Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal

Kate Dossett

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469654430
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia afroamericana

Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units" set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of "white" classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the black performance community—a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made and remade black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.

1 Our Actors May Become Our Emancipators

Race and Realism in Stevedore

“Nothing like it has ever appeared on the American stage before, under the management of white people.” William Pickens was describing the Theatre Union’s 1934 production of Stevedore to readers of the New York Amsterdam News. Harlem residents contemplating a trip to the downtown Civic Theatre were reassured that this white-authored drama was not “a play about white people and their conception about Negroes; it is primarily a setting forth of the life of the Negro: and the whites are the incidents, the ‘environment.’ ” Declaring the stage “the best spot on earth” from which to advocate for black rights, he predicted, “Our actors may become our emancipators.”¹ Written by George Sklar and Paul Peters, Stevedore was a welcome breakthrough for many African Americans because it offered a realistic representation of how black workers were both exploited by, but also resistant to race and class oppression. The plot traces the experiences of a black community of stevedores in New Orleans in the wake of a white woman’s false rape charge against a black man. Recalling the red summer of 1919, when black communities in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other American cities refused to flee their homes or wait passively for white lynch mobs to arrive, black dock workers in Stevedore fight back. Barricading their homes and arming themselves against their would-be lynchers, the play climaxes as a black woman brandishes a gun and aims a direct, lethal shot at a white man, proclaiming: “I got him! That red-headed son-of-a-bitch, I got him! I got him!”²

Black critics hailed Stevedore as a monument to black resistance even as the white playwriting team promoted a socialist realist play that celebrated interracial unionism. Sklar was already a well-known dramatist of working-class life; Peters, whose given name was Harbor Allen, was a contributing editor to New Masses and organizer for the American Communist Party’s legal arm, the International Labor Defense (ILD). He had spent five years working as a laborer, including on the New Orleans docks, to gather material for his drama of black working-class life. Both playwrights were on the executive board of the Theatre Union, a new coalition of New York–based white playwrights and directors from across the leftist political spectrum. Housed at the Civic Repertory Theatre in Union Square, the theatre collective was dedicated to producing dramas that addressed working people’s lives through a class analysis. Unsurprisingly, the Theatre Union promoted Stevedore as a labor play. Stage directions indicate that the black dockworkers, who are already successfully fighting off the white lynch mob, are aided by the last-minute arrival of white union men. In performance, however, the production seemed to elevate racial tensions above class conflict in ways that made the interracial ending unexpected and improbable. Outside the leftist theatre community, commentators (both black and white) overwhelmingly interpreted Stevedore as a play about black self-determination rather than interracial unionism. This reading shaped subsequent productions. When the Seattle Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre staged Stevedore two years later, it is doubtful whether the white reinforcements ever arrive. The black community appeared to fight off the white mob alone.

Stevedore is a good place to begin an examination of black Federal Theatre. Its fascinating production history offers insight into the practices and theoretical debates that framed political theatre on the eve of the FTP. Moreover, the Theatre Union served as an important model for the Federal Theatre in producing collaborative and socially relevant theatre and in developing marketing techniques for attracting new audiences. Both as a play and as a production, Stevedore became important to a community of black theatre critics, audiences, and performers who were willing, skilled, and increasingly able to adapt white dramas in order to develop a politically useful black theatre through the Federal Theatre. This chapter examines how black performance communities in New York City and Seattle transformed Stevedore’s political narrative. Envisaged by its authors and production company as a labor drama that foregrounded interracial unionism, African Americans exploited the self-making possibilities of the production process and became agents of their own liberation. This transformation enabled African Americans to articulate a powerful vision of black freedom at a time when much of the progressive theatre world was consumed by debates about the political efficacy of realist theatre. In the mid-1930s, leftist theatre practitioners were divided over whether realist or nonrealist theatre provided the better spur to revolutionary change. While many were concerned by what they regarded as the escapism inherent in realist dramas, others were more sympathetic to audiences’ desire to identify with the characters and scenes enacted before them on the stage. The history of radical black theatre challenges this simple binary and points to the broader range of performance strategies available to, and made possible by, African American theatre practitioners. Eschewing the narrow parameters of the realism/antirealism debate, black performance communities found ways to connect the experiences of performers, critics, and audiences in ways that inspired activism within and beyond the theatre. Examining the production history and reception of Stevedore, first in New York, and then on the federal stage in Seattle, reveals how African Americans reimagined the possibilities of dramatic realism and embraced its radical potential.

“A Race Riot with Class Interest”: From Wharf Nigger to Stevedore

Even before Stevedore opened in April 1934, Harlem was primed for a drama of black resistance. In January, the Amsterdam News announced that the Theatre Union was preparing “A Play to Expose the Exploitation of Negroes.”³ One of the two major black newspapers published weekly out of Harlem, the Amsterdam News played an important role in promoting and interpreting black theatre in New York. Among its theatre correspondents was Afrocentric historian Joel A. Rogers. His appraisal of Stevedore considered both its political and theatrical efficacy: “For perhaps the first time Negroes are given the opportunity on the stage to talk back to white people and say what’s in their mind.” Although Rogers believed interracial cooperation was “probably the only real solution to the race problem,” he didn’t find it convincingly dramatized in Stevedore, judging the play’s climax, “where the white radical workers join with the Negroes at the barricade against the white mob” to be the only “unreal scene.”⁴ Earl Morris, staff correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier, was also unpersuaded that Stevedore made an effective case for interracial unity: “The drama … fell short of its purpose to cement racial harmony and to shame whites for their treatment of dark Americans.” If anything, the play was more akin to Birth of a Nation, in fomenting hostility between the races. It might, he prophesized, (correctly) be subject to censorship if it played in other U.S. cities.⁵ The critic for the Norfolk Journal and Guide identified the scene where black stevedores throw off the role of victim and determine to fight for their lives as the “crowning dramatic moment.” Noting that white union men arrive only after the black community have already constructed a barricade and started to fight, he continued: “fortunately for the ideal which this play intends to establish, the black man had already decided his destiny, fought, and conquered when the whites arrived.”⁶

