Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook (review)

Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook demonstrates the depth and breadth of accomplishments by several black female writers of the twentieth century and new millennium. Arranged in approximate chronological sequence, with the occasional exception to allow for thematic comparisons of plays, the collection highlights and contextualizes the works of Alice Childress, Sonia Sanchez, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, Pearl Cleage, Aishah Rahman, Glenda Dickerson, Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Lynn Nottage as leading voices in the rich tradition of plays by African American women.

David Krasner provides an introductory overview of historical “precursors” to the playwrights examined in the book (9). Highlighting three principal female authors of the Harlem Renaissance—Georgia Douglas Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marita O. Bonner—Krasner explores their contributions to American theatre and their influence on Lorraine Hansberry’s establishment of “a socially conscious African American theatre” (22). These women’s emphases on folk drama, theatricality, avant-garde techniques, and social realism respectively are to be credited for the establishment of a “black theatrical aesthetic” (25) on which the dramatic innovations of the women discussed in the remaining essays are founded. Krasner argues that understanding the legacy of these playwrights is crucial to recognizing the ways they continue to create and challenge American culture through an “interpretative illumination” (24) of the black female experience.

Next, Soyica Diggs examines the performance of intersectionality in Alice Childress’s plays. She extends previous work on Childress as part of a militant tradition, arguing that Childress’s heroines “talk back to the cultural mandates of shame and fear that support and maintain the materialization of race” and gender (30). Diggs hails Childress as an author representing women, who were previously relegated to secondary roles, as leaders in the African American community. Next, Jacqueline Wood acknowledges Sonia Sanchez’s lifelong efforts to illuminate “the value and rights of black women in the black community” (50). Wood highlights Sanchez’s challenge to historic social and theatrical boundaries of black female subjectivity through an overview of Sanchez’s plays, such as I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t, read through the postcolonial, sociopolitical theories of Franz Fanon as representative of the “racist, economic, and social oppressions” (57) that continue to plague women in the black community. In “American History / African Nightmare: Adrienne Kennedy and Civil Rights,” Philip Kolin argues for Kennedy’s effective method of embedding historical events such as lynchings, hate crimes against African American youths, and urban racial profiling into her plays. Considering over forty years of theatrical production, Kolin’s careful analysis fulfills his goals to bring “a renewed immediacy to her [Kennedy’s] canon while at the same time profitably expand[ing] how it might be evaluated” (64).

James Fisher’s treatment of Ntozake Shange’s dramatic/poetic collages emphasizes each of the artist’s plays as “a rainbow of complex emotional colors expressed through language, movement, and music, emphasizing variations . . . [on the] dominant theme” of the journey from adolescence to womanhood (96), thus creating “a portrait of black womanhood for black women” (85) that has had a significant impact on subsequent African American women playwrights. Next, Beth Turner underscores Pearl Cleage’s accomplishments as a popular and consistently produced dramatist writing from a feminist/womanist perspective within the triedand- true format of the well-made play. Turner celebrates the “truth-telling and activism” (112) of Cleage’s works such as Flyin’ West, Hospice, and Blues for an Alabama Sky, in which Cleage develops characters who extend “beyond the border of normative gender restrictions to exist as a fully-realized human being” (103). Brandi Wilkins Catanese notes in her essay, “’We must keep on writing’: The Plays of Aishah Rahman,” that the quest for full subjectivity continues in Rahman’s work as a playwright and educator. Catanese emphasizes Rahman’s use of black iconography, jazz aesthetics, spirituality, and gender politics as a multi-pronged approach to the...