Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performance in Indianapolis, IN, 1970s:
Part I explores the important experience of self-actualization through theatrical representation. As Black people see ourselves working through urgent dramatic and musical/dance expression, we imagine stronger possibilities for our shared futures, and we better understand our shared pasts. What we see matters: who is doing the performing, who has created the experience backstage, and who is in the audience all contribute to the sense of satisfaction and appreciation for theatrical expression.
When we see ourselves onstage, we begin the important process of imagining beyond the everyday stresses and strains of living Black. Those stresses contribute mightily to the ways that we create and perform. African American approaches to performance value improvisation, wit, and a ferocious variety of address that create a multi-layered experience. These are tactics of survival that encourage Black people forward.
Our artistry also emerges in the spaces of unexpected demonstration of excellence made manifest by believing, deeply, in the power of performance to transform experience. Black people rely on the arts as a social necessity. We grow together through continuous practice in the arts. We sing, dance, rhyme, write, and design in creative play that extends through a lifetime from childhood through elder status, with each generation creating new modes of performance possibility.
The journey to sharing those performances, though, has never been easy. African Americans have always struggled for the chance to express our truths publicly. In the United States, civic legislation, deeply structured traditions of economic disempowerment, and racist social norms have kept Black people from thriving in professional theatre. Historically, the institutions of theatre have shunned Black participation or only allowed for narrow, racist depictions of Black life. As Black people have struggled for basic recognitions in social life outside of the theatre, the place of professional entertainment and its artistry has held even more urgency for African Americans hungry for skillful representations.
But African American artistry will not be denied. Its inventions, burnished in the crucibles of slavery and its afterlives, continuously demonstrate excellence in the face of disavowal. The chapters in this section speak to the inventiveness of artists and theatre professionals who have resisted being placed in any box of respectability, predictability, or some narrow definition of what it means to be involved in professional African American theatre. The authors and their subjects here are an intentionally diverse group: some are queer, some are concerned with bi-racial identity, some are Broadway producers and designers, and others are writing plays about Black families. In each case, these chapters remind us of the essential function of seeing ourselves and our sensibilities in full public view, where we can be surprised and amazed at the capacities of Black life in its infinite variety.
The first four chapters here explore early efforts by Black people committed to the possibilities of professional theatre. In every case, racist disavowals so challenged these artists that they had to nimbly change their approaches to producing theatre or submerge their intentions as authors according to acceptable genres and storylines. Nadine George-Graves (Chapter 1) considers the achievements of Sherman H. Dudley, who began as a versatile vaudeville entertainer, working as a singer, dancer, actor, songwriter, and live horse-act organizer. He went on to manage one of the breakthrough Black entertainment organizations of the early twentieth century, proving a versatility that extended into strong business acumen. Sandra Mayo (Chapter 2) explores the important theatrical genre of Black historical dramas, which demonstrate that African Americans inherit a wide range of legacies worthy of remembering and retelling to new audiences. Marvin McAllister (Chapter 3) reminds us how William Brown’s African Company, one of the earliest professional troupes of Black performers, suffered rioting by white marauders envious of its skilled actors and financial success. Alison Walls (Chapter 4) writes of the ways that the important Langston Hughes’ play Mulatto (1934) aligns the quintessential genre of family drama to the quintessential American concerns with racial mixing, sexual assault, and bi-racial identity.
An interview with legendary producer and director Woodie King, Jr. (Chapter 5) underscores the difficulties of centering Black lives in the circumstances of professional theatre. Black audiences and white audiences tend to experience African American creativity differently, and they often support differing portrayals of Black life onstage. King’s expertise and achievement offer beacons of excellence in this difficult, always-shifting landscape. While Broadway audiences have enjoyed King’s efforts in several landmark productions, Barbara Lewis (Chapter 6) thinks through the ways that playwrights Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry—who worked before King formed his New Federal Theatre—championed possibilities for an emergent Black feminism in their works that supported Black freedom as an ultimate implication of theatrical representation.
We turn to art in order to better understand what happens when people are willing, or forced, to live outside of norms of propriety. Black artists do indeed look toward the edges of everyday life to imagine transformative visions of lives in motion. Playwright Lynn Nottage follows in the path laid by Childress and Hansberry as an author often produced on Broadway whose plays tease the terms of normative living. Marta Effinger-Crichlow (Chapter 7) recounts the ways in which Nottage’s entirely successful play Intimate Apparel wonders at sexual and racial transgressions that push at a politics of respectability for Black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Baron Kelly (Chapter 8) points out that actor Earle Hyman achieved an unprecedented success performing Shakespeare and O’Neill in two Norwegian languages, confirming Black excellence as a result of his focused intellect and outstanding abilities as an actor. And thinking through the tremendous plays of August Wilson, Pedro E. Alvarado (Chapter 9) helps us to begin to understand an ever-present need for the non-tangible presence of spirituality that permeates Black life.
Black sensibilities on Broadway can also take the form of design and economic production. Interviews with producer Ron Simons and designer Paul Tazewell (Chapters 10 and 11) underscore the important presence of Black visioning that happens out of the direct view of the theatrical audience. Simons and Tazewell have each received Tony Awards for their work in theatre, an accolade of the highest order available to theatre professionals.
Mama, I Want to Sing! in New York City, 1980s:
Music and dance hold profound influence in Black life, so it should not surprise us that opera and musicals have provided important routes to public expression for scores of professional artists. Opera welcomed outstanding African American singers—especially women—in leading roles originally written for whites long before television or film followed suit. Twila Perry (Chapter 12) helps us understand how opera has expanded its possibilities by including artists of color, even if those artists did not immediately alter the demographic makeup of audiences for opera. Sam O’Connell (Chapter 13) reconsiders the narrative content of The Wiz in terms of its connection to African diasporic lives and the construction of a Black “home” that might nourish us in our various migrations.
Chapters 14 and 15 consider the legacies of the important 1921 Broadway production of Shuffle Along. That musical brought together an array of accomplished artists in a commercial and creative success the revitalized Black presence in New York professional theatre. Researchers in this volume explore how calls for Black economic independence intersect with the difficulties of producing resource-intensive Broadway musicals. Paula Seniors (Chapter 14) notes that Shuffle Along was revived in an altered version led by outstanding Black artists in 2016, only to succumb to the vicissitudes of economic pressures and close, prematurely. Sandra Seaton (Chapter 15) offers a highly personal account of Black theatre as a family affair that suits the needs of its practitioners, including Black people eager to applaud the raucous comedic efforts of usually respectable community members.
Seaton’s chapter provides a pivot toward thinking about how Black people engage theatre to imagine progressive futures and to illuminate the always-necessary, non-normative ways of being in the world. Black people enjoy seeing ourselves in excellence within popular modes of entertainment that are not necessarily of our own making. While we create so many forms of popular music and social dance, African American artists also excel in forms created by others. Experimental dance and theatre have always attracted Black participation, even when the audiences for these exquisite works might be small in size. In Chapter 16, prize-winning dance writer Eva Yaa Asantewaa offers insight into her method that allows her to valorize the achievements of queer artists of color (among others, of course) as she emphasizes the importance of documenting and reflecting upon performance in literary form. Her prescient commentary confirms: if we don’t learn to write about our creative exercises, how will future generations know what we have done?
Nappy Grooves Drag Kings performance in Cambridge, MA, 2000s:
The final three chapters in this section explore sexuality as an essential aspect of African American theatricality as well as a crucial aspect of Black being in the world. Beth Turner (Chapter 17) explores the extraordinary work of dramatist Pe...