The crisis of Black theatre identity.

Harrison, Paul Carter

We done sold Africa for the price of tomatoes. We done sold ourselves to the white man in order to be like him. Look at the way you dressed ... that ain't African. That's the white man. We trying to be just like him. We done sold who we are in order to become someone else. We's imitation white men. (Toledo, in August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom 417)

For the record, and in case the obvious has passed by unnoticed, as we enter the next millennium, Black Theatre is suffering an identity crisis, an inability to define its ideological purpose and performance practice. Unclarity has encouraged uncertainty, even an ambivalent indifference about whether or not the experience should be designated African American (the conservative practice, in form and content, of petit bourgeois Negro imitations of Euro-American domestic dramas) or reflect the conscious-raising ritual enactments of radical Black Theatre (which should not to be confused with the misapprehension of those observers who claim to have sighted a New Black Theatre, the enterprising, commercial exploitation of Gospel music staged as popular entertainments that do not own the slightest pretense of pursuing the enlightened aspirations of ritual enactment, an exercise uncharitably labeled "The Chittlin' Circuit" [see Gates 44]). Black Theatre might even be consigned to the hybrid status of the new performance orthodoxy that agglutinates race, gender, and gay/lesbian social and philosophical issues into a newly marginalized Other designated by the dominant culture as Multicultural Theatre. The unique, particularized, cultural expression that informs Black Theatre has been restrained by an historically passive response by blacks to the hierarchical authority of a dominant culture that subordinates the Afrocentric ethos into conformity with its popular standards of entertainment.

As Tejumola Olaniyan so aptly points out in Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance, the impediment to an Afrocentric theatre practice in Black Theatre cannot be fully discerned without an appreciation of the European hegemonic domination that has bridled the authentic impulses of black aesthetics: The "Eurocentric discourse on black drama is thinkable only within the materiality of the rise of Europe, the conquest and enslavement of African peoples, colonialism, neocolonialism, and ongoing aggressive capitalist imperialism" (11). Historically, the consequent subordination of the African American cultural ethos found support among influential authorities in defense of slavery, as President Dew of William and Mary College demonstrated in 1832:

... slavery had been the condition of all

ancient culture, ... Christianity

approved servitude, and ... the law of

Moses had both assumed and positively

established slavery.... It is the order of

nature and of God that the being of

superior faculties and knowledge, and

therefore of superior power, should

control and dispose of those who are

inferior. It is as much in the order of

nature that men should enslave each

other as that other animals should prey

upon each other. (qtd. in Dodd 53)

During his courageous challenge to mainstream American Theatre hegemony at the 1996 Theatre Communications Group Conference at Princeton University, August Wilson laid bare the fact that Black Theatre "is a target for cultural imperialists" who ignore the "abundant gifts" of black humanity, and he characterized the gross exploitation of black social practices for the purpose of white consumption as being a reflection of the House Slave being trotted out "to entertain the slave owner and his guests." In his disavowal of the values upon which the standards for American Arts and Letters are erected, Wilson declared:

We cannot share a single value system if

that value system consists of the values

of white Americans based on their

European ancestors. We reject that as

Cultural Imperialism. We need a value

system that includes our contributions as

Africans in America. Our agendas are as

valid as yours. We may disagree, we may

forever be on opposite sides of

aesthetics, but we can only share a value

system that is inclusive of all Americans

and recognizes their unique and valuable

contributions. ("Ground" 71)

While the spontaneous improvisations of slave entertainments were inspired by an African creative impulse that revealed the possibilities of an authentic approach to ritual enactments, the black presence in the formal exercises of American Theatre emerged into the twentieth century moored to the performance practices of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, shamelessly imitating grotesque white impersonations of black character and life that would serve as an unrelieved model of self-parody for future participation.

