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  • The Color of Art
  • James V. Hatch

"Am I playing White? Is this a White play?" I have never heard these questions from a white actor. The dominant culture assumes that "white" is universal; hence its adjective is invisible. A black actor or critic might ask, "Is Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, with only one black character, a black play? Is The Blacks,by Jean Genet, black because all the characters are?" For some if the cast of Tennessee Williams's Glass Menagerie is black, it becomes a black play. [End Page 596]

August Wilson has attempted to refocus the questions by pointing out that the definition of black theatre is not only genetic but cultural and economic. Resident white theatres producing one African American play a season, Wilson declared, will never suffice to train black actors or playwrights. He insisted that African Americans must build and retain their separate cultural identity by maintaining an economic base. White critic Robert Brustein accused Wilson of advocating the resegregation of American theatre. Wilson held out for a separate African American theatre to enact black culture—use it or lose it.

Defining black theatre has become a political issue. Racism allows no simple answers. Glance over nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American theatre history. Did earlier black artists share contemporary definitions of black theatre? Did the question even occur to them? If it did, their answers had to reference their own theatres. For example, in 1821, William Alexander Brown, founder of the African Theatre, might have pointed to his stage on Mercer Street in Manhattan and said, "This is my African theatre," for he knew of no other venue for his play The Drama of King Shotaway; but, when his company of color performed Richard III, perhaps they no longer played "black" but merely acted. In the 1840s and '50s, Charles Barney Hicks, black manager and sometimes owner of various black minstrel troupes, might have answered, "Black actors wearing blackface are nigger minstrel theatre." The Hyers Sisters, Anna Madah and Emma Louise, in the 1870s may well have responded, "an all-colored cast singing in musical drama was colored theatre." At the turn of the century, Williams and Walker might have distinguished their performances as "Negroes performing musical comedies about Negroes." In the same era, William Easton would have insisted that serious historical dramas written and acted by Negroes defined the genre. W. E. B. Du Bois was quite clear on this point when he wrote and produced his Star of Ethiopia. Theatre must present the glorious African past and confront America's present racial dilemmas. During the '20s Alain Locke opted for Folk Dramas to present the lives of Negro "peasants." The Harlem Renaissance is legendary, in part, for its black Broadway musicals such as Shuffle Along (Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, book; Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, music and lyrics). Theodore Ward of the Federal Theatre Project insisted that the Negro Units should confront social and racial issues, but three or four years later the Negro USO units of World War II presented song and dance performances that reflected few overtly racial or even social issues.

But what about Dorothy and DuBose Heyward and George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess,or Paul Robeson in his record-breaking Broadway performances of Shakespeare's Othello, or any of the musicals and plays adapted for black casts, like Philip Yordan and Abram Hill's Anna Lucasta? Or the mixed-cast play, Maxine Wood's On Whitman Avenue? From this confusion, Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins, young warriors in the '60s, not only embraced Du Bois's dictum to make our theatre "by, for, about, and near Negroes," but they added that "real" black plays must reveal and change the lives of their audiences. No period in our theatre history was more vocal in its allegiance to "blacker than thou." In the plays of Ed Bullins, the characters, mostly urban poor hustlers, did not speak often about their blackness; they enacted it. Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Nina Simone, and many others defined cultural blackness with music. Later, in the '90s, rappers and standup comics extended the image of the angry...

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