The Black Circuit

Race, Performance, and Spectatorship in Black Popular Theatre

Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351401623
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: African American History

The Black Circuit: Race, Performance, and Spectatorship in Black Popular Theatre presents the first book-length study of Chitlin Circuit theatre, the most popular and controversial form of Black theatre to exist outside the purview of Broadway since the 1980s. Through historical and sociological research, Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon links the fraught racial histories in American slave plantations and early African American cuisine to the performance sites of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, early-twentieth-century vaudeville, and mid-twentieth-century gospel musicals. The Black Circuit traces this rise of a Black theatrical popular culture that exemplifies W. E. B. Du Bois's 1926 parameters of "for us, near us, by us, and about us," with critical differences that, McMahon argues, complicate our understanding of performance and spectatorship in African American theatre. McMahon shows how an integrated and evolving network of consumerism, culture, circulation, exchange, ideologies, and meaning making has emerged in the performance environments of Chitlin Circuit theatre that is reflective of the broader influences at play in acts of minority spectatorship. She labels this network the Black Circuit.

1

THE BLACK CIRCUIT

This is not a counter-discourse but a counterculture that defiantly reconstructs its own critical, intellectual, and moral genealogy in a partially hidden sphere of its own.

—Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993)¹

As history will document, the 2017 Academy Awards season will be memorialized not only for its politically charged environment, coming at the dawn of the Donald J. Trump presidency, but also for the range of racially and ethnically diverse nominations that arrived two years after the academy had been severely criticized for repeatedly ignoring the filmic contributions of people of color. The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, credited as being started by the attorney, writer, and media personality April Reign in 2015,² gained traction on Twitter due to its poignant encapsulation of minority outrage that spoke to the heart of the matter. Reign and those who heeded her call directed attention toward the academy’s relentless tradition of excluding minority artistry and toward their simultaneous and ironic praise for white nominees who collaborated with Black artists on motion pictures that were topically about Black lives. Case in point, during the 2015 awards season, Creed (Ryan Coogler, 2015), the contemporary extension of the popular Rocky ( John G. Avildsen, 1979) films, garnered a nomination for Sylvester Stallone in the best supporting actor category yet ignored the acting performance of the African American actor Michael B. Jordan in the lead role and the directing feats of Coogler, also African American. A similar racially charged specter followed the original screenplay category in which an all-white screenwriting team was nominated for the blockbuster narrative Straight Outta Compton (F. Gary Gray, 2015); a film that chronicled the rise of the 1980s African American hip hop group N.W.A.³

The 2016 Academy Award season became a catalyst for even more outrage and coalition against more of the same. The January 2016 article in The Economist “How racially skewed are the Oscars?” documented the fact that the twentieth century had seen “95% of [all] Oscar nominations” awarded to “white film stars.”⁴ The February 27, 2016, Star Tribune article “Whitewashing the Oscars: How did Hollywood get in this predicament?” shed contemporary light on the issue:

For the second year in a row, each and every actor in the 2016 Oscar nominations is white. That’s 20 best actor, actress, supporting actor and supporting actress candidates in Sunday’s telecast, with zero people of color.⁵

This bold-faced and long-standing lack of diversity in Academy Award nominations seared fresh wounds into a fraught condition of erasure and disregard, specifically as experienced by African American artists and audiences. Very much in line with the sociopolitical, governmental, and economic structures that many Americans were protesting in the streets outside of cinemas across the country, the Academy Awards seemed to be the artistic wing of a larger hegemonic structure that was boldly and unapologetically reflecting and reinforcing that Black lives, Black narratives, and Black artistry do not matter here.

However, in 2017, a cultural and representational healing seemed to walk in and reconcile the academy’s almost century-long history of alienation and dismissal of artists and artistry of color. Positioned at the helm of this diversity was theatre, specifically African American theatre. The still unforgettable surprise wins for Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) in the categories of best picture, best supporting actor, and best adapted screenplay alongside Viola Davis’s momentous win for best supporting actress in Fences (Denzel Washington, 2016), sought to redress the academy’s past violations. Yet for those whose interests lie in theatre more pointedly, the awards also heralded the celebration of playwrights and their devoted attention to the theatre and the narratives that have existed and thrived there for centuries. The plot of Moonlight derives from the original play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, written by African American playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney. Set in a contemporary neighborhood in Liberty City, Miami, Moonlight presents the life of Chiron, a gay African American man, as he navigates his sexuality and parental abandonment within an environment that is simultaneously filled with violence, crime, drugs, and nontraditional love. Fences, the 1987 Pulitzer Prize–winning play authored by African American playwright August Wilson and set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, explores love, betrayal, resilience, and faith in an African American family led by Troy and Rose Maxson. While Wilson and Fences, in particular, have received worldwide acclaim, McCraney is a name that only theatregoers interested in African American drama and performance may have readily recognized despite the fact that he was awarded a McArthur Genius Grant in 2013.

