Black Nativity as Valence of Cultural Survival

When Black Nativity premiered in New York City in December 1961, the usage of the term "black" was still considered a contentious and political act. New York Times columnist Sam Zolotow suggested that several cast members found the title "in bad taste," and the lead actress quit the production after producers discarded the more folksy title Wasn't It a Mighty Day? in favor of the more militant Black Nativity (49). Traditionally performed as a gospel musical, Langston Hughes's "song play" exists at the intersection of religion, theatre, politics, and cultural practice. Black Nativity re-imagines both the narrative and performance of Christ's birth in a way that creates an African American cultural space in a holiday performance season otherwise dominated by European works such as Dickens's A Christmas Carol, Handel's Messiah, and Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, not to mention the more plebian performances of innumerable white shopping-mall Santa Clauses. Claiming this cultural space and, at the same time, labeling it "black" is just one example of what the production of Black Nativity accomplishes in terms of the enactment of a specifically African American theatrical practice within the public sphere.

Since its original production, Black Nativity has become a holiday staple for many African American theatre companies and other companies that seek to attract African American audiences. In 2007, American Theatre magazine featured four companies that produced versions of the play as evidence of the continued national appeal of this now-classic work. The article recognized Penumbra Theatre Company's production in St. Paul; Lorraine Hansberry Theatre's production in San Francisco; Congo Square Theatre Company's production in Chicago; and The Classical Theatre of Harlem's Broadway production in New York (14). Penumbra's production of the play contributes to African American cultural practice on three key fronts. First, the play is a religious celebration that equates the Nativity with various aspects of African American identity, such as the cultural survival of African Americans up from and out of slavery. The staging of these narratives ritually enact the collective memory of a common history in service of the survival and maintenance of a culturally specific group identity. Second, the production helps to maintain the theatre's relationship to the local community as the production where local artists, youth, and clergy are most broadly represented. And last, Penumbra's production of Black Nativity supports the vitality and survival of the theatre as a viable cultural institution and the livelihood of the artists who work within it. As one of the strongest selling show in the theatre's season each year, the company counts on it to bring in a certain amount of earned income. In the following pages, I examine how each of these different valences of cultural survival inform and interpenetrate one another.

Black Nativity as Narrative of Cultural Survival

Penumbra began producing Black Nativity in 1987 and has performed this work every year since, with the exception of the 2003–04 season (Penumbra Theatre Company 2009b). As a consequence of repeated annual productions and in order to differentiate Penumbra's more recent versions of the play from past productions and other companies' interpretations, the theatre occasionally varies the framing device of the play. In these cases, Hughes's original minimalist script operates more as inspiration than directive. Looking comparatively at the narrative frames featured in Penumbra's various manifestations of Black Nativity reveals how each production concept stages African American cultural survival differently by emphasizing diverse aspects of black identity, history, and spirituality. Because black identity changes and is both temporally and geographically constructed and experienced, the narratives that support the expression and interpretation of black identity must also necessarily change from one historical moment to the next. Performance studies scholar E. Patrick Johnson writes that "[f]ar from undergirding an essentialist purview of blackness, performance, as a mode of representation, emphasizes the ways in which cultures struggle to define who they are and who they want to be" (606). Penumbra's evolving interpretation of Black Nativity is involved in precisely this ongoing process of continuous self-definition.

Treating the Nativity...