Abstract
By the mid-1920s nearly every major urban center had an African American theatre group. African American professionals and amateurs, especially in Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Cleveland, formed theatres and presented plays, musicals, and staged readings. Although black theatres were experiencing what Nellie McKay termed “growing pains,”3 they retained a small but devoted number of patrons. The rise of the Black Little Theatre Movement from 1918 to 1927 emerged from an urban middle class seeking cultural enrichment and from black actors, playwrights, and directors unable to find work in mainstream theatre. The Black Little Theatre Movement derived its inspiration from a number of sources, including Ireland’s Abbey Theatre, Ridgely Torrence’s Three Plays for a Negro Theatre produced on Broadway in April 1917,4 Charles Gilpin’s success in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones ,and a burgeoning little theatre movement in general.
Whatever the difficulties of art for the white man, the American Negro has his special burden. The Harlem art of the 1920s shows the strains that he lived under…. It attempts to speak with two voices, one from the stage of national culture and the other from the soul of ethnic experience.
— Nathan Irvin Huggins (1971)1
If the traditional theatre, then, is now in a rut which affords no room for the one-act play, and if vaudeville is an empty cradle for this branch of dramatic art, where shall we turn?
— Walter Prichard Eaton (1917)2
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Notes
Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 194.
Walter Prichard Eaton, “Introduction,” Washington Square Plays (Garden City: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1917), xi.
Nellie McKay, “Black Theater and Drama in the 1920s: Years of Growing Pains,” Massachusetts Review 28.4 (Winter 1987), 615–26.
Ridgely Torrence’s three one-act plays opened on Broadway in 1917, running for one month. See Susan Curtis, The First Black Actors on the Great White Way (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998).
For a discussion about the rise of national stages, see Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1992).
For a discussion about black actors at the turn of the century, see David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
Barbara L. Webb, “The Black Dandyism of George Walker: A Case Study in Genealogical Method,” TDR 45.4 (Winter 2001), 7–24.
Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 106.
Morrell Heald, “Business Thought in the Twenties: Social Responsibility,” American Quarterly 13.2 (Summer 1961), 126.
Glenn Hughes, A History of American Theatre, 1700–1950 (New York: Samuel French, 1951), 355.
Eric Walrond, “Growth of the Negro Theatre,” Theatre Magazine 41 (October 1925), 20.
Eulalie Spence, “A Criticism of the Negro Drama,” Opportunity 6 (June 1928), 180.
Hubert H. Harrison, When Africa Awakes: The “Inside Story” of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World (New York: Porro Press, 1920), 14
James de Jongh, Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8.
John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1947), 397.
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945, 1993), 17.
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, tr. Peter Labanyi (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 2.
Mary Ryan, “Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 264.
Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, tr. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), 3.
Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, tr. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 135.
Habermas, “Remarks on the Concept of Communicative Action,” in Social Action, ed. Gottfried Seebass and Raimo Tuomela (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), 167.
J. Martin Favor, Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 12.
See, for instance, Brenda Ray Moryck, “A Point of View,” Opportunity 3.32 (August 1925), 246–249
James Weldon Johnson, “The Dilemma of the Negro Author,” American Mercury 15.60 (December 1928), 477.
James Weldon Johnson, “Preface,” The Book of Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1922), xl.
Rebecca T. Cureau, “Towards an Aesthetic of Black Folk Expression,” in Alain Locke: Reflections on a Modern Renaissance Man, ed. Russell J. Linnemann (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 77.
Ross Posnock, Color & Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 139.
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1992), 721
Robert E. Washington, The Ideologies of African American Literature: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Nationalist Revolt (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 41.
Du Bois, “Can the Negro Serve Drama?,” Theatre Magazine 38 (July 1923), 68.
Roman Jakobson, “On Realism in Art,” Language in Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 20.
For a history of the Quality Amusement Corporation, see Bernard L. Peterson, The African American Theatre Directory, 1816–1960 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 171–172.
See Addell Austin Anderson, “The Ethiopian Art Theatre,” Theatre Survey 33.2 (November 1992), 132–143
Jane T. Peterson, “Pride and Prejudice: The Demise of the Ethiopian Art Theatre,” Theatre History Studies 14 (1994), 141–149.
Samuel A. Hay, African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2.
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© 2002 David Krasner
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Krasner, D. (2002). “What Constitutes a Race Drama and How May We Know It When We Find It?”: The Little Theatre Movement and the Black Public Sphere. In: A Beautiful Pageant. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06625-1_10
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