“The archive of black-authored lynching plays began with Angelina Weld Grimke’s turn away from poetry and fiction to drama. By 1914, Grimke was crafting and revising the play now known as Rachel. The historical moment in which Grimke labored over her first full-length drama was marked not only by the prevalence of lynching and its photographic representation, but also by debate over the definition of ‘black theater.’ On what basis could blacks claim to have created theater? African American performers such as Bert Williams and George Walker had found success on Broadway through musical comedy, and they soon employed all-black creative teams. Was what they were producing on the Great White Way of Broadway ‘black theater’? Or would claiming that black theater existed require that African American performers address African American audiences? If creating black theater required having black viewers, was it enough that they could appreciate the actors’ craft from ‘Nigger Heaven’ balcony seats, or did ‘black theater’ require that African Americans have venues that accommodated them with a little more dignity? By the 1910s, all of these issues were under discussion, and African Americans increasingly believed that they could not claim that ‘black theater’ existed unless it was based on the work of a black writer.” “However, African Americans came to value black playwriting after 1910 only because of the triumphs secured by stage performers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black performers made space for themselves in minstrelsy and then in musical comedy, and later they invested in performing nonmusical, white-authored dramas on commercial stages in black neighborhoods. By entering each of these arenas, they asserted their citizenship by claiming the right to have access to theater and to represent themselves within it.” “Because black performers commanded so much attention, their work fueled conversations in black communities that soon centered on the absence of—and need for—African American playwrights. Angelina Weld Grimke joined this conversation by writing a full-length drama of her own. Through Rachel, Grimke agreed with those who asserted that the black-authored, nonmusical script was the strongest foundation for black self-representation in theater. This chapter begins by tracing the stage history that helped inspire Grimke to become a playwright. Next, it offers a gloss of her inaugural text, noting the aesthetic choices that seem to have demanded response from other African American authors. Black writers who turned to drama in the wake of Grimke’s theatrical debut offered literary revisions that continued the task of re-defining black theater. Yet, as much as Grimke’s successors diverged from her strategies, their works confirmed some of her decisions about how to represent black life and the impact that mob violence has on it. The chapter ends by identifying the features of Grimke’s drama that became generic conventions as lynching plays were written in the 1910s and 1920s.” Koritha Mitchell “Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890—1930” Page 43
Posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 12:24:59 +0000
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