African American Women Playwrights

A Research Guide

Christy Gavin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136521478
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

This Guide includes the primary and secondary works and summaries of plays of 15 prominent African American women playwrights including Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Alice Childress, Zora Neale Hurston, Georgia Douglas Johnson. During the last 10 to 15 years, critical consideration of contemporary as well as earlier black women playwrights has blossomed. Plays by black women are increasingly anthologized and two recently published anthologies devote themselves solely to black women dramatists. In light of the growing interest in scholarship concerning African American women playwrights, researchers and librarians need a bibliographical source that brings together the profiles interviews, critical material and primary sources of black female playwrights. This guide will provide a bibliographical essay reviewing the scholarship of black women playwrights as well as for each playwright: a biography, summaries of each play detailed annotations of secondary material, and list of primary sources.

Chapter One

Marita Bonner

Brief Biography

According to Margaret Wilkerson, The Purple Flower by Marita Bonner (1898–1971), is “perhaps the most provocative play” created by a black woman in the early part of this century. Critics have observed that in this work Bonner anticipates the dramatic expressionism of Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange. Unlike the genteel plays of Angelina Weld Grimké, Bonner’s race dramas, with their distinctive second-person narration, reflect her unflinching rage toward racial injustice. In her prescient essay “On Being Young-A Woman-and Colored,” Bonner wrote, “[Whites] have never had petty putrid insult dragged over them-drawing blood-like pebbled sand on your body where the skin is tenderest. . . . You long to explode and hurt everything white; friendly; unfriendly. But you know that you cannot live with a chip on your shoulder.” Lorraine Roses and Ruth Randolph (1.8) report that Charles T. Copeland, Bonner’s writing instructor at Radcliffe, encouraged her to write “but not to be ‘bitter’—a cliché to colored people who write.”

Born in Boston, Bonner attended Brookline High School. In 1922 she graduated from Radcliffe and went on to teach school in Virginia and Washington, D.C. While in Washington, she became part of the S Street Salon, a group of writers and intellectuals founded by the writer Georgia Douglas Johnson. During this period Bonner wrote three plays: The Pot Maker, The Purple Flower, and Exit, an Illusion; the latter two won first place in contests sponsored by The Crisis, a black magazine. A fourth drama, Muddled Dream, has been lost. Although Bonner joined the Krigwa Players, a theatrical group based in Washington, D.C., the company did not perform any of her plays. According to Jennifer Burton, the players were unaware of her dramas. In1930 Bonner married William Occomy, a graduate of Brown University, and the couple moved to Chicago. After her marriage, Bonner apparently ceased writing drama and concentrated on fiction and raising her children. In 1941 she ceased writing altogether. Some critics surmise that she quit because of her union with the First Church of Christ Scientist, but Roses and Randolph point out that writing is not anathema to the church’s philosophy.

None of Bonner’s plays was produced during her lifetime.

Burton and others speculate that Bonner’s plays went unproduced because their uniqueness set them apart from other contemporary plays written by blacks and because they would have been perhaps technically too complex to stage. Yet, as Elizabeth Brown-Guillory notes, Bonner’s plays “were read and savored . . . by some of the finest [Harlem Renaissance] artists, including Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, and Langston Hughes.”

Profiles and General Criticism

Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. New York: Praeger, 1990.

While focusing on later black women dramatists, Brown-Guillory includes discussions of several female playwrights active during the Harlem Renaissance: Bonner, Burrill, Grimké, Johnson, and Miller.

Burke, Sally. American Feminist Playwrights: A Critical History. New York: Twayne, 1996.

Burke agrees with Perkins’s (1.6) opinion that Bonner’s work influenced the expressionistic plays of Adrienne Kennedy. She also points out that Bonner anticipated Shange’s use of drumbeat, dance, and song: “Bonner pressed the boundaries of the drama, providing new ways of depicting age-old struggles.”

