Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910 by David Krasner (review)

Book Reviews 175 sonal line which Lamb himself opened with his view of Barker as the offended youngster in the audience at Saved. What, we might ask, lies behind Barker's imaginative sympathy for Celine, that dazzlingly innovative but outcast writer? For Lamb, psychological realism is a desirable mode, and one favoured by Barker, while social realism is not. That contradiction is justified on the grounds that social discourse today is hopelessly compromised by the pres-·sures from popular, commercial fanns of information and entertainment: "[R]eality itself has been appropriated by the exchange value system" (27). In this perspective - a social and political argument denying the value of a social and political theatre - Barker appears as a lone and embattled figure. That would be consonant with Barker's own view of his isolation, conveyed in his Arguments for a Theatre (1987, revised 1993). It is a romantic view, found both in his critical manifestos and in the heroism of doomed central figures in his plays. Under its impetus Barker will undoubtedly keep writing his own kind of drama. He is not a man to take instruction from those who are more conventionally successful. But he could do with critical suppon. Lamb's book is a stan. It needs to be followed by fuller treatments if Barker's presence in the field of modern drama is to be understood. ALAN THOMA S, SCARBOROUGH COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF TORO NTO DAVID KRASNER. Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, [895-[9[0. New York: SI. Manin's Press 1997. Pp. 2t8. $39·95· Some years ago, while researching at the Shuben Archive in New York City, I came across a copy of a letter written by George F. Walker to the Klaw and Erlanger organization. The letter was a carefully worded, businesslike defence of the all-black productions of Williams and Walker as viable commercial fare in the Broadway-centred white touring monopoly known as "the Syndicate." It was a conciliatory, almost-but-not-quite emotional plea to a power that could make or destroy careers, and at the same time had the self·confident tone of an anist who knew he was skilled and popular. It was a "loaded" document that required far more context to understand than I had at the time; but I still remember it and hoped someone would "unpack" it for me some day. David Krasner does exactly that in this book, and in so doing adds to a growing literature that (finally) takes on black performance and popular musical theatre as events/traditions wonh serious analysis. Krasner's work is not a survey of the time or the theatre. It is instead a Book Reviews defence for and test of the close analysis of a popular perfonnance idiom, through specific case studies. As such, it focuses on a limited number of influential black artists at the tum ofthe century: the perfonning-and-writing teams of Bert Williams and George F. Walker, and Robert "Bob" Cole and Billy Johnson; the perfonner and dancer Aida Overton Walker; and the writers Will Marion Cook, James Weldon Johnson and 1. Rosamond Johnson. Similarly, he restricts himself to specific productions, including among others the early variety-based The Two Real Coons and the Williams and Walker "legit" vehicles In Dahomey and Bandanna Land. Finally, he emphasizes the complex and contradictory relationships between a commercial and generic touring industry dominated by white audiences and the black artists who managed to find a place in that industry. He stresses that this relationship - one of pandering to white expectations at the same time as the artists complicated and resisted the resulting stereotypes - can only be understood in the broader cultural context. This book seeks to undennine any reading of documents that understands these productions as "simple." The flashy, dandified Walker and the slowmoving , shuffling Williams, as powerful and skilled as they were, have too easily been dismissed as "might-have-beens," artists who were not allowed to achieve all they could because of the traps laid for them by a racist performance culture. Krasner argues, instead, that the performer-audience relationship was far more complicated and the creative resistance to the status...