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

Susan Curtis’s straightforward and thorough account of the first serious, dramatic production of black life staged with black actors on Broadway, Ridgely Torrence’s Three Plays for a Negro Theater (Garden Theater, 1917), performs three very important functions. First, it reclaims a landmark event in American theater history whose erasure from mainstream memory and record was largely accomplished “by silence, evasion, and amnesia.” Second, the study’s analysis of the cross-race collaboration of Torrence’s production interrogates the meaning of cultural hybridity, forwarding the view of American culture as a collaborative project. Finally, it probes deeply into the question of representation in multicultural America and “the struggle to ‘democratize’ and ‘Americanize’ theatrical productions in the United States.”

To get at the issues underlying the forgetting of the Broadway premiere of The Riders of Dreams, Granny Maumee, and Simon, the Cyrenian, the three one-act plays that composed the Torrence production, Curtis, in addition to analyzing surviving critical responses and memory, gives insightful interpretations of what was not said and not remembered. Critical moments of hesitation, hedging adjectival qualifications, reliance on the “passive voice to avoid assigning responsibility,” and selective plot summaries become important clues to the later amnesia of the majority of white New York critics. Arthur Hornblow, James Metcalfe, and others hailed the production as the first step in the formation of a distinctive, democratic, national theater, yet in their end-of-season summaries they made no mention of it.

Curtis refutes Torrence’s assertion that Three Plays failed to make a lasting impact because the actors lacked sufficient talent by documenting the professional training, on and off Broadway, of most of the actors cast in speaking roles. The preconceived notions of whites that African Americans acted from instinct rather than experience and that the histrionic standards set by white actors had to be duplicated by African American actors, despite their exclusion from white study circles, also hampered critical reception.

Dismantling the argument of scholars that the U.S. entrance into World War I on 5 April 1917, the day after the production’s opening, upstaged its run on Broadway, Curtis concedes that the war did affect the production—but not because it deflected attention away from it. Other entertainment forms were not dampened by the war, and new theatrical works were staged. Rather, the war inspired a national self-consciousness: “Closing ranks to make the world safe for democracy demanded that a national self-image that could be construed as negative or antidemocratic be denounced, ignored, or forgotten.” Torrence’s public linking of his plays with his own antiwar pacifism also doomed the production’s chances for success.

The cultural influence of the money, fame, and authority of the two other white principals involved in the project, the socialite Emilie Hapgood and the director Robert Edmond Jones, and the essential whiteness of the New Theatre Movement and its failure to address racism are also deftly treated. Prompted by Curtis’s first book, Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin, The First Black Actors on the Great White Way is finely argued and well researched.