Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre by Geneviève Fabre (review)

Book Reviews Nowhere better than in Awake and Sing! (1935) are audiences made awareofOdets's sympathetic relationship with his characters. A Depression family. the Bergers are a microcosm of society: a matriarch, a pregnant girl forced to marry a naYve immigrant, a blue-coUar worker, a Marxist for a grandfather, and morc. Unlike most melodramas. Odets's play has no hero or villain; and it is reminiscent of Chekhov's work in this regard, his characters being the most important elements of the play. Wilder's Our Town (1938), an American classic, reaches out to all people. By choosing Grover's Comers, New Hampshire , for the locale of his play. a prototype ofso many small towns in America, Wilder universalizes what some have called banal preoccupations. His technique is original in other ways: the Stage Manager, who names the play's author, director, and chiefactors, tells the audience that what they are about to see is fiction and not reality, thereby frustrating the viewer who has come to the theatre to see a slice of life. The last two chapters of Dukore's fascinating work are devoted to Hellman's "melodramatic well-made plays" and to Saroyan's works, which at their best exude "love, wannth, and the sheer delight of living." Professor Dukore's American Dramatists 1918- 1945 offers readers a highly infonnative and engaging work. BETTINA L. KNAPP, HUNTER COLLEGE, GRADUATE CENTER CUNY GENEVltVE FABRE. Drumbeats, Masks. alld Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre. Translated by Melvin Dixon. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1983· Pp. 274. $20.00. Black Theatre during the 1960s and early 1970S had enonnous impact, both on the black community and on the American stage. Drumbeats, Masks. and Metaphor is the first major study of the Black Theatre of that period, and in many respects it is a brilliant one. Fabre's readings of individual plays are always illuminating; her "thread," a "chain of possible meanings," is always suggestive; her ideological framework, defining the theatre through its cultural and political purpose, illuminates as well the Black Ans Movement to which the theatre was so central. Fabre divides the theatre of the period into two groups: Militant Theatre and Theatre of Experience. Militant Theatre, best illustrated by the plays of LeRoi Jones (although the range of playwrights she treats is fairly comprehensive), seeks to alter the consciousness of its audience by exposing and healing the wounds of oppression and then, in Brechtian fasion, proposing actions or analyses which the audience must judge. Grounding her analysis in a theory of theatre as ritual , Fabre categorizes the plays in various ways to establish how the Militant Theatre accomplished its purpose. Notably. she distinguishes between plays of "call" (which address a white audience), plays of "demarcation" (which similarly excoriate a white audience, partly for the benefit of a black audience), and plays of"consecration" (which address a black audience, moving it Book Reviews 149 toward group solidarity based on altered self-perception). She concludes the chapter with a beautifully articulated discussion of the differences between revolutionary and classical theatre, particularly in what each expects from its audience. The second main chapter of the book concerns Theatre of Experience. "a theatre of truth, ... seek[ing] to integrate all aspects of black life, particularly the most neglected ones" (p. 108). Defining the role of this theatre as that of cultural integration, Fabre discusses a range of plays thematically and then attends to the work ofseveral writers in more detail: J.E. Gaines, Melvin van Peebles, Ed Bullins, Edgar White and Paul Carter Harrison. Although Fabre is clearly more comfortable with the Militant Theatre, her discussion of the Theatre of Experience, and particularly her reading ofindividual texts, is unfailingly insightful and suggestive. In her final chapter, "Theatre and Culture," and in her conclusion, Fabre provides a theoretical overview for her study. Basically, she proposes that the Black Theatre of the period performed several crucial political and cultural functions: restoring and making sense of the black community's mythic and historic past, and contemplating and apprehending its present. She argues that because theatre is, essentially, performance, an event in time, it has particular cultural and political transformative power. As impressive as I find...