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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The struggle for social justice is a long-term endeavour that has continued for
ages with redefinitions and upheavals. Artful activism through resistance provides a
new energy and converts the goals to be more tangible. It is art which allows the
individuals to reminiscence the past, to imagine the future and sense the world
differently. Of all the genres in literature, it is drama that energizes both the actors and
the audience to re-define and revitalize themselves. Drama serves as a catalyst on
multiple levels for change. It is only in drama that both the actors and the audience
involve themselves in their commitment and understanding, thereby deciphering
themselves and in re-defining too. It is this interconnectedness, in drama that creates
as community of resistance and solidarity that is essential for a successful social
movement. This ultimately adds up to the empowerment of the individual, community
and the movement.
The black woman‘s history is a legacy of struggle. It is this history of
oppression that has united the black woman to create one unique stand point of redefining themselves. African American women continue to play myriads of critical
roles from their entry as slaves through the middle passage in America. Their labour
and leadership, their motherhood and patriotism, and their intellect and artistic
expression have all enriched the African American community which has been
exhibited in various literary genres. The accomplishments of these exceptional
women are the expressions of a vibrant culture.
The historical oppressions and the power of struggle over centuries have been
exposed by black writers, both male and female, yet with a difference. From exposing
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to assimilating and thereby empowering, these African American writers have utilized
varied genres. Of which the most energizing and immediate awakening both the
audience/readers have been only through drama. To expose their agonizing roles
through the dramas, they used the theatre as their chronotopic device.
Theatre is a living, dynamic space in which many perspectives converge:
playwright, director, actors, and set designers. Other creative forms such as novel or
short story offer only a static vision that remains constant during the process of
audience or reader engagement. In theatre, the bodies on stage, in conjunction with
the presence of a live audience, generate a palpable connection between actors and
spectators, fostering a sense of culpability within the spectator
Black playwriting in America is directly related to African theatrics.
Genevieve Fabre in Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor traces the development of
black playwriting from its earliest roots. He asserts that, initially the African Dramatic
rendering were in the form of dance and mime shows. These kinds of African
ceremonies helped to preserve their customs and cultural heritage. In‗Black theater
U.S.A : Forty -Five plays by Black Americans,(1847-1974), James Hatch and Ted
Shine depict that Africans have vibrant tradition of celebrated life and death in theatre
rituals. This tradition of oral drama was transformed to American soil by enslaved
Africans. They entertained whites even in ships while on their way to America. ―On
plantations, masters continued to request these performances. The slave was cast in
the double role as labourer and entertainer‖ (Fabre 4). In Kuntu Drama, Paul Carter
Harrison says that, ―these African shows comprised of song, dance and drums and
that these three modes continue to characterize contemporary black theatre‖ (Harrison
353). Next minstrel show emerged from slave theatricals and remained popular for
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decades. In New Black playwrights, William Counch explains that, American
audiences were delighted by the Negro minstrels.
The transition from the oral tradition to the written play form took place
gradually. William Wells Brown, the first African American playwright, in his The
Escape; or a leap for Freedom, (1858) marked the beginning of formal playwriting.
This melodramatic, closet drama speaks against slavery and reveals the South as a
corrupt society. This first protest play made an appeal for justice for African
Americans.
During the Harlem Renaissance, two important occurrences marked a
revolution in black theatre in America. First, the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored people (NAACP) was formed in 1910 and published Crisis
magazine. W.E.B Dubois edited the maiden magazine and insisted that there should
be a theatre by, for, about and near Black people. Crisis emerged as a laboratory for
novice playwrights to publish their works. To encourage black playwrights to develop
their plays, Drama Committee of Washington D.C. was established. With their huge
support, blacks owned and operated nearly 157 theaters between 1910 and 1930.
In 1917, the second occurrence that sparked the Harlem Renaissance was
Ridgely Torrence‘s work Three plays for a Negro Theater, including Granny
Maumee, The Rider of Dreams, and Simon the Cyrenian. This white playwright‘s
interesting subject matter was blacks on American stage. This popular material was
well received and followed by Eugene O‘Neill, William Varghia Moody, Mare
Connelly, and Paul Green. These white playwrights served as an impetus to African
American playwrights who started creating their own images of black men and
women. This attempt helped them to eradicate the stereotypes.
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Sterling Brown states that the black playwrights were learning their craft
during Harlem Renaissance. However, the burst of dramatic creativity is solely
associated with great male playwrights like Wallace Thurman‘s Harlem (1929), Hall
Johnson Run Little Chillun (1932) and Langston Hughes Mulatto(1935). They
produced plays for large audiences on Broadway.
The Harlem Renaissance or ‗New Negro Renaissance‘ was reexamined and
redefined by the black women playwrights. Initially plays by black women
playwrights were rarely anthologized. Burns Mantle‘s American playwrights of Today
(1929), deals with brief discussions of fifty women dramatist, but does not include
any black woman playwrights. The plays by black women are vital because they
provide a unique view of the black experience during the period between 1910 and
1940.Through their content, form, characterization, and dialogue, the black women
playwrights stunned the American theatre. These women mavericks, who emerged
from long and vibrant tradition were instrumental in paving a way for black
playwrights between the 1950s and 1980s.