White critics were less concerned with black agency, but they agreed that the final scene was not realistic and the theme of interracial unity insufficiently integrated into the structure of the play. In the second of his two reviews for the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson suggested that the interracial ending was mere wish fulfilment. John Gessner argued that the play’s thesis of interracial union was presumed rather than dramatized, since Stevedore lacked a “fully realized presentation of how the masses of white workers overcame their prejudices to the extent of coming to the rescue of the besieged stevedores.”⁷ The critic for Time magazine thought the audience’s enthusiastic response to the ending had more to do with the effect of melodrama than interracial solidarity, suggesting that they cheered, “not for the symbolism of a workers’ united front, but simply for a thrilling rescue.” The Nation’s critic concurred: “Those brought up on melodrama may be reminded faintly of the old days when the marines used to get there at the last minute.”⁸

The persistence of racial separatism in a play ostensibly about interracial unionism is partly explained by the fact that Stevedore began life as a race drama. Peters had written “Wharf Nigger” in the late 1920s after spending several months working on the New Orleans docks as a freight checker. In that southern port city he had witnessed firsthand the hostility between white checkers and black loaders.⁹ According to Peters, the earlier play was unsuitable for the Theatre Union because “it dealt with the Negro problem from the race angle rather than from a Marxist approach.”¹⁰ Centered on a false rape charge, “Wharf Nigger” dramatized racial hatred: white men are shown to be ignorant, boorish, and malevolent; black men are defined by the physical characteristics attributed to black males in racist ideology. Lonnie Thompson, the hero of Stevedore, is called Yallah Thompson in the earlier play, while Blacksnake Johnson is described as “a huge vital Negro.” The supporting cast of characters include “an awkward, grotesque Negro,” and “a sporty buck.” There is little attempt to explore the relationship between race and class oppression and no last-minute rescue by white union men. Distrusting of whites, the black stevedores defend themselves alone.¹¹

Scenes from “Wharf Nigger” were published in New Masses in November 1929 and April 1930. The Provincetown Theatre in Greenwich Village came close to staging the full play in 1931, but the production was postponed indefinitely after a summer of rehearsals.¹² When the drama of the docks was reworked as Stevedore three years later, a number of critics recalled the earlier play. Atkinson remembered that the script had been admired, but in rehearsal it had proved “unactable,” “muddled,” and “unwieldy.” Whereas “Wharf Nigger” was, “primarily a race relations drama.… The rewriting collaboration with Sklar has made it [Stevedore] an exciting drama of a race riot with class interest.”¹³ John Anderson had also read “Wharf Nigger,” and in his view the new, collaborative script compared unfavorably with Peters’s earlier drama:

With Mr. Sklar’s assistance, presumably, a good deal of material about labor has been brought into it, and the mood of the play confused. In the last-act fight at the barricades, the Negroes, defending their homes against a mob of white lynchers, are saved by the arrival of the union. In franker and older melodramas this graceful duty was always performed by the Crew of the U.S.S. Olympia. It was one of the naïve touches which make “Stevedore” for adult playgoers less effective in the theatre than, for the sake of its cause, it ought to be.¹⁴

Writing in the New York Telegram, Robert Garland found the insertion of the “labor angle” confusing: “I, as an excited onlooker would rather see the back-to-the-wall Negroes win or lose standing on their own than come over the top with the assistance of the American Federation of Labor.”¹⁵

Critics and audiences often choose to see their own politics reflected in the theatre. Ideological opposition to, or even ignorance of, interracial struggles supported by the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) might explain why white commercial critics preferred to see black Americans win or lose alone. Similarly, it was understandable that black critics and audiences honed in on Stevedore’s message of black self-determination at a time when black actors seldom got to talk back to white authority figures on stage. However, the Theatre Union production and its critical reception were more than a reflection of the personal politics of individual critics; they were also an intervention in ongoing debates about the potential for, and desirability of, genuine interracial cooperation in social movements. By the mid-1930s, moderate black civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) no longer determined the parameters and possibilities of what an integrated America might look like. Since the late 1920s, the CPUSA had vied to shape the cause and course of racial justice for black and white workers. When the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern met in 1928 and declared black Americans an oppressed nation with a right to self-determination, the CPUSA enacted a two-pronged strategy that recognized the role of interracial activism and black nationalism in African American politics and culture. Even if many black Americans were unpersuaded by the CPUSA’s black belt thesis—that imagined black Americans from Virginia to Texas as a separate and independent nation—the party’s uncompromising defense of the Scottsboro youths and other high-profile victims of America’s judicial system convinced many that here, finally, was a political party committed to t...