As film and theatre historians easily recognize, of course, this is not the first year in which films rooted in the stage have gained entry and garnered accolades from the academy. Included in a list of these lauded stage-to-screen adaptations are Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker (Arthur Penn, 1962), Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Mike Nichols, 1966), and James Golden’s The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, 1968).⁶ Yet as a scholar devoted to the study and practice of Black theatre and performance, I see the marked significance not in the commendation that theatre has once again received from the film industry but in the landmark achievement and recognition of Black playwrights, Black theater artists, and Black dramatic narratives in this contemporary moment. For those interested in when and where African American theatre is granted access into the mainstream, the 2017 Academy Awards season would signal a moment of confirmation, celebration, and first-time recognition. The 2017 Academy Awards also direct interests toward probing the options, possibilities, limitations, advantages, and conditions in which Black theater and performance have thrived without or in spite of acknowledgment from the mainstream.

The Black Circuit: Race, Performance, and Spectatorship in Black Popular Theatre complicates our understanding of this mainstream by presenting the first book-length study of Chitlin Circuit theatre, the most popular form of contemporary Black theatre outside the purview of Broadway since the 1980s. In so doing, Black theatrical productions and their audiences move from the margins to the center of focus, and thus, a notable shift of vantage point and power occurs. Instead of African American theatre artists, like McCraney and Wilson, being situated as wholly (economically and artistically) dependent on accolades, legibility, and acknowledgment from the large, outside, and white-oriented mainstream, a small cadre of artists and spectators have built their own theatrical empire complete with their own category of standards, content, aesthetics, performance spaces, and interests. The result is that this community of artists and audiences looks inward for merits of success and acknowledgment rather than outward, as has been the case with most traditional African American theatrical fare. The impact of their choices, in the creation of a theatre world that is, I argue, by and for a segment of the Black American community whose interests have been devalued and marginalized, even by other Black Americans, has caused cataclysmic representational and aesthetic shockwaves across the national frontier of the so-called American mainstream. The Black Circuit therefore maps the politics of Black theatrical pleasure in these performance enclaves. In what follows, I examine the making, the performing, the spectating, and articulation of contemporary Chitlin Circuit theatre and performance as political acts that have far-reaching implications both inside and beyond the terrain of theatre and performance studies.

Chitlin Circuit theatre (also known as gospel musicals, gospel plays, urban musicals, urban theatre⁷ or more recently as the urban circuit), emerged from a varied theatrical lineage encompassing influences such as nineteenth-century melodramatic theatre,⁸ early-twentieth-century vaudeville and theatre performance, the 1950s gospel musicals of Langston Hughes, and a practitioner-produced tradition of African American musicals of the 1980s in which Black dramatists infused religion, comedy, gospel, jazz, and R&B into contemporary narratives about urban African American life, set in fictional, inner city environments. The productions also contain African American popular culture elements found in music, television, film, and literature. Many productions also feature African American entertainers who perform their celebrity identities in the context of the play. Early circuit playwrights, such as Vy Higgensen and Ken Wydro, creators of the popular musical Mama, I Want to Sing (1983), and Shelly Garrett, author of Beauty Shop (1989), set a number of important precedents for the more recent wave studied in this book, achieving commercial success, wide recognition, and loyalty among African American audiences, extended runs, and consistent tour bookings. They likewise laid the groundwork for the independent, community-based nature of these productions, in which playwrights continue to serve as their own directors and producers. Financial support, then as it does now, came largely from the pockets of the playwrights themselves and from family, friends, and interested community members. Similar to the environments that are found in today’s circuit events, Higgensen, Wydro, Garrett, and other early circuit artists created highly interactive theatre environments in which audiences were seen singing, dancing, and engaging in dialogue with performers, from their seats.

Typically, circuit productions are staged in large performance spaces that cater to touring entertainment such as popular music concerts, conventions, or motivational speakers. The plays share particular themes of love, loss, lust, moral intervention, spiritual redemption, and faith inspiration. Popular narrative topics include, but are not limited to, stories about adultery, domestic violence, mental abuse, marriage, and divorce. An average production runs between two and three hours, depending on the amount of audience interaction and onstage improvisation on any given performance night. After engaging with a varied presentation of play-related materials and merchandise in the theater’s lobby, ticket holders are welcomed into a well-lit auditorium and usually take their seats while popular R&B and/or gospel music is played overhead. Once the curtain rises, audiences are introduced to the unfolding drama that is interwoven with songs, comedic routines, and musical accompaniment provided by the band members and sometimes vocalists who play and/or sing from the theater’s orchestra pit (a sunken area located at the front of the stage that is usually out of view and separated from the auditorium seats). At curtain call, all of the actors traditionally appear onstage one by one for audience applause, and if the playwright is in attendance, they come onstage for applause and thank the spectators directly for attending the show.

Tracing this historical and aesthetic lineage, The Black Circuit focuses on the contemporary wave of Chitlin Circuit theatre that emerged in the 1990s. In doing so, I acknowledge how the efforts of its practitioners and the loyal and engaged support of its spectators have impacted American theatre and culture more broadly. Religion, comedy, music, and African American culture still loom large in this second generation, and yet, unlike their predecessors, these younger playwrights are interested in creating an entire repertoire of blockbuster productions rather than relying solely on the success of one or two box office hits. Although many African American playwrights and producers have sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Black Circuit
• 2 Slow-Roasted Chitterlings
• 3 Looking for Langston
• 4 David Talbert: Resurrecting Langston
• 5 Johnson and Guidry: Vaudeville 2.0
• 6 Tyler Perry: Minstrelsy Inverted
• 7 Small Acts: The Politics of Black Theatrical Pleasure
• Index