In 1940s, like white women playwrights including Rachel Crothers, Neith
Boyle, Susan Glaspell, Zone Gale, Zoe Atkins, Edna St.Vincent Millay, Sophie
Treadwell and Ann Seymour, black women presented the lives of shattered women in
the society. Unlike white women playwrights‘ subject matter, which included
melodrama, farces, mysteries and romantic comedies, black women playwrights
concentrated on serious drama characterized by racial and social protest.
Many significant black women writers emerged during the years between
1916 and 1935.They include Regina Andrews, Helen Webb Harris, Ottie Grahane,
Alvira Hazbard, Thelma Duncan and nine black women playwrights captured the real
lives of black people in their works. The original voices of the pioneer playwrights,
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Angelina Weld Grimke, Alice Dunbar Nelson, George Douglas Johnson, Mary Miller,
Mary Burrill, Myrtle Smith Livingston, Ruth Gaines Shelton, Eulalie Spence and
Marita Bonner were not welcomed in the commercial theatre of the period. But they
were crucial in voicing for the development of the feminine prospective and created
the notion that there was a ‗New Negro‘ in America.
These pioneering spirits are the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. In their one
act plays, they speak about middle class and common folk, about passion and apathy,
love and hate, life and death, hope and despair, self-effacement and race pride,
oppression and equality of the races and sexes. These themes reached the hearts of
black people across the nation. They wrote for black community and their plays were
produced in black-owned and black-operated community theatre, churches, schools,
social club halls and homes. In their dramas, they supply their audience with
compassionately drawn, multidimensional characters. Through theatre, the black race
is given roots that nurtured, tested, healed and provided the spirit to survive. It helps
blacks to become aware of their own self-worth.
The tradition of pioneer playwright William Wells Brown was adopted by
black women playwrights and they wrote protest plays. Mance Williams in his Black
Theater of the 1960s and 1970s, reveals that protest is characterized in many black
dramas prior to the 1960s. Pioneering black women playwrights protested four
inconsistencies in American society. First, lynching was the principal impetus for
protest. Second, they were outraged by the fact that black soldiers who fought abroad
to keep America safe and free were deprived of their basic constitutional rights. Third,
these women were furious about the economic disparity between black and white
Americans. They believed that poverty would break the spirit of rural and urban
blacks. Fourth, miscegenation was condemned by these leading black women writers.
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Several early plays with dominant feature of protest are Angeline Weld Grimke‘s
Rachel (1916), Alice Dunbar-Nelson‘s Mine Eyes Have Seen (1918), Mary Burrill‘s
They That Sit in Darkness (1919) and Aftermath(1919),Georgia Douglas‘ A Sunday
Morning in the South (1925) and Mystle Smith Livingston‘s For Unborn Children
(1926).
The pioneer playwright Angeline Grimke (1880-1958) spent several years in
writing poetry and teaching English in Washington D.C. Her first play Rachel (1916)
was publicly performed by black actors. In this play, the playwright protest against
the lynching of innocent black people by the white Christians. The play concludes
with the dark mothers suffocating fear that their husbands and sons might be
murdered as, ―And so this nation—this white Christians nation has deliberately set its
curse upon the most beautiful—the most holy thing in life-motherhood!‖ (Grimke
149). Though she was an early playwright, she has used language eloquently,
sensitively and powerfully to mirror the black life in American society.
Alice Dunbar Nelson (1875-1935) was a poet, journalist, lecturer and
organizer who travelled widely across the country that provided substances for her
writing. Her writing reflects the voice of social protest which includes three major
factors: an attachment to the New Orleans Creoles of Color, World War I and the
developing Harlem Renaissance .Dunbar-Nelson‘s Mine Eyes Have seen (1918) is a
protest play about a black soldier who was degraded in the American society when he
returned from war. It contains sympathetically drawn characters. This literary piece
did not give popularity like other earlier works, such as Violets and other Tales
(1895), and The Goodness of St.Rocque and Other Stories (1899). Her keen
observation and her skills at mirroring universal concerns makes Ora Williams
comments that:
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in all her writings Dunbar-Nelson is always direct…Her concerns
about racism, the roles of men and women in society, and the
importance of love, war, death, and nature appear as recurring
themes…Hers was one of the most consistent, secure, and independent
voices of the black community. (227)
Georgia Douglas Johnson (1886-1966) is best known for her several volumes
of poetry which includes The Heart Of a woman and Other poems (1918), Bronze
(1922) , An Autumn Love Cycle (1928), and Share My World(1960). She was one of
the most prolific writers during Harlem Renaissance. She wrote nearly twenty plays.
