Performing Race

African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader Edited by Harry J. Elam, Jr., and David Krasner Oxford University Press, 2001

Tokens?: The NYC Asian American Experience on Stage Edited by Alvin Eng The Asian American Writers' Workshop, 1999

José, Can You See?: Latinos on and off Broadway By Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez University of Wisconsin Press, 1999

For the last 50 or 60 years historians of American theater as well as playwrights, actors, and directors have all been aZicted bythe feeling that they are stepchildren, unfairly dealt with, not properly recognized. Theater—the study of it, the practice of it—has come to seem more and more marginal as a scholarly or cultural space. In spite of professional groups like the Association for Theatre Historians in Higher Education and graduate programs that train theater historians, Tonys on TV, Broadway buzz, and regional theaters in every city outside of New York, scholars and artists know that the theater no longer enjoys the favored status it did in the early and mid-nineteenth century, when highborn and lowborn knew the same plots and miners on leave in San Francisco would fill a 2,000-seat theater to watch Hamlet and King Lear (Levine 19).Today, other cultural forms have captured mass attention—film, of course, and television—and theater survives by targeting smaller, segregated audiences. Even Broadway, or maybe especially Broadway, plays to a niche audience, tourists on vacation, an elite audience by virtue of money as well as taste. There are lots of other constituencies that smaller theaters cater to: venues that produce the avant-garde, political and feminist theater collectives, Gilbert and Sullivan societies, classical companies, queer and ethnic theaters. They may all be vibrant theaters, and great stuff may be seen in them. There are plenty of drama schools, and even movie stars find their way back to (or for the first time find themselves on) the stage and remark on what an amazing experience it is. But one almost has to justify, if not exactly apologize for, spending time around greasepaint.

In the collection Tokens?: The NYC Asian American Experience on Stage, Jessica Hagedorn says in an interview: "What it comes down to is who's still writing for the theatre anyway? Why would young people want to write for the theatre? More and more they're drawn to film where you can make a living without ever being produced—you can doctor scripts or something—whereas theatre is really a labor of love. They already know that they're not going to get widely produced so who's going to be attracted to that? You have to be some sort of lunatic to want to do this and put up with all this shit" (438). If, as Hagedorn observes, theater is a labor of love at which only lunatics can be found laboring, if theater seems neither particularly playful nor natural (to write for it, to go to it), and if it doesn't seem all that necessary, then given this downgrading of cultural centrality, it is hardly surprising that scholars and practitioners have resorted to the tone they sometimes take on, a sort of pleading, infantile whine, when they ask for a fairer share of the spoils. If the desire to regain most favored child/cultural status is a lost cause because the theater is likely to remain a niche cultural form, if the theater has become a place suitable only for lunatics, then what possible inheritance is left to squabble over? What could possibly be at stake? Three books, quite differently organized but defined by racial categories, suggest that the theater, marginal though it may have become in our culture at large, has been and continues to be a necessary space for artists of color.

African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, edited by Harry J. Elam, Jr., and David Krasner,is an anthology of critical essays about theater, with a roundtable discussion by some of the same scholars represented in the book...