Bearing Witness: The Noose as an Iconic Prop in African American Theatre

Bearing Witness The Noose as an Iconic Prop in African Ameri­ can Theatre Adrienne C. Macki As a horrific relic of our cultural memory, the lynching noose represents a period of Ameri­ can history that stirs visceral emotions . From 1880 to 1930 (the end of the Reconstruction through the beginning of the Depression), there was widespread support for lynch mobs in the old South among the white establishment. In the late 1930s African Ameri­ can blues singer Billie Holiday popularized the lynching protest song “Strange Fruit.” At the same time, a flurry of lynching dramas appeared in response to anti-­ lynching legislation. Black and white activists, such as African Ameri­ can poet and playwright Georgia Douglas Johnson, submitted lynching plays to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to be performed by local branches, encouraging support for the Wagoner-­ Van Nuys Anti-­ Lynching Bill. Although many of these plays are now forgotten in archives, they were once stage worthy and incredibly important to local groups, community organizations, and Little Negro Theatre companies. The phenomenon of staging politically subversive dramas concerned with the specter of the lynching noose warrants further analysis to consider the development and significance of the iconic noose as a stage property. In this essay, I evaluate the increasing representation of the lynching noose in performance, along with its meaning and dramaturgical function as an explosive, iconic, transformational theatrical prop in five representative lynching plays. My work focuses primarily on works by African Ameri­ can playwrights from what I term the second and third wave, or phase, of lynching drama, but also includes a noteworthy example from the first phase. For the sake of clarity, the three categories include: the initial phase from roughly 1858 to 1937, the second phase from 1938 68      A d r i e n n e C . M ack i to 1961, and the third phase from 1962 to the present. The first wave of lynching drama, which has received greater scholarly attention, reflects the trend towards stage realism and folk drama but largely restricts the depiction of brutal violence onstage. The second phase often places the lynching onstage and incorporates the noose as a critical, experimental component of its otherwise realistic dramaturgy.1 Here, the noose serves as a catalyst for dramatic action and/or supplies the play with its havoc-­ wreaking climax. The third phase, launched by Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, tends to invoke departures from realism with stylized, expressionist interpretations of the lynching scene. While these phases overlap, they offer a model to evaluate the role of the noose dramaturgically. Analysis of the noose onstage is complicated by the fact that the lynching drama genre resists periodization because many early lynching plays have been (and perhaps remain) lost. My research has uncovered several unpublished manuscripts. Each rediscovered text offers a new perspective, expanding on Kathy Perkins and Judith Stephens’s seminal anthology, Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by Ameri­ can Women.2 Long lost plays add to Strange Fruit’s important chronological index of known lynching dramas. Furthermore, closer scrutiny reveals that the genre of lynching plays (especially those from the middle period) reflect the incendiary presence and/or frequent allusion to a trinity of potent symbols: the lynching mob (as a sign of mass misrule); the trope of a gun (either brandished onstage or confined to a threatening sound effect catapulting the dramatic action); and finally, the most complex and unsettling of all, the noose onstage. My study is mainly concerned with the depiction of the noose onstage in African Ameri­ can theatre to illustrate how the prop noose functions as an object capable of advancing dramatic action, reflecting and refracting dramatic meaning, and inciting audience reaction by ritually extolling or exhuming the dead. As Andrew Sofer suggests in The Stage Life of Props, a prop can also be “fetishized” or “defamiliarized” through its manipulation and placement onstage.3 This is especially true of the lynch­ ing noose. Although previous studies have effectively highlighted the anti-­ lynching movement as well as considered the impact of race, gender, and class politics on lynching drama, or focused on the work of one playwright , few have...