Introduction: Black Plays

Abstract

Introduction: Black Plays Harvey Young What is black theatre? What is a black play? These questions have been asked frequently throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. They were invoked during the New Negro Movement, throughout the Black Arts Movement, in the aftermath of playwright August Wilson’s spirited Theatre Communications Group (TCG) keynote address in 1996, and, most recently, at the outset of a special issue of Theatre Journal (2005) dedicated to black performance. Although “black” was preceded by “colored,” “Negro,” and “Afro-American” in earlier iterations, the questions themselves have not fundamentally changed. Across the years, the underlying challenge of these deceptively simple queries has been to engage with and articulate the interrelationships among “black,” “theatre,” and “play.” The questions dare the person to whom they have been posed not only to contemplate individualized notions of race and/as performance, but also to present their conceptions within a public forum. Most people can recognize a person as being “black” and can determine whether a witnessed event qualifies as an instantiation of “theatre” or “play.” However, they rarely would leap at an opportunity to broadcast their personal, private, and internally deliberated definitions to others. The act of talking publicly about race and/as performance can create anxiety: a respondent may worry that others will misconstrue her motivations and personal politics when her expressed beliefs do not resemble those of others. Audiences, including peers, colleagues, neighbors, and anyone else who inhabits the same public sphere as the speaker, may find themselves compelled to reevaluate their relationship to the respondent based on their interpretation of her expressed viewpoints. Is it possible for her to associate “black” with over three hundred years of embodied experiences of captivity on US soil without being labeled a racial essentialist or a black nationalist? Can she refer to an individual in whose veins the “blood memory” of slavery does not flow as “black” without being considered a racial pluralist? Is she disrespecting the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., or the hundreds of thousands of people who watched him describe it, if she identifies the 1963 March on Washington as an act of “theatre”? It is this anxiety, what cultural anthropologist John Jackson Jr. would describe as a manifestation of “racial paranoia,” that confronts most people who have to declare their vision of race and/as performance within a public setting in the post-segregationist, post–civil rights present. It is a feeling that many instructors, at every level of the academy, experience when they contemplate whether they will offer an entire class on black theatre or incorporate a single black play into a preexisting course. Their concerns are justified. Teaching is a form of public disclosure. A syllabus not only defines the scope of the class, but also reveals, through its content, the instructor’s valuation of what is (through inclusion) and what is not (through exclusion) important to her. For example, a syllabus for a “Great Playwrights” class that features the writings of only white male playwrights—from Euripides to Albee—would suggest that the instructor does not consider the work of any nonwhite and/or nonmale artist to be “great”—or, at least, not as great as those selected for inclusion in the course. Class lectures, even when presented in snippets within a small seminar, offer glimpses into and flashes of the subjectivity of the instructor. The anxiety that the prospect of teaching black theatre can cause also anchors itself in the recognition of the potential of upsetting community members, especially students who have registered [End Page xiii] for the class. Can an instructor introduce her students to the history of blackface minstrelsy, the work of the defunct theatre troupe Pomo Afro Homos, or James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie without offending a few students or, at the least, making them feel uncomfortable? The fact that blackface remains taboo in twenty-first-century performance practice, same-sex marriage ceremonies prompt protests and lawsuits, and the presence of the “n-word” on hip-hop albums results in the application of parental-advisory labels suggests that she cannot. The job of an educator may be to teach and not to worry about...

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