For four decades, her home was a Mecca for intellectual and artistic grants such as
Langston Hughes, Mary Miller, Owen Dodson, Sterling Brown, Alain Locke,
Angeline Grimke, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay and
others. Her association with these leading authors made her to protest against injustice
and racism. Her remarkable play A Sunday Morning in the South, is a protest play
against lynching. Wilkerson‘s insightful evaluation of Johnson‘s play is that
―Lynching informed most of her works-one –act-plays that are spare in dialogue and
action based on the very real drama of terrorist acts directed at the Southern black
community….The subject matters left no room for humor‖ (xviii). Johnson‘s play
begins with a low murmur and ends with plea for whites to treat blacks like human
beings with hearts and souls.
Mary Burrill (1879-1946) like other early playwrights taught English in
Washington D.C.Burrill‘s Aftermath (1919) depicts an indictment against white
society, which forces blacks to protect White Americans from foreign wars whereas
African Americans go unprotected from terrorist who lynch and burn them. Burrill,
unlike Grimke calls for action with violence and advocates Hammurabi‘s code of an
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eye for an eye. Her next play They That Sit in Darkness (1919) is equally explosive
like Aftermath which protests against poverty. She quietly but powerfully treats the
sensitive issue of the poor who due to lack of education and income have many
children but cannot feed or cloth them. So, Burrill makes an appeal to the government
to create awareness by instructing them in the methods of birth control. The
playwright asserts one thing that black parents nurture their children to be spiritually
strong.
Myrtle Smith Livingston (1901-1973), is another strong black woman
playwright of the twentieth century. In, For Unborn Children (1926), the subject of
protest is miscegenation. To Hatch and Shine, miscegenation is intolerable and
degenerative for both black and white playwrights. Livingston‘s For Unborn Children
is paralleled with Eugene O‘Neill‘s ‗All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1933). Both deal
with the interracial relationship between young black man and young white girl.
May Miller (1889) was the leading figure in the area of historical drama
during Harlem Renaissance. She was the student of Grimke and Burrill. She was
influenced by her mentors to write.As a teacher of speech and drama and a poet, she
co edited along with Willis Richardson two volumes of Negro plays for school
children. Miller, as a prolific early black woman playwright deals with several forms
like genteel, folk, historical and feminist. Goldfarb and Wilson remark that Miller
along with Willis Richardson and Randolph Edmonds, ―decided that black children
needed plays and skits about their own history and heroes …and wrote a total of 100
plays and published six book‖ (431).
May Miller‘s three important historical plays which contains genteel tradition
are Graven images (1929), Samory (1935) and Christopher’s Daughter (1935).The
setting of these plays are pre-christian Ethiopia, the African Sudan, and Haiti
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respectively. The language in all the three plays is artificial, rapid and saturated with
euphemisms. The characters are one-dimensional, positive images of noble blacks.
The plays merit lie on their thematic and historical value. Miller argues on sexism,
racism, miscegenation, political back stabbing, reconciliation, gossip, provincialism,
illegitimacy and family loyalty. Pinkie Gordon Lane comments that Miller is a writer
―of deep personal insight of unquestioning moral courage and one who has suffered
imbalance of our society yet retained a grace and wholeness of spirit‖
(qtd.in.Stoeling 247). All her plays portray that she is perceptive and compassionate.
Early black woman playwrights popularized the historical drama to teach
blacks about the heroes and heroines of their race. Hatch and Shine believed that this
historical form is ―to liberate the black audience from an oppressive past, to present a
history that provides continuity, hope, and glory. Such feelings and knowledge have
positive survival value for the race‖ (Hatch 351). May Miller and George Douglas
Johnson are the prominent personalities in producing historical dramas during the
Harlem Renaissance. Miller‘s Harriet Tubman (1935) and Sojourner Truth (1935)
then Johnson‘s William and Ellen Craft (1935), and Frederick Douglass (1935) give
depth and breadth to the African American characters.
Another notable form of drama by early black women playwright is the folk
tradition that includes the lives of common people. A few folk plays that dominated
the folk tradition are Langston Hughes‘ Little Ham (1935), May Miller‘s Riding the
Goat (1929), Georgia Douglas Johnson‘s A Sunday Morning in the South, and Plumes
(1927).
Eulalie Spence (1894-1981) was a daring and vociferous early black woman
playwright. Her stunning realistic play Undertow (1929) deals with folk life in
Harlem. It was published in Carolina Magazine in the year 1939. Next appears
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religious plays by early black women playwrights that move around the Southern,
rural poor. Almost all of the mother playwrights give some reference to God,
Christianity or religion in general in their notable works. Religion is presented as a
supportive mechanism and the characters call on God to help them survive in an
oppressive society. Religious allegory is one of the forms of religious plays. Ruth
Gaines-Shelton (1873), a remarkable early black woman playwright, distinguishes it
on three levels. First, it is a comedy, a rare quality of the period because of racial
tension, World War I and depression. As a rule, the mother playwrights did not use
humour to effect social change. Second, the play is religious allegory where the
characters are the personification of abstract qualities. Third, the play does not
concentrate on race. The Church Fight is a play by, about and for blacks. Oscar
Brockett, in The Theatre (1979), comments black theatre of the 1960‘s, ― In recent
years, black playwrights seem to have been moving away from defining black
experience through negative pictures of whites and toward depicting blacks in
relation to each other‖ (Brockett 352). These words are apt for Ruth Gaines-Shelton, a
writer of the 1920s portrayed blacks in relation to each other.