Minstrelsy was a tradition that brutalized the authentic creative impulses of black song and dance for the primary purpose of appealing to the obligatory comfort of white patrons. Buckin' `n' Wingin' on stage with their faces blackened with burnt cork and their heads adorned with fright-wigs, minstrels performed slapstick gestures that burlesqued the black experience as being "lazy and shiftless, afflicted with a peculiar appetite for watermelon, which is devoured in an equally peculiar manner, a cavernous mouth coming in handy, which, on other occasions, shapes itself into unmatchably funny and slavishly broad grins, or as a funnel for a glass too many of cheap gin, or yet as witness to atrocious incapacities such as twisted pronunciations, meaningless long words, and incomprehensible jabberings" (Olaniyan 13). Much of this self-negating practice, though subtly crafted as ethnic satire, continues to find validation in American pop-culture today. But then, as Toledo reminds his fellow musicians in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, it is, after all, Show Business:

You lucky they let you be an

entertainer. They ain't got to accept

your way of entertaining. You lucky and

don't even know it. You's entertaining

and the rest of the people is hauling

wood. That's the only kind of job for

the colored man. (Wilson, Ma 416-17)

Such a notion would lead one to think that the pursuit of opportunities for self-mockery on the stage is more noble than honest hard work.

As far back as 1820, black thespians such as the masterful James Hewlett and the renowned Ira Aldridge sought to shed the burnt-cork mask and legitimize their presence on the American stage by performing Shakespearean works at the African Grove Theatre in New York. Paradoxically, loathing for such skilled mimicry of the classics provoked such vitriolic responses from white patrons that they had to be roped off in a specially segregated section away from the stage in order allow the "Ladies and Gentleman of Color" to witness the performances without crude interruptions.

Performing to the comfort zone of whites had also been the apparent strategy of William Wells Brown's effort in the 1850s to galvanize a sense of outraged conscience in white liberal Northern abolitionists with personal recitations of his 1858 published slave narrative, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom. Despite an urgency to reveal the corruptions of Southern gentility amidst the specter of the Dred Scott decision that had reaffirmed the sanctity of slaves as property, Brown's play was fashioned in the popular melodramatic style of the period: a series of short scenes depicting the pathos of a lover's tryst, a predictable fight, an obligatory song, and, most importantly, dialect comedy. Cato, the darky, would be the source of dialect comedy, yet is provided an opportunity to reclaim the dignity of human purpose when he repudiates the myth of being a contented slave by also leaping for freedom (see Hatch 34-35).

In Sterling A. Brown's study of black stereotypes, including the Contented Slave, the Wretched Freeman, the Comic Negro, the Brute Negro, the Tragic Mulatto, the Local Color Negro, and the Exotic Primitive (all of whom continue to have currency in popular American culture), Brown describes how hegemonic descriptions can become internalized:

The stereotype of the "comic Negro" is

about as ancient as the "contented

slave." Indeed, they might be considered

complementary, since, if the Negro

could be shown as perpetually mirthful,

his state could not be so wretched. This

is, of course, the familiar procedure

when conquerors depict a subject people.

English authors at the time of Ireland's

greatest persecution built up the

stereotype of the comic Irishman, who

fascinated English audiences and,

unfortunately, in a manner known to

literary historians, influenced

even Irish authors. ("Negro" 188)

Brown's observations on the Local Color Negro are particularly interesting in light of the contemporary problematic of valorizing Afrocentric authentication as an option to multiculturalism without corrupting its validity with a reductive, romanticized essentialism:

Local color stresses the quaint, the odd,

the picturesque, the different. It is

an attempt to convey the peculiar

quality of a locality. Good realistic

practice would insist upon the localizing

of speech, garb, and customs; great art

upon revelation of the universal beneath

these local characteristics. Local color is

now in disrepute because of its being

contented with merely the peculiarity of

dialect and manners.... the local

colorists of the Negro were more

concerned with fidelity to speech and

custom, with revelation of his difference

in song and dance and story, than with

revelation of Negro character they

accepted at face valuation the current

molds into which Negro character had

been forced. (Brown, "Negro" 196)

At the beginning of the century, in pursuit of what Alain Locke, a leading architect of the Harlem Renaissance, had called an "authentic atmosphere," local colorists, both white and black, created dramas that reduced the experience of black folk life to "the rural, southern Black of the soil, who because of his innocence and unpretentiousness best represented Black attitudes and responses toward life, religion, morality, and culture. To most Whites, it conjured up images of the exotic and erotic" (Williams 109).

During the 1920s, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, the most prominent black scholar of the period, attempted to rescue black images from stereotypical manipulation and commercial institutional control with his now familiar edict to the black performance community that urged the development of an ethnocentrically based theatre:

The plays of a real Negro theatre must

be: 1. About us.... they must have lots

which reveal Negro life as it is. 2. By

us... they must be written by Negro

authors who understand from birth and

continual association just what it means

to be a Negro today. 3. For us ... the

theatre must cater primarily to Negro

audiences and be supported and sustained

by their entertainment and approval. 4.

