrative of Stevedore from an interracial labor drama into a play of Black self-determination. First staged by the Theatre Union in New York in 1934, this white-authored labor drama explores interracial relations between Black and white dockworkers. The Black hero who stands up for fellow dockworkers is framed on a rape charge. When the white mob arrives to lynch the Black hero, Black dock workers fight back with the help of white union men. Two years later Stevedore was staged by the Seattle Negro Unit. On the federal theatre the interracial ending was downplayed, and possibly dropped altogether: Black men appear to resist the white mob alone. Black self-determination, rather than interracial unionism wins the day. Stevedore’s fascinating production history offers insight into the practices and theoretical debates which framed political theatre in the 1930s. It suggests that Black performance communities moved beyond the realist-anti-realist binaries that consumed white leftist theatre and instead developed a Black realism with radical potential.