Marita Bonner (1905-1971) experimented with a new form in theatre to give
dynamic work of arts. Her essays, short stories and plays appeared in Crisis between
1925 and 1928, provide insight into her life. Bonner‘s The Purple Flower (1928) ―is a
fantasy that takes place in a nonexistent world, concerns incredible and unreal
characters, and serves as a vehicle for her to make a serious comment on reality in
America‖ (202). This play addresses the issue of revolution. It is a biting, militant
fantasy is powerful in every bit like the radical plays of three decades later.
Deeply feminine and deeply human, early black women playwrights told what
is appropriate. They depicted black women as loving and supportive of their men but
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also as strong, willful women demanding to be treated equitably. They successfully
deal with the issue of the emergence of woman as an individual who has her own
tastes, aspirations and uniqueness.
By exploring various subject matters such as lynching, poverty,
disenfranchised war heroes, church politics, revolution, and women‘s rights in their
dramas, early black women playwrights carved an indelible place in the twentiethcentury. Following the footsteps of these mother playwrights, there emerged
America‘s finest contemporary black women playwrights Alice Childress, Lorraine
Hansberry and Ntozake Shange. These maverick playwrights looked at the world with
their feminine hearts and observed much that disappointed and angered them in the
white oppressive world. Their first hand experience made them deal with the
problems of Colored women and their families. Their approach is simple but always
passionate, optimistic and committed to illuminate the downtrodden conditions of
African Americans with the hopes of bringing about social change.
Early black women playwrights of the twentieth century opened a way for the
next generation of strong black women dramatists, as Margaret Wilkerson comments
in 9 plays by Black Women (1982):
Women playwrights before 1950 were full partners in the theatre‘s
protest
against conditions for blacks, whether in the form of ‗race
propaganda,‘ folk
plays or historical dramas. They also made the unique perspective of
black women‘s reality a part of that protest. Not until mid-century,
however, would their voices reach beyond their communities into the
highly competitive world of professional theatre. (xviii-xix)
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From this long and vibrant tradition, America‘s most talented black women
playwrights have emerged. Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry are crucial
identities in the development of black playwriting in America from the 1950s to
1980s. Their strong determination and commitment made them to hold a deserving
place in the white world. Both made significant contributions to the development of
theatre in America, particularly black theatre. A vivid examination of their plays
reveals that their works are both similar to and different from plays written by black
males of the period. They made considerable efforts to create new images of blacks
and to counteract stereotypes that had been presented in the earlier period. Genevieve
Fabre, in Afro-American poetry and Drama, 1760-1975 (1979), comments that the
1950s saw the definite emergence of black playwrights who could and did compete
with highly crafted plays. He points out that Alice Childress‘ Trouble in Mind (1955),
and Lorraine Hansberry‘s
A Raisin in the Sun (1959) are among the best-known plays by black playwrights of
the 1950s.
These playwrights inform that the hopes of blacks lie in the determination and
strength of black people. Their characters are assertive and strong willed who speak
freely on their own terms. They eradicated almost all the old images and stereotypes
of the servile blacks. Mance Williams, in Black Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s
(1955) asserts that ―plays during the 1950s expressed a new form of protest, one that
not only exhorted Black people to stand up for their rights but warned Whites that
Blacks would settle for nothing less than their full share of the American
Dream‖(112). Though less violent than Amiri Baraka and James Baldwin, Alice
Childress and Lorraine Hansberry portray their characters as unyielding to the
demands of whites.
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A great deal of black drama since 1960 deals with the black consciousness and
incorporates black music, dance, language and lifestyles as integral parts in subject
matter. This drama of self-celebration captures the flavour of the black experience and
unites the black people. Unlike black male dramatist, their vision is different.
Childress and Hansberry have brought to the American stage a multiplicity of images
of female heroines who are challenging, innovative and multidimensional and have
not confined themselves to such limiting images of black women as immoral,
promiscuous, wanton, frigid, overbearing, or pathetically helpless. This illustrates that
they are the forerunners in the development of black playwriting.
Alice Childress (1920-1994) was born in Charleston, South Carolina. But she
grew in Harlem in New York City with her grandmother, who was a great story teller,
first aroused her interest in theatre. She attended high school for two years but left
before graduation. Laura Bowman‘s recitation scenes from Shakespeare inspired
Childress to become an actress. She held several jobs and in 1941she joined the
American Negro Theatre in Harlem where she performed for eleven years. Her classic
roles are Titania in Shakespeare‘s A Mid Summer- Nights Dream, Anna Lucasta in
Philip Yordan‘s Anna Lucasta (1944).