Near us. The theatre must be in a Negro

neighborhood near the mass of ordinary

Negro people. (134)

Paradoxically, such an uncompromising ethnocentric proposal was being issued by a man who, though he adamantly celebrated black folk expression, measured black progress by white standards of achievement. Richly endowed with Eurocentric intellection, and perhaps more culturally privileged than most of his peers, Du Bois was a complex, mercurial thinker who also promoted the patriarchal notion of a Talented Tenth among the black population that would have the responsibility of raising the level of social experience for the underprivileged black masses. In DuBois's social universe, Howard would be Harvard; Fisk would be Yale; the Sorrow Songs would sonorously be elevated to the stature of Handel's Messiah; and the poems of Dunbar would own the refined cadences of nineteenth-century poesy. While Du Bois had very little patience, or even tolerance, for black leadership that was untutored or unlettered, DuBois's proposal sincerely, and without contradictory equivocation, promoted the inception of a theatre experience that would be self-affirming, as opposed to self-negating.

Yet, however auspicious DuBois's appeal for artistic control and institutional solidity may have been, the compelling desire for commercial success energized by the popularity of vaudevillian song and dance on the Great White Way found black performers "shufflin' along" in entertainments primarily designed for white consumption throughout the twenties and thirties. In 1937, Sterling Brown observed that Broadway, while liberally providing opportunities to perform, was "still entranced with the exotic primitive, the comic stooge and the tragic mulatto.

The anecdote of the manager who, having read a serious social drama about Negro life, insisted upon the insertion of `hot spots,' of a song and dance, is still too pertinent" (Brown, Negro 139).

Black performers then responded--as they frequently do today--to a performance ethic that subordinates social ideology to performance opportunity, revealing an artistic ambivalence that would have them surrender their gifts in the service of the dominant culture's demand for benign racial dramas such as Dubose Heyward's exoticized, stereotypic reduction of rural Negroes in Porgy and Bess, Mark Connelly's caricature contrivances that burlesqued black religious beliefs in Green Pastures, Eugene O'Neill's portrayal of impotent, self-anointed power that confirmed black inferiority in The Emperor Jones, and the perennial novelty of refiguring black humanity in the resurrection of European classics, such as The Swing Mikado.

The most uniquely expressive form of theatre to emerge in Harlem during the thirties--perhaps in response to Dr. DuBois's appeal--was the agit-prop Living Newspaper, which spoke directly to a black audience about issues of lynching, Jim Crow, and segregation with an improvisational spontaneity usually associated with the black church and with jazz performances. As a theatrical invention, the Living Newspaper was "an amalgam of motion-picture, epic theatre, commedia dell'arte, and American minstrel show techniques kept within the framework of a question asked, usually by a puzzled little man who represents the public, and answers supplied by a series of presentational devices consisting of scenes, demonstrations, slides, lectures, and arguments. Symbolism was not excluded from this technique .... Pageantry was also not foreign to the medium .... Naturalism could also be assimilated into the medium, when this was deemed theatrically feasible" (Gassner 10-11).

During the 1950s, many black intellectuals were awakened by Marxist polemics that heightened the contradictions of presumed equity across the color-line, inspiring protest dramas in the style of social realism that held a mirror up to the unabated inequities suffered by blacks in America. The social realist format offered a descriptive reflection of oppression that served as passive propaganda void of higher expectations toward action. While writing in the interest of black folk, authors such as Langston Hughes, Alice Childress, and William Branch found a highly receptive audience among whites of liberal/left persuasion who were anxious to be sensitized about the "Negro problem." In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun arrived on the American stage as the quintessential achievement of the social realist mode, yet it was infused with both the poetics and ethnocentric cultural resonances of a familiar black family. Still, the social critic Harold Cruse remained ever circumspect of the play's appeal to a white comfort zone:

The phenomenal success of A Raisin in

the Sun has to be seen against the

background of the temper of the racial

situation in America and its cultural

implications for American artforms.

Broadway and the rest of the American

theatre halve] not been at all kind to

the Negro playwright or performer.

