Drama

Perhaps it is time once again to look at the predicament in scholarly publishing and its effect on academic evaluation. While the MLA and others propose changes in the methods of measure in tenure and promotion cases, someone might cast a jaundiced eye at what is happening at university presses. There are exceptions, of course, but I wonder what some presses are thinking: Oxford announces Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon and Columbia offers Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery. Popular culture as always is a lever to move the world, and people. As Suzan-Lori Parks's play ****ing A opens at New York's Public Theater, she dips her toe into a new genre with her first novel Getting Mother's Body and into broader celebrity as she moves literally within sight of the Hollywood sign as she adapts three novels for Winfrey's production company.

Meanwhile, back at the legitimate theater, New York presents Lanford Wilson's Rain Dance; John Patrick Shanley's Dirty Story; A. R. Gurney's O Jerusalem; Tony Kushner's Caroline, or Change; while August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean, the latest in his 10-play cycle about the African American experience in the United States, has its world premiere in Chicago; and David Rabe's adaptation of Chekhov's story The Black Monk has its world premiere at the Yale Repertory Theater. The year's noticeable trend, however, is that the most talked-about plays ov-Broadway were written by women: Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros's Omnium Gatherum, Tristine Skyler's Moonlight Room, Julia Jordan's Tatjana in Color, Tracey Scott Wilson's The Story, Amy Freed's The Beard of Avon, Lisa Loomer's Living Out, Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel, Paula Vogel's Long Christmas Ride Home, and Bridget Carpenter's The Faculty Room, which was presented at the Humana Festival. All these are signs of a vibrant American drama. The response of scholars to the explosion of distaff dramatists in this season of female playwrights remains to be seen.

i Theater History

Marvin McAllister's White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown's African and American Theater (No. Car.) is an interesting, carefully articulated, and substantially documented exposure of a brief and little-noted episode from 1821 to 1823. In 1821 William Brown, a free man of color and a retired ship's steward, opened a pleasure garden on Manhattan's West Side which catered to a growing population of Afro-New Yorkers who were seeking refined leisure pursuits such as drama, music, and refreshment from which they had been barred in whites-only venues. Over the next two years, Brown expanded his enterprises, founding a series of theaters that featured African Americans playing a range of roles unprecedented on the American stage that drew increasingly integrated audiences. Chapter 1 introduces Brown's first venture while chapter 2 analyzes Brown's Minor Theatre, which challenged Manhattan's Park Theatre, managed by Stephen Price, who would prove an important and debilitating rival. Chapter 3 chronicles Brown's construction of a new theater catering to all New Yorkers and features a discussion of perhaps Afro America's first known drama, Brown's Drama of King Shotaway. Chapter 4 concentrates on a troupe called the African Company. It is an unfortunate yet perhaps inevitable fact that the book's most compelling moments occur in the final chapter, which deals with the political, cultural, and physical assaults—including the summer riots of 1822—on Brown's theater. This book provides a measured, effective, and controlled consideration of a theatrical and historical moment in American life—finding villains like Price, detractors like editor and political operative M. M. Noah, and hope in Brown's protégés Ira Aldridge and James Hewlett. This study contends that certain disapproving or dismissive Euro Americans did not know how to "behave" at these mutually African and American entertainments, and the project's second objective is to analyze those misbehaving whites who attempted to divest Brown's black company of its artistic...