Penumbra: The Premier Stage for African American Drama

5 Black Feminist Performance

81 FIVE BLACK FEMINIST PERFORMANCE Social justice projects are not either/or endeavors where one can say, “We have our movement and you have yours—our movements have nothing to do with one another.” Instead such projects counsel, “We have our movement, and we support yours.” In a context of intersecting oppressions, Black feminism requires searching for justice not only for U.S. Black women, but for everyone. —Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought Because of its historical ties to both the Black Arts movement and the work of August Wilson (much of which is centered around ensembles of African American men), Penumbra Theatre Company is not usually associated with feminist performance practices. Echoing the feminist critiques of the Black Power movement,1 both company members and audiences have criticized Penumbra, particularly in its early days, for being male-dominated and heteronormative. Given these criticisms, Sarah Bellamy asked several of the original female company members in her oral history initiative about their experience as women artists in the early years of the theatre. Faye M. Price was a company member during Penumbra’s first full production season, acted in many Penumbra productions during the 1970s and 1980s, served as Penumbra’s first August Wilson dramaturgical fellow, and performed in both the original and latest production of Zooman and the Sign. She has had one of the longest working relationships with the theatre of any African American female artist. Price described what it was like to be a woman in the company during the 1970s and early 1980s: 82 BLACK FEMINIST PERFORMANCE I think it was a place of the times, I mean, the Black Arts movement was clearly a very male movement and it wasn’t like Lou was doing Adrienne Kennedy, those kinds of plays, which meant that I was either a mother, or prostitute, or a ho-ish mother who was a prostitute. [Laughs] There were a lot of men, and me. Or me and one other woman. So, you know, there was a lot of . . . unfortunately there was a lot of . . . I don’t even know the word for it . . . I don’t want to say harassment, but yeah, you got hit on a lot . . . I never felt uncomfortable or unsafe. I never felt fearful. But I was aware of how much my, not my sexuality, but my sex was used . . . in a show.2 When asked what she found most challenging about working at Penumbra, Price replied: Being a female in an all dick theatre. [Earlier in the interview, Price had described Penumbra’s aesthetic as gritty, grounded, and “of the groin.”] That was just a personal struggle but the work was really gratifying. . . . It didn’t stop me. It didn’t make me not want to go to work. It was just like, “Must we—again?”3 Estelene Bell and Tia Mann-Evans, who were both actresses in the original company and performed frequently in the early works of theatre, also noted that the theatre expressed the gender politics of the time period. Mann-Evans stated: “I don’t get that feeling at all [that the theatre was male-dominated]. I don’t remember that. Not after the first season . . . that was just . . . in the time that was what it was like.”4 In her interview with Estelene Bell, Bellamy engaged with Bell in the following dialogue: bellamy: I’ve heard that it was a very, sort of masculine, sometimes quite macho situation. bell: Yep, yeah. bellamy: So, as an artist, as a woman . . . did you feel safe, did you feel comfortable, did you feel frustrated? bell: I would have to say that I did feel safe and comfortable . . . because I guess I felt like this was my family . . . but it was frustrating many times, not getting . . . I didn’t have the same kind of relationship with Louis [Lou Bellamy] that other male actors probably did . . . where they were bringing work to him and saying “oh, let’s do this,” Marion [McClinton] and Terry [Bellamy] and you know . . . I didn’t know how to do that.5 BLACK FEMINIST PERFORMANCE 83 Bell’s experience suggests that while there was a standing company of both men and women in the theatre’s early years, it was predominantly the men who proposed plays to produce or direct and that consequently the productions the theatre mounted had primarily a male point of view. Penumbra’s production...