The Wisdom of “Worldliness”: Bringing African American Theatre and Drama into Existing Course Syllabi

What possibilities for teaching African American theatre exist outside of traditional black theatre courses? Beyond introductory survey courses and specialized seminars within the field, how can professors engage students in the study of African American theatre and drama in depth and with critical rigor? Can this be done within existing curricula, beyond those isolated and unsatisfying gestures where a single iconic “black play” on a syllabus stands-in emblematically—and reductively—for all? I wrestle with these questions as a researcher in the field and as a newly appointed assistant professor at Arcadia University, a small liberal-arts college where no courses dedicated to African American theatre are yet in the catalog. I also confronted these same questions, for different reasons, in my previous appointment as adjunct instructor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where many courses in African American theatre were offered, but were not part of my teaching purview. In both situations—because I aspire to teach in a way that informs and is informed by my scholarship—I sought and still seek opportunities and strategies for incorporating investigations of African American theatre and drama into existing courses in ways that will fulfill existing learning objectives and also offer some measure of sustained inquiry.

In this essay, I describe one attempt I made to include in-depth study of African American theatre within the existing framework of a “canonical” theatre studies course. I offer my experiences with no illusion that my efforts were completely successful, nor do I make claim to have answered the questions outlined above in a way completely satisfactory to me or to the students who joined me in this endeavor. Still, in relating my efforts in this particular instance, I want to suggest that as educators we need not think about teaching African American theatre and drama exclusively within courses dedicated to the subject, nor resign ourselves to unsatisfying gestures of tokenism within reading lists of canonical texts. New strategies can help bring the works of African American theatre artists before the eyes of our students—ones that can not only celebrate the rich heritage of African American theatre, but also diversify our teaching and expand the ways in which we view familiar subjects.

During the Fall 2006 term, I accepted an invitation to teach an advanced seminar course for NYU’s Department of Drama titled “Modern Drama: Realism and Naturalism.” The catalog description for this course defined it as an investigation of “the primarily 19th century European movement toward Realism and Naturalism that remains a major influence in today’s theater.” As advertised, the course began with “the plays of the major European dramatists who defined the movement (Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw), and tentatively traces its transformation in early to middle 20th century American drama.” A critical survey of realism and naturalism as theatrical styles is particularly resonant within NYU’s curriculum, which offers a rigorous acting track that for many BFA students focuses on the training methods of the Stanislavsky system and American Method acting. Many of these students receive their training in studio programs founded by and named for the pioneers of the American Method: Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner. “Modern Drama: Realism and Naturalism,” offered in multiple sections each semester, provided the opportunity for a rigorous historical, critical, and theoretical grounding for these students’ artistic training.

While aspiring to fulfill these objectives for the course, for my section I also looked to cater the syllabus toward my personal interests and research in African American theatre. I wanted to explore with my students what relevance the stylistic labels “realism” and “naturalism” (whose various and overlapping meanings we actively wrestled with throughout the semester) might have within African American drama and theatre history. Given the persistent, hegemonic influence that these “primarily 19th century European” aesthetics have exerted on the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries American stage, how have certain African American playwrights, performers, and theatre companies positioned themselves? How does their work stand in conversation with the history of those movements? Setting aside those artists...