Miss Hansberry's play provided the

perfect opportunity to make it all up,

or at least assuage the commercial

theatre's liberal guilt .... What

obviously elated the drama critics was

the very relieving discovery that what

the publicity buildup actually heralded

was not the arrival of belligerent forces

from across the color line to settle some

long-standing racial accounts on stage,

but a good old-fashioned, homespun

saga of some good working-class folk in

pursuit of the American Dream ... in

their fashion. (277-78)

The tendency for black playwrights to frame the black experience in restrictive conventions that mirror nature was not lost on Alain Locke, who had earlier argued for a black dramaturgy that would abandon the hegemonic tradition of the well-made play so as to allow black folk life to rise above predictable cliches of folksiness and inhibit the full breath of characterization and style. He prescribed a practice for black performance that it "not only be liberated from the handicaps of external disparagement, but from its self-imposed limitations. It must more and more have the courage to be original, to break with established dramatic conventions of all sorts. It must have the courage to develop its own idiom, to pour itself into new molds, in short, be experimental" (qtd. in Olaniyan 22). Though grounded in the aesthetic structure of social realism, Hansberry's play achieved an intimacy with folk life that revealed a diversity of social and political objectives and, arguably, forged a bridge between the self-negating racialized experiences normally associated with social realist protest and the self-affirming expressive poetics of radicalized activism encouraged by the emergence of cultural nationalism in the sixties. While Adrienne Kennedy's fragmented, non-linear, introspective inquiry into the conflict of an embattled European and African psyche in Funnyhouse of a Negro may represent a signal departure in aesthetic form, the first salvo of outward rage and rebellion was issued in Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, which erupted in the birth of the Black Arts Movement.

True to the masks of self-invention among an earlier generation of African Americans, the protagonists in both Funnyhouse of a Negro and Dutchman would grapple with the crisis of black identity by projecting themselves in a hostile universe in a guise that valorizes European role models. In Funnyhouse, Sarah/Negro, immersed in the mythologies and icons of European power, insulates herself from the black world by writing poetry, "filling white page after white page with imitations of Edith Sitwell" (194). And Clay, in Dutchman, self-assured in the armor of his Ivy League-style three-button suit, reveals to his antagonist, Lula, that, "in college, I thought I was Baudelaire." Lula counters caustically: "I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger." Lula, the mythic siren/White Bitch Goddess that preys on young black men in the underground/world, is not deluded by Clay's Ivy League self-invention, knowing all too well what lies beneath such a defensive contrivance:

... that funnybook jacket with all the

buttons .... why're you wearing a jacket

and tie like that? Did your people ever

burn witches or start revolutions over

the price of tea? Boy, those narrow-shoulder

clothes come from a tradition

you ought to feel oppressed by.... A

three-button suit and striped tie? Your

grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to

Harvard. (Dutchman 222)

Sarah/Negro's nihilistic renunciation of the African heritage results in the death of her father, thereby implying self-destruction. Lula's continuous picking at Clay's layers of psychic cover finally reveals that what he has been concealing behind the three-button suit is rage:

I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be

who I feel like being. Uncle Tom.

Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your

business. You don't know anything

except what's there for you to see. An

act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart,

the pumping black heart. You don't ever

know that. And I sit here, in this

buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from

cutting all your throats. I mean

wantonly. (Dutchman 229)

In the underground/world, a heavy price must be paid for such ventilation of rage: annihilation. It is not unlike the rage exhibited in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom when Levee, feeling humiliated by a sense of betrayal by the white studio executive, directs all the venom of his rage onto Toledo, his musician colleague, stabbing him to death while insistently declaring: "Nigger, you stepped on my shoe!!" (434). Levee's assault on Toledo amounts to a repressed tendency toward self-destruction which is restrained by the promises of opportunity in the beguiling underground/world of commercial music. Levee, as Clay observes in his refiguring mythology about Bird (Charlie Parker), would never have had to play a single note of music if he had walked into a jazz club and "killed the first ten white people he saw" (Baraka, Dutchman 229). But unlike Levee, Clay directs his rage outwardly on the underground/world, declaring that all a "would-be poet" of some "kind of bastardized literature" requires is the simple thrust of a knife: "Just let me bleed you, you loud whore, and one poem vanished" (230). For this, Clay is annihilated.

The sixties were driven by efforts to reify cultural nationalism into an Afrocentric aesthetic for the arts in order to create a particularized Black Theatre experience. The poet Larry Neal admonished the performance community with his Black Arts Movement manifesto in tones resonant of Du Bois in the twenties:

The Black Arts Movement is radically

opposed to any concept of the artist

that alienates him from his community.

Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual

sister of the Black Power concept. As

such, it envisions an art that speaks

directly to the needs and aspirations of

Black America. In order to perform this

task, the Black Arts Movement

proposes a radical reordering of the

western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a

separate symbolism, mythology,

critique, and iconography. The Black

Arts and the Black Power concepts both

relate broadly to the Afro-American's

desire for self-determination and

nationhood. Both concepts are

nationalistic. One is concerned with the

relationship

between art and politics; the

other with the art of politics. (Neal 29)

Illumination of the black thang, as Neal would affectionately discern it, requires telling our story through the lens of our particularity of shared material and spiritual experience. We are the stories, and only we can tell them. But what are the stories that animate consciousness into action, that revitalize the collective spirit? The reordering of the dominant culture's hegemonic influence, even control, on how stories are told requires institutions that are committed to being, as Amiri Baraka observed in a 1994 conference on Cultures, Communities, and the Arts, "examples of awakened motion toward self-determination through self-expression to elicit what Du Bois called true self-consciousness." Still, we find ourselves seduced by the glitzy packaging of a hollow Andrew Lloyd Webber extravaganza, suspended in the vulgarity of irradiating neon, mesmerized by a sensory overload of cyber-technic spectacles that have transformed the Great White Way into a Phantasmagoria Theme Park for rapacious consumers seeking relief from reality, as opposed to enlightenment. "The mainstream," Baraka further reminds us, "provides enough titillation and superficial gratification. However, we take its unseriousness seriously" (Keynote).

When Broadway beckons, few are able to resist the power of its commercial grip, which demands that the best intentions of artful expression become commodified for the consumption of the dominant culture's entertainment. The submission to commercial opportunity has resulted in a recent trend among black writers to interrogate the black experience for social pathologies without contextualizing the oppressive forces that have corrupted the efficacy of traditional African values, a worst case being evinced in the despairing vision of Cheryl West's far the Floor and Holiday Heart, works that appear to have been appropriated from a sociological manual on dysfunctional black life in America, yet have had popular appeal on the regional theatre circuit. A natural remedy for such obtuse submission to commercial opportunity requires the redevelopment of alternative institutions to Broadway, institutions committed to nurturing the stories told by black playwrights who consciously, in accordance with the mission of Chicago's ETA Theatre Playwrights Discovery/ Development Initiative, "affirm the tradition and transcend the condition."

During the seventies and eighties, major black institutions such as Robert Macbeth's New Lafayette Theatre, Woodie King's New Federal Theatre, and, most importantly, Douglas Turner Ward's Negro Ensemble Company had nurtured the greatest proliferation of black playwrights ever developed in America, thereby establishing, for the first time, the foundation of a legitimate Black Theatre literature. Included among the beneficiaries of these institutions were OyamO, Richard Wesley, Ed Bullins, ntozake shange, Ron Milner, Aishah Rahman, Philip Hayes Dean, Charles Fuller, Wole Soyinka, Pearl Cleage, Derek Walcott, and a host of others. Unfortunately, these institutions were largely dependent upon the capricious goodwill of government and private foundation funding. The New Lafayette, based in Harlem, dissolved early.

The nineties found financial support shifted away from ethno-specific arts programs in favor of funding the agglutinated Other, newly marginalized as the multi-cultural experience. This had a particularly grave impact on the stability of the Negro Ensemble Company, whose presence had formerly provided black writers across the country with an opportunity for uncompromised self-expression in the heart of America's commercial theatre. As black institutions were cut off from the dole, mainstream regional theatres were funded and charged with the 'development of black playwrights, becoming the adoptive parents of the black experience. With the exception of the Wilson projects under the guidance of Lloyd Richards at Yale, Kenny Leon's nurturing of Pearl Cleage's Blues for an Alabama Sky at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, and the inspired collaboration between George C. Wolfe and Savion Glover that produced a new standard for inventive musical theatre excellence, Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk at New York's Public Theatre, most of the black adventures developed for mainstream theatres--with their own peculiar social and ideological lenses--confirm that the mere presence of black actors on a stage, without a designed purpose to amplify and illuminate the black experience, may very well be entertaining, but have no instructive or spiritual value for a black audience.

