Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950

Introduction

INTRODUCTION The colored woman of today occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race probblem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both. -Anna J. Cooper (1892)1 DURING THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, Lorraine Hansberry emerged as the first black woman to present a drama on Broadway with her 1959 production of A Raisin in the Sun. Never before had a black female playwright commanded such attention in the American theatre. In Raisin, Hansberry was able to realistically address an array of issues such as the strength and survival of the black family, their dreams, racism, abortion, manhood, and womanhood. She defied the stereotypical portrayal of blacks commonly seen on the American stage by substituting realistic images. One of the factors that precipitated Hansberry's writing A Raisin in the Sun is expressed in a 1959 New York Times interview: "One night, after seeing a play I won't mention, I suddenly became disgusted with a whole body of material about Negroes. Cardboard characters. Cute dialect bits. Or hip-swinging musicals from exotic sources.,,2 While Hansberry and the black women writers of her period must be praised for their courageous and outstanding works, it was the black women during the first half of the twentieth century who set the stage for this new group of writers. Prior to the 1950s, black women published over sixty discovered plays and pageants, as well as numerous unpublished scripts. However , many of these works are rare and hard to find. Overall, blacks in drama did not achieve any significant status in the American theatre, and playwriting, at that time, was considered a profession for men. During the first half of the twentieth century, black women, who had to bear the double burden of racism and sexism, burst upon the scene. However, in this climate, their contributions remained unheralded. Recently, articles and books have been published establishing the tremendous impact that black women have made not only in black theatre, but in American theatre in general. Even with these pUblications, there is still a paucity of information on the achievements that black women have made as playwrights. Except for the section on plays of early black women writers presented in James Hatch and Ted Shine's Black Theatre U.S.A. (1974), 2 / INTRODUCTION there has not been an anthology totally devoted to the works of these pioneer writers. The impetus behind this anthology grew out of a need to acknowledge the works of these black women in a single volume. These plays-most of which were written when blacks were just learning the art of playwritiRg-represent a historical perspective that reflects the lives of the early black women . It would be unfair to view these plays based on technical and creative writing skills alone. The main objective in presenting these works is to illustrate how these plays conveyed the attitudes of black women-issues which were rarely voiced on the stage at the time. Many of the topics that these women focused on were issues that could only be expressed by a black woman. Neither the white nor the black male playwright could express the intense pain and fear a black woman experienced concerning her childrenwondering , for instance, if the child that she carried for nine months would be sold into slavery, or be a son who might one day be lynched. Along with this excruciating pain, black women were also preoccupied with the safety of their husbands. Although the black male and female wrote plays on similar topics, their works also differed in many respects. While many of the male playwrights wrote about life in Harlem and other major cities, black women were more diverse in their geographic location, providing a greater sense of the black community on a national level by setting the action in rural communities throughout the country as well as in large cities. The main characters in plays by black women were usually female. These women were often placed in major ~ecision-makingroles. In many instances the husband was dead, or absent from the household-perhaps working in another town. The central focus in these women's plays was usually on the children, with the mother being overly protective because of the times...