Alice Childress, a dominant black woman playwright of the middle twentiethcentury have written plays, produced and published over a period of four decades. She
writes about poor women for whom the act of living is sheer heroism. Her own
background resembles that of the heroines in her plays. In her essay, Knowing the
Human Condition, Childress acknowledges that her grandmother was a slave. She
states, ―I was raised in Harlem by very poor people. My grandmother who went to
fifth grade in the Jim Crow school system of South Carolina inspired me to observe
what was around me and write about it without false pride or shame‖ (Childress 10).
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Her contributions to the American theatre were varied and consistent. She helped to
found the American Negro Theater (ANT), a phenomenal organization that provides
hope to countless actors, playwrights and producers including Sidney Poiter, Ossie
Davis, Ruby Dee, Franka Silvera, and others. She was bestowed with many honours
and awards to her credit. She received a Harvard appointment as playwright, and
scholar to the Radcliffe Institute for Independent study from 1966 to 1968. In 1977,
she received the first Paul Robeson Award for Outstanding Contributions to the
performing Arts from the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. She died on August 19,
1994.
In early 1940s, Alice Childress started establishing herself as an actress and
writer. During that time, she worked to support herself and her only child, Jean
through number of odd jobs including assistant machinist, photo retoucher, domestic
worker, salesperson and insurance agent. Harris believes that:
the variety of experiences and the constant contact with working class
people undoubtedly influenced Childress‘ approach to the development
of characters and her overall writing philosophy. Her characters in
fiction and drama included domestic workers, washerwomen,
seamstresses, and the unemployed, as well as dancers, artists, and
teachers. (69)
As a keen observant and unsentimental, Childress is one of the most influential
theatre pioneers whose works serve as a precursor to the black naturalistic plays of the
1960s. Her constant effort shaped the ethnic theater of black experience of the 1970s
and 1980s.
Childress‘ contribution to the American theater has been varied and consistent.
She has to her credit fourteen plays. They are Florence (1949), Just a Little Simple
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(1950), Gold Through the Trees (1952), Trouble in Mind (1955), Wedding Band: A
Love/Hate Story in Black and White (1966), The World on a Hill (1968), String
(1971), The Freedom Drum retitled Young Martin Luther King (1969), Wine in the
Wilderness (1974), Mojo: A Black Love Story (1971), When the Rattlesnake Sounds
(1975), Lets Hear it for the Queen (1976), Sea Island Song retitled Gullah (1984),
Moms (1987). As a versatile and prolific writer, Childress has published four novels,
Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic Life (1956), A Hero ain’t
Nothin but a Sandwich (1973), A Short Walk (1979), and Rainbow Jordan (1981).
She is also the editor of Black Scenes: Collection of Scenes from Plays Written by
Black People about Black Experience (1971) and author of impressive host of essays
on black art and theatre theory. Though she is talented in a variety of literary forms,
Childress considers herself primarily a playwright.
Alice Childress‘ legacy to the American theatre is substantial. In her thirty
years of writing for the American stage, she admits that she has never compromised
her vision. Her total commitment became apparent when she commented, ―I will not
keep quiet and I will not stop telling the truth‖ (qtd. in.Brown-Guillory28). As a
member of PEN and the Harlem Writers Guild and a council member of the Dramatist
Guild and Writers East, Childress has helped many young black women playwrights
to begin their careers. According to C.W.E. Bigsby, in A Critical Introduction to
Twentieth Century American Drama, ―Childress‘ humanism is evident, and her
resistance to ruling political and cultural orthodoxies apparent‖ (333). She is a writer
of great discipline, power, substance, wit and integrity. A pioneer in the theatre,
Childress‘ steadfast efforts of forty years have substantially shaped black playwriting
in America.
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Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (1930-1965) apparently held Childress as a role
model, a springboard from which to carve a new and broader place for black women
on the American stage. She was born in Chicago to the upper middle class parents.
She was reared by her educated and refined parents who provided material comfort as
well as intellectual stimulation. At the age of nine, she began reading black poets
including Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Waring Cuney who provided her
the lasting images of Africa. In 1950, she left Chicago and moved to New York.
Surrounded by black literary giants, such as, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, Walter
White, Joe Louis and Jesse Owens, Hansberry‘s interest towards black consciousness
was elevated. Her commitment to Civil rights, and assertiveness to write about the
illness of the society too increased. Abramson states that, ―she began hanging around
little theatre groups and discovered that ‗theatre embraces everything that I like all at
once‘‖ (239). Between 1950 and 1953, Hansberry wrote a host of essays, and
reviewed books and plays for Paul Robeson‘s radical newspaper, Freedom. During
this period, she came to know about the plays of Alice Childress, Loften Mitchell,
William Branch and other Black dramatists. Like them, she also wrote of Blacks‘
indomitable spirit of survival.