A case in point is the theatrically ambitious--even artistically achieved--Transformations project mounted in the 1997 Black History Month slot at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. The project utilized an ensemble of black Equity actors--of whom there are few, due to the limited opportunities for black Chicago actors to perform in union-endorsed productions--and was guided by the creative vision of the company's considerably gifted Artistic Associate, playwright /actress Regina Taylor. The project was conceived by Taylor as a multi-cultural opportunity for her skilled collaborators--which included one male Latino--to explore performance challenges offered in the cross-cultural significations located in the short works of five experimental writers: Peter Handke's Prophesy, Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers, Irene Forne's Dr. Kheal, Sam Shepherd's Red Cross, and Oliver Pitcher's The One. On the level of pure performance, the ritualistic layering of the five works into a seamless theatrical synthesis was entirely engaging. However, though conceived as inextricably a part of a whole that should not be separated out, only The Owl Answers and The One held any significant potential to illuminate the black experience. The performance skills of the ensemble were simply exploited as a device to amplify a Eurocentric universe of apocalyptic alienation. The latter is particularly evident in Prophesy, a work absorbed in the pessimistic world weariness of post-War German angst that cannibalizes language with meaningless, ritualized renderings such as "The chickens will run like chickens .... vultures will circle like vultures .... ordinary people will behave like ordinary people" (Handke), an exercise in hopeless futility that is antithetical to the African American ethos of keep hope alive.

A less innovative case in point, albeit with good-natured intentions, was Emily Mann's stage adaptation of the centenarian Delaney Sisters' personal chronicle Having Our Say, a "feel good" exercise that allows black participation in the mainstream without the benefit of illuminating our particular story. The work was first staged by Mann in Princeton, New Jersey, at the McCarter Theatre, where she serves as Artistic Director, a venue far removed socially and spiritually from the Harlem community where the Delaney sisters resided. While the sincerity of Mann's response to the human interests in the chronicle that inspired the adaptation is unimpeachable, her personal history is as remote from the experiences of Bessie and Sadie Delaney as the lifestyles of a nomadic, desert-dwelling Arab and an Eskimo sheltered in an Alaskan igloo, and this limited her ability to discern the aspects of the storytelling that are dramatically significant.

As a result of her dramaturgical manipulation of the text, Having Our Say became an uneventful chronicle, a charming conversation piece about two spinster sisters who, as far back as their 1889 origins in North Carolina--a mere twenty-four years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation--had lived through, but not necessarily experienced, lynchings and Jim Crow, Sojourner Truth and the Women's Suffrage Movement, Jack Johnson's rise to Heavyweight Champion of the World, Du Bois's declaration that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line," the birth of the NAACP at Niagara Falls, the death of Bessie Smith because she had been refused aid at a Southern white hospital, Zora Neale Hurston and the Harlem Renaissance, Marcus Garveys Back-to-Africa Movement, the crash of the Stock Market, the ban by the Daughters of the American Revolution of Marian Anderson's singing at Constitution Hall, two World Wars, the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Jackie Robinson breaking through the color-line of major league baseball, Rosa Parks and the bus boycott, the fall of Malcolm and the shattering Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream at the hands of assassins, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., being drum-rolled out of Congress, the voice of Barbara Jordan leading the moral authority for the Congressional impeachment of President Richard Nixon, David Dinkins being elected as Mayor of New York, and Mae Jemison becoming the first African American woman in space--an abundant panoply of significant historical activity which never seems to have impacted their lives. It might have been useful to at least uncover some rationale for their inseparable bonding for most of their lives, as opposed to draping them with the baggage of nineties' feminist rhetoric that would have them credit the absence of a man in their lives with the longevity and perseverance of their lives together.

Nurtured at the McCarter--as opposed to, say, Barbara Ann Teer's National Black Theatre in Harlem--Having Our Say was conceived in a linear narrative form without the usual stuff of drama--conflict, passion, mystery, pageantry, spectacle--resulting in a genteel portrait of the Maiden Sisters passing through so much history as passive observers. The chronicle, then, becomes a prosaic homily arrested in nostalgia, void of the verbal dexterity of the African American oral tradition, expressive devices such as call-and-response and the improvisational testimony located in black Church and Blues narratives, which invoke heightened imagery with passion and enlightened revelations and which raise the familiar encounters in the social universe to the level of parabolic wisdom, thereby promoting healing and spiritual mobility.

