The First Black Actors on the Great White Way (review)

The First Black Actors on the Great White Way. Susan Curtis. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. Pp. xix + 277. $29.95 (cloth).

When Broadway's first all-Black-cast dramatic production premiered in the spring of 1917, the theater world took notice. By the end of the year, the production had been largely forgotten. Susan Curtis reconstructs the mounting and reception of this groundbreaking play in order to discuss the complex relationships between America's racial politics, its cultural productions, and its definitions of art and citizenship at the turn of the twentieth century. Curtis maintains that the story of this long-obscure production has much to tell us about the fundamental ways race inflects the production and reception of art and entertainment in the U.S. Throughout her carefully researched study, Curtis exploits the obvious juxtaposition of "Black actors" and the "Great White Way" in an effort to demonstrate the severity of racial segregation and the degree to which whiteness was normalized and celebrated within the most influential site of American theater. The glaring contrast between "Black" performers and the "White Way" (the brilliant white lights of Broadway) alludes not only to tensions about interracial interaction in turn-of-the-century America but also to the obscure roles to which African Americans have been relegated in accounts of American modernity.

The book revolves around the production Three Plays for a Negro Theater, written by Ridgely Torrence, and the numerous social, political, and aesthetic questions it raised within and beyond its Broadway context. For example, what does a Black-cast drama that is written, directed, and produced by whites tell us about the problems and possibilities of interracial collaboration? How does a production centered on Black themes fit into an American theatrical scene that is struggling to establish an identity distinct from European traditions in the midst of wartime nationalism? How can we make sense of the inconsistent critical reception of the plays and their rapid fade from cultural memory? Curtis explores how the "arrival of the first black actors in this province of white playwrights, managers, actors, and plays represented the first major confrontation of racialized assumptions about art and nationality in the twentieth-century American theater" (13). In the heightened "quest for representative American culture" that characterized this period, Curtis shows that these plays both reflected and challenged prevailing views about how representative Black experience could or should be (x).

For the most part, Curtis does an admirable job of sorting out the explicit and implicit factors shaping the making and reception of Three Plays. As an early model of interracial collaboration in commercial entertainment (of the sort that is discussed more frequently in relation to theatrical and musical production of the 1920s), Curtis illustrates how the three playlets did not stem from or bring about a sense of racial equality among the participants involved. Instead, the white production team (writer Torrence, producer Emilie Hapgood, director/designer Robert Edmond Jones) presented Black themes in order to make names for themselves by exploiting untapped aspects of American "folk" culture. All the while, they underestimated the talents and experience of the African American cast members, many of whom were seasoned professionals from Black stock companies seeking to make the most of this rare opportunity to display Black dramatic (rather than musical or comedic) talent on Broadway, and, by extension, to "redress the second-class citizenship of American Negroes" (24). Curtis's excellent discussion of the backgrounds of the Black actors (including Blanche Deas, Opal Cooper, Alexander Rogers, Lottie Grady and Jesse Shipp), and of the critical commentary of Black writer Lestor Walton in the New York Age, demonstrates how significant this production was for long-standing members of the African American theatrical community. This community was largely invisible to the white theater world, however, and white critics and audiences had difficulty assimilating both the "Negro Players" into Broadway culture and serious Black themes into their conception of American...