Burton, Jennifer. “Introduction.” In Zora Neale Hurston, Eulalie Spence, Marita Bonner, and Others: The Prize Plays and Other One-Acts Published in Periodicals. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., xix-lx. New York: G.K. Hall, 1996.

Burton’s solid introduction to the plays of early women playwrights provides background on Bonner and briefly explores each of her plays. The introduction is accompanied by extensive notes and a bibliography.

Flynn, Joyce. “Marita Bonner Occomy.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Vol. 51, Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940. Edited by Trudier Harris. Detroit: Gale Research, 1987.

Flynn, co-editor of Bonner’s collected works, provides a basic introduction to the life and work of Marita Bonner. Accompanying the essay is a photo of Bonner and reproductions of pages from her journal. See also Frye Street & Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner. Edited by Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin. Boston: Beacon, 1987.

Miller, Jeanne-Marie. “Black Women Playwrights from Grimké to Shange: Selected Synopses of Their Works.” In But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Edited by Gloria T. Hull, P.B. Scott, and Barbara Smith, 280–290. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982.

Miller surveys the work of several African-American women whose plays “offer a unique insight into the Black experience,” including Angelina Weld Grimké, Marita Bonner, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Mary Burrill, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Sonia Sanchez, J.E. Franklin, and Martie Charles.

Perkins, Kathy A. Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays Before 1950. Edited by Kathy A. Perkins, 189–190. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Perkins maintains that Bonner’s importance lies in the fact that she rejected dramatic realism. Her plays anticipate the surreal and expressionistic plays of Adrienne Kennedy thirty-five years later.

Peterson, Bernard L. Early Black American Playwrights and Dramatic Writers: A Biographical Directory and Catalog of Plays, Films, and Broadcasting Scripts. New York: Greenwood, 1990.

The entry on Bonner includes a brief biography, plot summaries, staging history, and list of secondary sources.

Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph. Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900–1945. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990.

The entry on Bonner provides brief biographical information and selected list of primary and secondary sources.

Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph. “Marita Bonner: In Search of Other Mothers’ Gardens.” Black American Literature Forum 21 (Spring-Summer 1987): 165–83.

Although the authors limit their discussion to Bonner’s short fiction, their introduction to her life, based on her papers and interviews with her family, is highly relevant to a study of Bonner’s drama.

Shafer, Yvonne. “Marita Bonner.” In American Women Playwrights, 1900–1950, 428–432. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

Shafer provides a basic introduction to Bonner and her work. Included are brief synopses and analyses of Bonner’s plays.

Exit, An Illusion

(Won first prize for best play in the The Crisis magazine contest, 1927; unproduced during Bonner’s lifetime)

Playscripts

Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays Before 1950. Edited by Kathy A Perkins, 187–199. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

“Exit, an Illusion.” The Crisis (Oct. 1929): 335–36, 352.

Frye Street & Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner. Edited by Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin, 47–56. Boston: Beacon, 1987.

Zora Neale Hurston, Eulalie Spence, Marita Bonner, and Others: The Prize Plays and Other One-Acts Published in Periodicals. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 126–132. New York: G.K. Hall, 1996.

Summary of Play

Asleep in a shabby flat, amid a mess of clothes, dishes, lacy lingerie and red kid pumps, is Buddy, a black man, and Dot, a half black, half white woman. They are neither brother and sister nor husband and wife. Dot, who is ill with an unspecified disease, awakes and announces to Buddy that she has a date with Exit Mann, a man she has known all her life. They argue. Buddy’s jealousy of Exit, whom he believes is white, is complicated by the fact that he is angry that Dot can pass for white. Buddy threatens that if Exit comes for Dot, Buddy will shoot both of them. Suddenly, Exit appears. Buddy screams at him for taking Dot away. Dot implores Buddy to say he loves her. Instead, Buddy rejects her and she goes to Exit. Buddy fires a shot that hits a light and the stage goes dark. Buddy strikes a match. He sees Dot lying prostrate as Exit turns to reveal his true self—the “hollow eyes and fleshless cheeks” of Death. Buddy awakes as if from a dream, realizes Dot is dead, and cries, “I love you.”