In 1953, Lorraine Hansberry married Robert Nemiroff, an aspiring writer. This
interracial marriage ended in divorce in 1964. She resigned her job at Freedom in
order to pursue her career as a writer. After stepping out from Freedom, she did part
time jobs such as typist, worker in the garment fur industry, recreation leader at the
Federation for the Handicapped, and production assistant in a theatrical firm. Later
she concentrated much on theatre. Like Childress, Hansberry too believed that the
black artist has a responsibility to tell the truth about the sufferings of the black
people. She announced that she was going, ―to tell the truth from all its sides,
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including what is still bitter epic of the black man in this hostile nation‖ (Hansberry
10). In 1965, she died of pancreatic cancer at the age of thirty four.
To her credit, her dramas include A Raisin in the Sun (1959), The Drinking
Gourd (1960), Les Blancs (1970), What Use Are Flowers? (1961),The Sign in Sidney
Brustein’s Window (1964) and To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969).
As an optimist and realist, Hansberry believed that the world could be
reconstructed. She wanted a world where blacks could breathe. To achieve this, she
insisted the black community to involve themselves in every single means of struggle,
which includes, ―harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, liedown, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps and shoot from their windows when
the racists come cruising through their communities‖ (Hansberry 222).
Both Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry embraced theatre because they
were forced to speak out against the disparity between the poor and rich, black and
white and women and men. Each one has carved for herself a unique place on the
American stage. They served as a vital link in the evolution of black theatre in
America. Jeanne-Marie A. Miller, a remarkable scholar, comments that contemporary
―black women playwrights, handed the torch from preceding generations, have
continued to move forward, to develop, to expand and to contribute to the literature of
the American theater‖ (290). The dramaturgical advances made by Alice Childress
and Lorraine Hansberry compelled the African Americans to struggle together in
order to achieve social, political and economic gains. Alice Childress‘ pioneering
spirit and Hansberry‘s vision encouraged the young black women writers of the
period.
Samuel A. Hay‘s African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical
Analysis, explores visionary and revisionary images of African American theatre
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history. It is the study of Black theatre and drama. This landmark volume brings
together what is most universal and most unique about the fusion in the ever changing
image of American identity. To Hay, the health of African American theatre is ailing
and he wants ―to improve prospects for the further long-term health of the theatre‖
(1). The book traces the dense history of African American theatre from its beginning
in 1898 to the present. It analyses the types of plays written for this theatre, identifies
the perennial problems faced by the theatre artists and producing companies and
makes bold, innovative proposals for the theatre‘s healthy survival. Hay suggests that
this African American theatre has been not only the cultural repository for black life
and history but also the forum where important ideas and aspirations of a people have
been advanced and argued. At the end, a passionate appeal is also made to African
American enthusiasts to preserve and keep African American theatre alive.
Paul Carter Harrison, along with his co-authors Victor Leo Walker II and Gus
Edwards, in Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora gives a new
understanding of the past and vision for the future in African American theatre
through the well-crafted essays written by playwrights, scholars and critics, including
Ntozake Shange, Femi Euba, Wole Soyinka, Derek Wolcott and Gus Edwards and
academic writers such as, Paul K.Bryant-Jackson, William Cook and Keith Walker.
Even as they acknowledge that black experience is not monumental, these
contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that
creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers
ritual rather than realism and it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching
towards revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the
community. In Paul Carter Harrison‘s words, it ‗reveals the Form of Things
Unknown‘ in a way that ‗binds, cleanses and heals.‘ The four provocative sections in
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this indispensable anthology are ‗African roots‘, ‗Mythology and Metaphysics‘,
‗Dramaturgical Practice‘ and ‗Performance‘. This volume successfully illustrates how
black theatre is. Harrison comments that, ―it is not a mere reaction to oppression,‖ but
an endeavour to ―identify and retrieve African traditions from the American social
landscape‖ (9).
Errol Hill in The Theatre of Black American: A Collection of Black Essays
offers a penetrating look at black art form the origin of the Negro spiritual and the
birth of the Harlem Renaissance to the emergence of a national black theatre
movement. It contains essays of James Hatch, Shelby Steele, Sister M. Francesca
Thompson and Ronald Ross. Errol Hill says that these rigorously researched essays in
this book attempt to view black theatre as ―theatre is both an art and an industry; an
expression of Culture and a source of livelihood for artists and craftsmen, a medium
of instruction and purveyor of entertainment‖ (qtd.in.Morris 1).
Errol Hill‘s History of African American Theatre is first definitive history of
African American theatre investigates African ritual born out of slavery to European
forms, from amateur to professional. It embraces nearly two and a half centuries of
black performance and production with issues of gender, class and race. The volume
encompasses aspects of performance such as, minstrel, vaudeville, cabaret acts,
musicals and opera. The breadth and vitality of black theatre history, from the
individual performance to large-scale company productions, from political
nationalism to integration is conveyed in this volume. Shows by White playwrights
that used black casts, particularly in music and dance, are included, as are productions
of Western classics and a host of Shakespeare plays. This book is an extensive
anthology of all types of African American theatre that gives a wonderful historical
perspective.