But then, Having Our Say was conceived as a "feel good" event, like soaking, soothingly, in a warm bath, removed from the antagonisms of the world. In a private space, the subdued spectacle of soaking in a warm bath can be most reassuring. But in a public space--which is the theatre--the unspectacular soak-in-a-warm-bath is tantamount to self-indulgence and borders on exhibitionism, inducing embarrassment, if not boredom, in the spectator who, though trained to affirm recognition of the familiar with a polite nod, is left without an engaging frame of metaphoric reference to elevate the behavior to a sense of significant purpose. Instead of creating a transformative spectacle, the play presents the Delaney Sisters to the world as if they had accomplished little more than living past 100 years of age. We are thus cheated of an opportunity to learn something from the special intimacy these elders had experienced in history that might enlarge our understanding. At best, the occasion becomes an opportunity to bear witness to the ratified gifts of stellar performers in tandem, such as Gloria Foster and Mary Alice.

In August Wilson's 20th-Century cycle of plays--one play for each decade--we discover a more legitimate and compelling chronicle of the African experience in America. Most importantly, his vision reveals a particularized experience that is legitimized by the authority of his personal voice. It is a vision that favors black aesthetic objectives that "affirm the tradition, transcend the condition":

I stand myself and my art squarely on

the self-defining ground of the slave

quarters, and find the ground to be

hallowed and made fertile by the

blood and bones of the men and

women who can be described as warriors

on the cultural battlefield that

affirmed their self-worth. As there is

no idea that cannot be contained by

black life, these men and women

found themselves to be sufficient and

secure in their art and their instruction.

(Wilson, "Ground" 16)

Wilson's voice sent shock waves through the mainstream theatre community, which had formerly been so solicitous in celebrating his gifts as models of the American tradition. His voice seemed to echo Levee's response to Toledo's indictment that blacks are imitation white men: "I ain't no imitation white man. And I don't want to be a white man." The intractable posture of his stance unveiled the appearance of a closely guarded yet impatient rage festering inside his breast that demanded ventilation, inducing a passionate declaration of deliverance from cultural hegemony that had not been witnessed since the initiation of the Black Arts Movement in the sixties.

Wilson's repudiation of the aesthetic and social goals of the American Theatre mainstream that had so generously anointed him unleashed, predictably, the wrath of the patriarchal guardians of the tradition who would have preferred from Wilson an expression of gratitude similar to the abject obeisance reflected in Porgy's signature song: "I got plenty of nuttin' ... an' nuttin' plenty fo' me! " Leading the assault was one of the last proprietors of patrician cultural primacy, Robert Brustein, the Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theatre, who smugly observed that "Wilson is displaying a failure of memory.... I hesitate to say a failure of gratitude" in response to Wilson's acclamation of an ethnocentric aesthetic standard that does not aspire to the American tradition:

His speech is melancholy testimony to

the rabid identity politics and the poisonous

racial consciousness that have

been infecting our country in recent

years.... such sentiments represent a

reverse form of the old politics of division,

an appeal for socially approved

and foundation-funded separatism. I

don't think Martin Luther King ever

imagined an America where playwrights

such as August Wilson would

be demanding, under the pretense of

calling for healing and unity, an entirely

separate stage for black theatre

artists. (Brustein 42)

Brustein's condescending incredulity clearly reflects his ignorance of an eighty-year history of the efforts by black performers, scholars, and social activists to legitimize an Afrocentric performance aesthetic. Irrespective of his patronizing invocation of Martin Luther King, a luminous icon of Civil Rights passive resistance, it is entirely disingenuous of Brustein to pretend that blacks and whites in America have ever lived in harmony without distinguishing their differences racially, responding to a common history from the site of their cultural sensibilities. Inclusion had never been part of the deal following emancipation from 250 years of forced free labor, an additional 100 years of legalized segregation, and ensuing years of de facto exclusion from the benefits of national progress created by our labor, both economically and culturally. Unlike immigrants who had assimilated--including recently arrived Asians and Africans--black exclusion served to bond African Americans around the retention of ancestral traditions that guided secular manners and sacred cosmologies desperately needed to affirm our humanity in an oppressive social universe. Our expressive sensibilities, then, are informed by an African ethos that serves as a prominent signifier in the performance strategies of black Church and Music, and these sensibilities have recently gained expressive currency in the ritual enactments of Black Theatre. Maximizing our cultural heritage in the formation of an Afrocentric theatre Style does not suggest separatism. It seeks an alternative to a tradition that does not allow the full breath of our African spirit to breathe.