Criticism

(No criticism on Exit; An Illusion is available)

The Pot Maker (A Play to Be Read)

(Published, 1927; unproduced during Bonner’s lifetime)

Playscripts

Frye Street & Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner. Edited by Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin, 17–29. Boston: Beacon, 1987.

“The Pot Maker.” Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life (Feb. 1927): 47–56.

Wines in the Wilderness: Plays by African American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, 1–10. New York: Greenwood, 1990.

Zora Neale Hurston, Eulalie Spence, Marita Bonner, and Others: The Prize Plays and Other One-Acts Published in Periodicals. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 107–114. New York: G.K. Hall, 1996.

Summary of Play

Elias has been called from the fields by God to preach the Gospel. He rehearses his sermon to his family, including his parents, Luke and Nettie, his wife, Lucinda, and her lover, Lew Fox. As he begins, his family constantly interrupts him with comments and criticisms, especially his frustrated wife. Elias tells the parable of the maker of earthenware pots. The pot maker tells the pots that if they do as he says, they will be transformed into pots made of gold, silver, brass, iron, or tin. The pots will be filled, according to the pot maker, and must remain upright even though the room will darken and terrifying noises will erupt. Some of the pots complain of cracks. The pot maker mends the cracks. As the room darkens, the pots react in different ways—some fall over and they turn to tin; some hang their heads, but “settin up” they turn to silver. Others try to deceive the pot maker by acting as if they are upright; for their boldness, the pot maker turns them to brass. Those that remain standing are turned to gold. Elias concludes that the pots symbolize people. If they “keep settin on the truth” of God, they will be rewarded. Following Elias’s parable, Lew leaves the house. Shortly thereafter, Lucinda attempts to follow him but is prevented by her mother-in-law. Lucinda loses her temper and screams at her husband for his irresponsibility—“Ain’t no woman so in love with her man’s mother she wants to live five years under the same roof with her like I done.” Meanwhile, Lew, outside waiting for Lucinda, falls down the well. Elias prevents Lucinda from saving him. She breaks loose and runs to Lew. Elias yells that they are both “tin.” Suddenly he realizes he also has cracks. He runs to the well and attempts to save Lucinda, but he drowns as well. The play ends with the playwright commenting, “A crack has been healed. A pot has spilled over on the ground. Some wisps have twisted out.”

Criticism

Harris, Will. “Early Black Women Playwrights and the Dual Liberation Motif.” African American Review 28, no. 2 (1994): 205–221.

Harris asserts that important to the plays by black women dramatists in the earlier part of the twentieth century were raising racial consciouness and staging strong, independent roles for women. However, The Pot Maker differs from other plays by women of the period by its refusal to celebrate race or women’s independence. According to Harris, “Lucinda’s direct criticism of her husband Elias violates the rule of silence on the subject of black men held by the other female salon playwrights. Lucinda’s affair (that is, her rejection of the racially defined terms of the egalitarian commitment) results in her own death, her lover’s, and her husband’s.”

Wines in the Wilderness: Plays by African American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, 1–10. New York: Greenwood, 1990.

Brown-Guillory observes that Bonner depicts “poor and middle class black women who defend themselves against gender-based, societal constraints.” The Pot Maker reflects Bonner’s concerns with resisting t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• General Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Chapter One: Marita Bonner
• Chapter Two: Mary Burrill
• Chapter Three: Alice Childress
• Chapter Four: Angelina Weld Grimké
• Chapter Five: Lorraine Hansberry
• Chapter Six: Zora Neale Hurston
• Chapter Seven: Georgia Douglas Johnson
• Chapter Eight: Adrienne Kennedy
• Chapter Nine: May Miller
• Chapter Ten: Ntozake Shange
• Index