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James V. Hatch‘s The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of
Early Plays, 1858-1938, contains the plays of William Wells Brown, Pauline
Hopkins, Katherine D. Tillman, Mary Burrill, Bitterbeans and Susie, Willis
Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, Joseph S. Mitcheli, Owen Dodson and Abram Hill.
Their stories and styles are as diverse as the culture they celebrate. It is realistic
musical epic, didactic, romantic, sentimental, overly literate and sophisticated, naïve
and to the point. The subjects treated include slavery, sharecropping, World War I,
employment, middle-class striving, the Depression, vaudeville, religion and legend
and mythology. The plays represent variety of styles including allegory, naturalism,
realism, melodrama, musical comedy and opera.
Harvey Young‘s The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre
traces the comprehensive overview of African American theatre from the early
nineteenth century to the present day. It chronicles the evolution of African American
theatre and its engagement with the wider community, including discussions of slave
rebellions on the national stage, African Americans on Broadway, the Harlem
Renaissance, African American women dramatists and the ‗New Negro‘ and ‗Black
Arts‘ movements. Leading scholars spotlight the producers, directors, playwrights and
actors whose effort helped to present a more accurate image of Black life on stage. It
reveals the impact of African American theatre both within and outside the United
States. Some chapters also discuss recent theatre productions in the context of
political and cultural change and interrogate where African American theatre is
heading in the twenty-first century.
The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre centres the struggle
to create a uniquely African American theatre. It offers an introduction to significant
movements, topics and themes that influenced the development of Black theatre over
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the past two centuries. The book begins in the nineteenth century, when slavery was
legal and when African Americans who were ―free‖ lacked basic citizenship rights,
such as right to vote. It ends approximately two centuries, after August Wilson‘s
premature death and during the presidency of Barack Obama, the first African
American President of the United States. With each passing decade, African
American actors, playwrights, directors, and producers actively employed the theatre
not only to comment upon the events and concerns of their present but also to record
and preserve their experience and everyday realities for future consideration. This
book gives lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists and philosophers.
Harry J. Elam Jr and David Krasner‘s anthology of critical writing African
American Performance and Theater History explores the intersections of race, theatre
and performance in America. The interactions among them are always dynamic and
multidimensional. These esteemed scholars assembled this anthology into four
sections, representative of the ways of black theatre, drama and performance interact
and enact continual, social, cultural and political dialogues. It includes the discussion
of dramatic performances of Uncle Tom‘s Cabin to the Black Act Movement of the
1960s and early 1970s. Harry Elam. Jr comments that ―Dramatic tropes, aesthetic and
cultural images, artistic agendas, and political paradigms are repeated and revised as
the past is continually made present, and the present is constituted in the African
American past.
Anne Cheney in Lorraine Hansberry traces the brief life of the Black
American Lorraine Hansberry, analyses each of her works and assesses her place in
the modern theatre. This book is the first full-length study of Lorraine Hansberry,
which chronicles her childhood in Chicago, her youth in Wisconsin, her maturity in
New York. She states that, in all her plays, ―Hansberry examines the importance of
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African roots, traditional versus innovative women, the nature of marriage, the real
meaning of money, the search for human dignity‖ (Cheney 58).
Margaret Wilkerson‘s Nine Plays By Black Women is a collection of plays by
the major black women playwrights from 1950s to 1985. They represent an important,
underdeveloped group of theatre voices. The editor‘s preface is a valuable survey of
twentieth century black women dramatists. The best of these plays connect us with
real people struggling in a real world and they are of universal interest. She comments
on Lorraine Hansberry as ―Hansberry‘s art shows a deep sensitivity to the intricacies
of women‘s lives under challenging, possibly devastating, social conditions‖
(Wilkerson 389). Hansberry dedicated her best-known play, A Raisin in the Sun
(1959) ―to Mama: in gratitude for the dream.‖ ―The heroic potential of ‗motherhood‘
finds its way into her plays through the strong presence of characters like Lena and
Ruth Younger in Raisin, and the slave mother Rissa in the posthumously published
The Drinking Gourd (Wilkerson 389). Hansberry was ahead of time. Margaret
Wilkerson has called her ―the complete feminist‖ for she sought to address both race
and gender within a social context. Both her commitment to human rights and her
feminism remained inclusive.
Elizabeth Brown-Guillory‘s renowned work Their Place on Stage: Black
Women Playwrights in America (1988) is important in black literature because her
ideas and terminology describing the black women playwrights are well-reasoned,
and her analysis of symbolism, its place in Western and African traditions is wellsupported. This book focuses mainly on the black theatrical tradition and three black
women playwrights including Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry and Ntozake
Shange of the contemporary period. Alice Childress was the pioneering dramatist of
the period. She comments that, ―Alice Childress‘ brilliance, her intense and
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microscopic penetration into life, matches such great twentieth-century dramatists as
Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, Jean Anouilh, Sean O‘ Casey, Sholem Aleichem,
Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, and the Pulitzer Prize winning African dramatist,
Wole Soyinka‖ (Brown-Guillory 52-53). Childress addresses the struggle of her
people with the aim of effecting social change.
