A More Aggressive Plantation Play: Henrietta Vinton Davis and John Edward Bruce Collaborate on Our Old Kentucky Home

When discussing the earliest African-American woman playwrights, conversation in theatre history classes tends to focus on the 1920s and 1930s. The Harlem Renaissance brought writers like Angelina Weld Grimke, Zora Neale Hurston, and Georgia Douglas Johnson to the stage, and any history of the black woman playwright naturally must mention them. Contrary to this prevailing narrative, however, black woman playwrights existed in the United States prior to the Harlem Renaissance. In 1898 the celebrated African-American actress and public elocutionist Henrietta Vinton Davis added "author" to her list of titles with her plantation play Our Old Kentucky Home. Davis did this through one of the most lauded—if not always practiced—traditions of theatre: collaboration. Davis composed Our Old Kentucky Home with the noted black journalist John Edward Bruce, aka "Bruce Grit."¹ In the period prior to the explosion of African-American literary and cultural output in the 1920s, black woman writers faced significantly more challenging working conditions. Without the benefit of belonging to a larger movement—and without the benefit of white-dominated organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—woman writers of the preceding generation needed to find alternate paths in order to bring their voices to the public.²

A black woman playwright faced two particular obstacles en route to the stage: her gender and her race. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, nineteenth-century culture viewed woman writers as an oddity. Writing was considered the purview of men—the ability to compose words and sentences a uniquely male attribute—thus discouraging women from attempting the craft. Gilbert and Gubar pose the question, "What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are, as we have seen, both overtly and covertly patriarchal?"³ The racial obstacle stood as an even greater societal hindrance. In Staging Whiteness, Mary F. Brewer writes, "To be White is to be culturally denominated as possessing and instantiating a set of moral and 'civilized' traits and habits."⁴ Conversely, blackness connoted the antitheses of these "civilized" traits and values. "White" represented more than a mere skin color; it represented a way of behaving—of existing—thought to be desirable, while "Black" stood for everything that "White" was not.

The culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thus defined "Black" as immoral and uncivilized, and "Woman" as silent. How, then, was a woman writer of color to express herself? Collaboration proved the key for Davis to break through this racist, patriarchal logjam. By forming a creative partnership with her friend Bruce, Davis overcame the cultural quieting of woman writers. This partnership then allowed her to speak her opposition to the second obstacle. Through the writing and production of Our Old Kentucky Home, Davis skillfully addressed racial issues in America. In her hands the play served as a vehicle to deliver skillfully crafted commentary on both racial and gender issues in the United States. Davis and Bruce used the form of the plantation play, familiar to American theatre audiences from such popular works as Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Octoroon, and twisted it to new, more aggressive ends.

Henrietta Vinton Davis

Between 1883, when Frederick Douglass first introduced her to Washington, D.C., as a public elocutionist, and 1919, when she began a long association with the radical black leader Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association, Henrietta Vinton Davis was considered the foremost dramatic actress of her race.⁵ Davis eschewed the popular minstrel-show stereotypes of her time, never "blacking up" in performance, and focused her energy instead on recitations from and performances of the plays of Shakespeare as well as numerous popular literary melodramas of the late nineteenth century. Audiences and critics lavished praise on the talented performer. Shortly after her 1883 debut, one audience member exclaimed, "Our race never before reached so high a point in histrionic art. This is indeed...