Abject No More: Authority and Authenticity in the Theatrical Career of Rose McClendon

{ 42 } \ Abject No More Authority and Authenticity in the Theatrical Career of Rose McClendon —Cheryl Black A Rose is just as sweet, they say by any other name. but when it comes to actresses all roses aren’t the same There is one Rose—McClendon Among our stars, the best. For poise, abandon, soulfulness, She really leads the rest. Filled with human tenderness her eyes express her soul A star, is Rose McClendon A Goddess as a whole. From her professional debut, in 1919, until her untimely death at the age of fifty-­ one, in 1936, Rose McClendon enjoyed a unique status among African Ameri­ can theatre artists. Dubbed a “dark Duse” by critic Alexander Woollcott at the time of her Broadway debut in 1924, within a few years she was generally recognized as the “first lady of Negro drama” and one of the first ladies of the New York stage of any race, sharing critical honors in 1927 with white contemporaries like Ethel Barrymore, Ruth Gordon, and Lynn Fontanne.1 In addition to acting, McClendon also directed and wrote plays; served on several theatre advisory boards; cofounded, in 1935, the Negro People’s Theatre, which laid the groundwork for the development of the black theatre units of the Federal The- { 43 } the Theatrical Career of Rose McClendon atre Project (FTP); and served, for a short time before her death, as codirector of New York’s black theatre unit. Seldom in Ameri­ can theatre history has an individual accomplished so much in so little time, against such odds.2 For when McClendon embarked on a professional theatrical career in 1919, she was black, she was female, and she was over thirty. Yet published scholarship on McClendon is scant, and there are a number of gaps and inconsistencies in the published record. In the invaluable History of African Ameri­ can Theatre, authors James Hatch and Erroll Hill recognize the“sketchy”record of McClendon’s life, pointing to actress and activist Vinie Burrows’s one-­ woman performance of McClendon’s life as a partial corrective to this historical gap.3 Burrows’s moving tribute does convey considerable information about McClendon’s life and career, but Burrows’s dramatic script is not bound by historiographic restrictions , and she has, by her admission, fictionalized certain aspects.4 To date, Jay Plum’s unpublished master’s thesis is the most comprehensive survey of McClen­ don’s career, but Plum was hampered by lack of access to archival materials that have since become available.5 Lillian Voorhees pioneered research on McClendon ’s life, publishing a biographical entry on McClendon in Notable Ameri­ can Women in 1971.6 Other than brief entries in biographical dictionaries, I have located only two published essays devoted exclusively to McClendon: an article by Jay Plum focusing on McClendon’s role in the formation of the black FTP units and Glenda Gill’s chapter on McClendon in her study of pioneering African Ameri­ can performers.7 In her essay, Gill focuses primarily on McClendon ’s vision for a Negro theatre,8 highlighting McClendon’s discontent with the roles she played, which Gill categorizes as “almost exclusively” the three racist and sexist stereotypes identified by critic Lisa M. Anderson as the Mammy, the Tragic Mulatto, and the Jezebel.9 Despite her reading of McClendon’s stereotypical casting, Gill later cites, and seems in agreement with, the contemporary critic who hailed McClendon as one who “gave to the Ameri­ can theatre its first real, authentic depiction of the Negro woman.”10 It is that seeming paradox that led, in part, to this undertaking. In gratitude to and inspired by previous scholarship that laid the groundwork for this study, I am interested in expanding and clarifying the documented record of McClendon’s career with particular emphasis on Rose McClendon as a subversive force in the Ameri­ can theatre who effectively challenged prevailing racist and sexist assumptions about African Ameri­ can female identity during the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro era. Although McClendon’s stage roles include two characters named “Mammy” and at least five domestic servants employed by white families, my analysis considers a fourth type, largely untreated by Anderson and Gill, which seems equally, perhaps...