Change will not come in the next millennium by black acquiescence to the new orthodoxy of multi-culturalism. There is a small coterie of black scholars, such as Eugene Nesmith, who sincerely believe that the change has already happened, observing that we "are at a crucial juncture for the future of the American theatre, an intersection of cross-cultural developments from which the contours of a new, diverse, racially inclusive American theatre can be discerned" (15). Reflected in Nesmith's optimism is the erasure of all differences among race, gender, and gay/lesbian discourses, a cultural melting pot that does not distinguish a specificity of aesthetic or social goals as the crowning achievement of a new diversity of experience. He naively believes that the doors of the mainstream will be opened to this newly formed, conglutinated Other if blacks would "sacrifice their sometimes purist and exclusionary notion of an Afrocentric theatre" (14). What Nesmith perhaps does not appreciate is that diversity requires recognition of the potential of each specific culture to give expression to its own experiences through the distinctive voices of its people, and through culturally inspired inventions. American theatre, then, should be a reflection of a firmament that respects all differences in theatrical expression equitably, and not be subordinated to a single Euro-American canon.

Notwithstanding the various appropriations of inter-cultural influence, black expression has always been a major vector in shaping the American cultural landscape, from the Civil Rights evolution that raised the moral conscience of the nation, to Be-bop and Hip-hop on the meta-language of vernacular speech, or even the Playing Field where the very presence of black athletes has changed the rules of the game. It would not be a wide stretch of the imagination to presume a great potential for the inventions of Black Theatre to make a difference in altering the static state of the American Theatre tradition in the future. But the measure of influence will depend upon how vigorously African American artists persist in utilizing African-inspired traditions to pursue what the poet/scholar Nathaniel Mackey has observed in vanguard jazz--"the adventuresomeness, the risk-taking, the inclination to move into uncharted and undefined areas, the less-conventionalized and commodified areas" (qtd. in Monagham B10-B11)--in the process of forging a new, unabashedly African American theatrical style. The question is not whether or not Black Theatre is valid so much as it is recognizing that it is in an invalid state and must recover its protean expressive force to survive in the next millennium. A "she!

Works Cited

Baraka, Amid. Dutchman. Oliver and Sills 215-31.

--. Keynote Address. Conference on Cultures, Communities, and the Arts. Columbia College, Chicago, 1994.

Brown, Sterling A. "Negro Character As Seen By White Authors." Journal of Negro Education 2 (Apr. 1933): 179-203.

--. Negro Poetry and Drama. Washington: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937. Brustein, Robert. "Subsidized Separatism." New Republic 19-26 Aug. 1996: 39-42.

Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: Morrow, 1967.

Dodd, William E. The Cotton Kingdom. New Haven: Yale UP, 1920.

Du Bois, W. E. B. "Krigwa Players Little Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement." Crisis July 1926: 134-36.

Gassner, John. "Social Realism and Imaginative Theatre: Avant-Garde Stage Production in American Social Theatres of the Nineteen Thirties." Theatre Survey 111 (1962): 3-18.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "The Chifflin Circuit." New Yorker 3 Feb. 1997: 44-45.

Handke, Peter. Prophesy. Dir. Regina Taylor. Goodman Theatre, 1997.

Hatch, James V., ed. Black Theatre USA. New York: Free P, 1974.

Kennedy, Adrienne. Funnyhouse of a Negro. Oliver and Sills 192-205.

Monagham, Peter. "A Scholar Who Mixes Music, Poetry, and Fiction to Explore Black Culture." Chronicle of Higher Education 20 Sep. 1996: B10-B11.

Neal, Larry. "The Black Arts Movement." Drama Review 12.4 (1968): 29-39.

Nesmith, Eugene. "What's Race Got To Do With It?" American Theatre Mar. 1996: 12-17.

Olaniyan, Tejumola. Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Oliver, Clinton F., and Stephanie Sills, eds. Contemporary Black Drama. New York: Scribner's, 1971.

Williams, Mance. Black Theatre in the 1960's and 1970's. Westport: Greenwood P, 1985.

Wilson, August. "The Ground On Which I Stand." American Theatre Sep. 1996:14-16, 71-74.

--. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Totem Voices. Ed. Paul Carter Harrison. New York: Grove P, 1989. 331-436.

Paul Carter Harrison is one of the co-editors of this special issue of AAR. He is Playwright-in-Residence and Professor of Theatre at Columbia College Chicago.