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{ 163 } BOOK REV IEWS The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: From the New Negro Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. Edited and with an introduction by Judith L. Stephens. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2006. 195 pp. $40.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. Judith L. Stephens carefully assembles all twelve of the dramatist’s extant plays in The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson, and with a thorough introductory essay she contributes an insightful study of Johnson’s dramatic oeuvre. This work enriches existing scholarship in two important ways: by rescuing from oblivion two previously unpublished scripts and by examining Johnson’s place in “cultural history and provid[ing] insight into her rich and complex dramatic vision ” (1). Although Johnson wrote twenty-eight plays, her race and gender limited their publication during her lifetime. Despite these challenges, Johnson figured prominently in the national black theatre movement and was an important “cultural sponsor” in the early twentieth century, assembling and inspiring the intellectuals and artists who generated the next cadre of black theatre and emergent scholarship (16). As Stephens argues, “the leadership Johnson provided in building a community of black artists and intellectuals in Washington is an accomplishment that equals and complements her own contributions as a playwright, poet, and composer” (13). Johnson’s “originality and versatility as a playwright are reflected in the dramatic genres she created to organize and preserve a record of her productivity ” (19). Johnson divided her work into distinct categories: “Primitive Life Plays,” “Historical Plays,” “Plays of Average Negro Life,” “Lynching Plays,” and “Radio Plays.” This classification informs Stephens’s division of the anthology into four parts (excluding the radio plays), placing Johnson’s remaining scripts into their respective genres. While each of the first three sections features two representative plays, the lynching category presents six of Johnson’s dramas, including two different versions of A Sunday Morning in the South and two previously unpublished manuscripts, And Yet They Paused and A Bill to Be Passed. Also included in this section is a recently discovered companion piece, Kill That Bill! written by Cleveland NAACP representative Robert E. Williams. Johnson’s and Williams’s short skits were created for the NAACP’s 1938 anti-lynching campaign. The first section, “Primitive Life Plays,” features Blue Blood and Plumes, which were published and produced during Johnson’s lifetime. Stephens ar- \ { 164 } BOOK REV IEWS gues that these plays “shift the focus away from black people as ‘primitive,’ toward a consideration of the uncivilized (primitive) institution of slavery, its far-reaching effects, and of how post-emancipation African Americans must deal daily with its consequences” (22). In part 2, “Historical Plays,” Johnson illustrates antebellum responses to slavery with plays that serve as “model history lessons taught in an engaging and memorable way” (23). Johnson submitted Frederick Douglas and William Ellen Craft to the Federal Theatre Project between 1935 and 1938 but received ambivalent reader reviews, and neither play was produced. However, both texts were published in Negro History in Thirteen Plays (1935) and may have been staged by local Washington, D.C., schools (22). Although Johnson wrote several dramas in the category of “Plays of Average Negro Life,” only two scripts remain, Starting Point and Paupaulekejo, featured in part 3. Paupaulekejo imparts an ironic view of Christianity and its inability to negotiate “racial and sexual boundaries” (31), while Starting Point illuminates the struggles of an urban black family. The former is also one of the “earliest Harlem Renaissance plays to be set in Africa” and treats the miscegenation theme in a unique way, pairing an African male with the daughter of a white missionary (29). According to Stephens, Johnson was the first dramatist to identify a dramatic genre focusing on the atrocities of lynching and its impact on the community , which is showcased in part 4. Stephens not only collects all of Johnson ’s lynching plays, including Safe and Blue-Eyed Black Boy, but also provides the anthology’s greatest contribution: the recovery of the manuscripts of A Bill to Be Passed and Yet They Paused (previously lost in the NAACP Papers at the Library of Congress). In her introductory essay, Stephens deftly highlights correspondence between Johnson and members of the...

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