Black Theatre: Ritual Performance In The African Diaspora

Afterword: Testimony of a Witness

Eleanor W. Traylor Afterword: Testimony of a Witness One works, one dreams, and if one is lucky, one actually produces. But the true fulfillment comes when our fellows say: Ah, we understand, we appreciate , we enjoy . . . —Lorraine Hansberry Forty-three years have passed since, from the Broadway stage, the Younger family abandoned its vermin-infested flat on Chicago’s South Side, heading out for the hostile but greener, airier Clybourne Park in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Today, virtually in the spot where the old tenement stood, sits the elegant house of the ETA Creative Arts Foundation, the home of a fully endowed, board-protected, bank-guaranteed, community-loved and supported black theatre. Here playwrights, invited to take advantage of the opportunities of the place, engage in “conversations with the future.” One or all of them will undoubtedly envision, for dramatic enactment , a way out of the situation that the Younger generations now face. For the Youngers at the millennium have discovered—as have their neighbors—hostile or not, that Clybourne Park is a failed promise; that the possibilities for an engaged life (its terrors still to be reckoned) remain on the South Side; that all the world now knows this and that for some time (through state-maneuvered redress), there has been a stampede to reentry. But South Side real estate now exceeds in value and price what Clybourne Park, as real estate, ever was or could become. What is to be done? Where is the space in which “one works, one dreams . . . one produces,” and finds “fulfillment”? Where are these questions to be answered if not by an agency of individual genius forming a collective mainly bereft of official legitimizing sources but imaging for a people the distinction between a South Side tenement, Clybourne Park, and all in between—where, if not by such an agency, one that pronounces itself black theatre? The recuperative and penetrating essays in this anthology assure that such questions are not misplaced, for as they uncover the multiple identities that configure their subject, we learn that more than playwrights, singular successes, resplendent performers, and real estate—invaluable as these are—black theatre is, in fact, an imaginative lens through which we now see the world. The glory of the day was in her face The beauty of the night was in her eyes And over all her loveliness, the grace Of morning blushing the early skies. I remember these lines spoken from a stage liberated to perform “bodies of literature , lore, and history” (Bambara: 92) formerly suppressed by the very architecture— not to speak of the expectations of a construct called “theatre.” I heard these lines from a stage that convinced me (who in childhood had wailed that my hair would not Shirley Temple curl) they were true—true of me, true of everyone in the house. I heard them from a stage which had ignored the protocols of space regarding performance and audience, a stage demanding the least amount of distance between actor and witness, a stage promoting innovation in performance and response to the degree of complete surprise, a stage expecting the style of variety itself, and a stage approving grace as the most essential element in the achievement of beauty. Unbounded by the limits of proscenium arch, actors—moving up and down aisles and on a ramp-extended stage executing expert movement and eliciting cries of “tha’s awright”—erased the tenses of time as they addressed the cadences and themes of a culturally specific poetry, as if to supplicants who reply, “Teach!” The pitch heightens ; the movement patterns itself; the tension between stage and seat, and seat and seat, tightens until those walls come tumbling down. Such was the first rendering of Glenda Dickerson, who composed book, designed stage, and directed her piece The Unfinished Song in the Ira Aldridge Theatre at Howard University in the Spring of 1970. Her stage, radiant of “the radical cultural/political theories of the day . . . smashing the codes, transforming previous significations as they relate to Black women,” remains a stage evoking “four circles of involvement: myth, history, ritual, and ontology ” (Spillers and Pryse: 153). These circles identify the primary structural and dramatic features “against which motivation takes shape” (Spillers and Pryse: 152). Most of all, her stage remains an agent-centered stage, presenting what Gwendolyn Brooks has called “a sovereignty,” as in, “we assume a sovereignty ourselves” (Brooks: 72). It is a stage...