Penumbra: The Premier Stage for African American Drama

1 Beginnings

ONE 1 BEGINNINGS In 1973 the Black Theatre Alliance counted 139 professional theatres around the nation. In 2001 it was estimated that no more than fifty existed. —Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch, A History of African American Theatre Penumbra Theatre Company was founded in 1976. It has operated continuously since that moment and is one of the few theatre companies created during the Black Arts movement that still exists today. Because Penumbra is housed inside a community center , its history is also intimately linked to the legacy of the Settlement House movement. In the late 1960s and 1970s these two movements intersected when many African American community centers that had been former settlement houses founded theatres in response to increased community interest in culturally specific dramatic literature . In A History of African American Theatre, Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch name the South Side Settlement House in Chicago, the Henry Street Settlement House in New York, Upper Manhattan’s Union Settlement Community Center, and the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center in St. Paul as successful examples of African American settlement houses and community centers that produced high-quality theatre during the Black Arts movement.1 Cleveland’s Playhouse Settlement, founded in 1915 and renamed Karamu House in 1941, was another important theatre supported by a former settlement house that was significant and influential in the production of theatre during the Black Arts movement.2 As a particular example of this national phenomenon, I examine the birth of Penumbra and its association with the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center, which 2 BEGINNINGS houses the theatre, provided its first grant, and served as its fiscal sponsor and parent organization from 1976 to 1990.3 The Settlement House movement’s presence in America’s largest cities dates back to the nineteenth century, when neighborhood centers were constructed as a means to ameliorate the living conditions of the urban poor and to address many of the social and economic problems associated with American industrialization. Settlement houses provided housing for the homeless and destitute, food for the hungry, social services, health care, and recreational activities designed to help the poor not just survive but be able to participate in the civic life of the cities in which they lived. Writing about Hull-House, the famous settlement founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr on the West Side of Chicago in 1889, Shannon Jackson says, “Historians have located Hull-House as a vital force in—and sometimes original site of—the programs that have since come under the umbrella term social welfare.”4 Jackson states that in 1891 there were six settlement houses in the United States, and by 1910 there were more than four hundred.5 These organizations were named settlement houses because they provided free or substantially subsidized housing. Many of these organizations later transitioned into what are now referred to as community centers. Community centers do not usually provide housing but offer a wide variety of other social services formerly provided by settlement houses. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discriminatory housing covenants restricted African Americans to specific neighborhoods, and segregationist policies denied blacks admittance to hotels and restaurants in northern as well as southern cities. Because of the experience of racial discrimination, African American settlement houses necessarily served as gathering places and venues for entertainment as well as places to go for referrals for various forms of social and economic services. Arts programming had always been a component of these centers’ offerings for reasons of necessity as much as philosophy. In Minneapolis, for instance, touring entertainers , educators, and lecturers lodged and frequently presented at the Phyllis Wheatley House in North Minneapolis because they were not permitted to rent rooms at any of the local hotels.6 In 1923 the Urban League established a Twin Cities chapter as a means to provide civic (as opposed to church-sponsored) social ser- BEGINNINGS 3 vices for African Americans in Minnesota. It subsequently helped found the Phyllis Wheatley House in Minneapolis in 1924 and then split into two separate organizations for each city. The newly formed St. Paul chapter consequently supported opening the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center in what is now the Selby-Dale or Old Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul in 1929.7 Hallie Q. Brown was an important educator and civil rights activist from Ohio who lived from 1845 to 1949. She was one of...