La Vinia Delois Jennings‘ Alice Childress (1995) is the full-length
examination of Alice Childress‘ work. Jennings describes Childress as a transitional
writer whose female-centered plays anticipated the work of Ntozake Shange and
Sonia Sanchez. The book provides good introduction to the life and work of Childress
as well as analyses of each play and discussion of the main themes and influences
within socio-historical context.
This study entitled ‗Re-defining black womanhood: Deciphering the speaking
subjects in the select plays of Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry‘ explores the
essence of black womanhood. The plays taken for study are Alice Childress‘ Florence
(1949), Trouble in Mind (1955), Wedding Band: A love/hate story in Black and White
(1966) and Lorraine Hansberry‘s A Raisin in the Sun’(1959), The Drinking Gourd
(1960), and Les Blancs (1970). The chapters of this study, excluding the introduction
and conclusion, are titled as, ‗The African American Chronotope,‘ ‗Visionary
Matriarchs‘ and ‗Dramaturgies of Activism.‘
The four outstanding black women playwrights who have reconstructed the
passive other into a radical phenomenon have been Alice Childress, Lorraine
Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange. It is the contributions of these
black women playwrights that have elevated the credible images of blacks as, ‗the
black militant, the black peacemakers, the black contemporary matriarch.‘
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The progress of art through varied genres gets reflected in the growth of
society. This gradual shift from a passive form to an active element cannot be
identified without the recollection of the origin and development of that particular
genre. The first chapter entitled ‗Introduction‘ traces the historical, sociological issues
prevalent in the African American from their entry into the new land America. The
untold miseries - ethnical, political and sociological encountered by the black women
from the dominant white society and their struggle to overcome these problems are
traced. The contributions of black female dramatists paralleling the black male
counterparts have been elaborately presented. A specific reference to the two
playwrights- Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry‘s dramatic contributions in
redefining black womanhood through their plays have been chronologically
displayed.
The second chapter titled ‗The African American Chronotope‘ analyses the
contemporary society of the African American world from the 1950s to the 1970s as
reflected by Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry. The concept of chronotope
involves time and space in the historical context. These two elements are
interconnected and are ―fused.‖ A chronotope plays a significant role in a text to
expose the nature of events and actions and exemplifies the texts relation to their
social and political sphere. Mikhail Bakhtin asserts the validity of chronotope as: ―out
of the actual chronotopes of our world merge the reflected and created chronotopes of
the world represented in the work‖ (253).
The third chapter entitled ‗Visionary Matriarchs‘ applies the term ‗matriarchy‘
theoretically to the female protagonists in both Alice Childress and Lorraine
Hansberry‘s plays taken for study. Patricia Hill Collins observes, ―The image of the
black matriarch emerged at that time (1960s) as a powerful symbol‖ (75). Black
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writers like Maya Angelou and George Jackson have paid tributes to the black
mothers by referring them as a ‗Madonna‘ for bringing salvation to their black
children. Daryl C. Dance theoretically establishes the positive traits of the matriarchs.
Dance concludes the black matriarchs to have performed their role as a strong black
bridge that ―we all crossed over on, ―whose love, strength, endurance and ability to
survive have made possible the new militant…‖ (130-131). It traces the evolution of
the black women from a passive state of mind by transforming themselves into
empowering women. The application of the theoretical and ethnographic grounds to
the term ‗matriarchy‘ relevant in societies where the cosmological and the social
system are found to be linked by primordial ancestors, mother Goddess or archetypal
queen have been paralleled to live black female characters, who have embodied and
articulated the principles of matriarchy in their practical conduct.
The fourth chapter entitled ‗Dramaturgies of Activism‘ analyzes the various
stage techniques experimented by Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry in their
plays to empower their black womanhood. Both of them have made significant
contributions to the development of theatre in America, particularly the Black theatre,
not only by continuing the traditions set up by earlier playwrights like Alice Dunbar
Nelson, Thelma Duncan, Ruth Gaines-Shelton but also by appropriating the
conventional forms to suit their needs. James Baldwin remarks, ―Lorraine Hansberry
as a true visionary, concerned with human race, who used the theatre a stage for social
activism‖ (58).
The last chapter entitled Conclusion explores the extracts of each chapter and
presents the complete arguments drawn and assumptions derived chapter-wise. The
findings of the study have been enlisted. The implications of the study with the scope
for further research have also been suggested. Their black drama of self-celebration
26
has aimed at capturing the flavour of the black experience and at uniting black people.
This study proves and asserts Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry to have attained
and achieved the pinnacle of being termed as ‗social activist‘ and ‗radical feminist.‘
The next chapter, ‗African American Chronotope‘ examines the six plays of
Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry from the theoretical concept of time and
space carved by Mikhail Bakhtin. It aims to fix the plays from Bakhtin‘s varied
concepts of heteroglossia, dialogic imagination, Openness of time and finally justifies
the concept of ideological becoming which the dramatists have fixed to empower their
race and womanhood.