African American Playwrights Examine Life, Act by Act

African American playwrights have been trailblazers in the theater. The themes of these writers revolve around race and identity., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

Black History Month: African-American playwrights examine life, act by act

Writers tackle the gamut of truths and experiences in stage works

BY A. PETER BAILEY
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2014, 4:00 AM

EVEN A casual theatergoer probably has an awareness of the works of prominent, award-winning black playwrights such as Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange and August Wilson.

Hansberry’s highly acclaimed drama, “A Raisin in the Sun” is regularly performed by theater companies throughout the country. Baraka’s “Dutchman” and Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf” are generally recognized as masterful creations.

In a 1978 interview, I asked the legendary poet-playwright-educator Owen Dodson to cite his favorite stage works of the hundreds of plays he has seen during his long and distinguished career as a drama professor at Howard University, and director and student of national and international theater.

The seven he listed included “Dutchman” — “because it’s one of the most powerful statements about race relations that has been written in our time. It’s not only a play about blacks and whites, but a universal statement about hatred and cruelty” — and
“Colored Girls,” “because of its great Gothic language, though I was a little disturbed by its cruelty,” he said.

Black playwrights, especially young ones such as Bryonn Bain (“Lyrics From Lockdown”), Daniel Beaty (“Emergence-see”) and Esther Armah (“Saviour?”), all of whose plays have been called “exceptional” by noted producer Voza Rivers, should pay close attention to an observation by August Wilson. After seeing the first drama written by a young black playwright, Wilson reportedly said, “I just want to tell you that you have a very powerful voice and I liked your play. But you need music. You always need music.”

There are other black playwrights equally worthy of attention because of the quality of their artistic creations. These include Charles Fuller, Aishah Rahman and Richard Wesley.

They have well-defined positions on the role of the playwright.

Fuller — whose brilliant drama, “A Soldier’s Play,” became the Hollywood movie “A Soldier’s Story” — told me in an interview, “I write plays for black people and my plays are about people, not just black-white confrontations. I am concerned about history and about human beings. I also believe in the heroic. My heroes are those black people, most of them without big names, who have been deeply involved with moving our people ahead in the ways they know best.”

Rahman, when asked about the attributes that a playwright must have, said, “A playwright must be a storyteller, teacher and philosopher. He or she must be an observer of people, must love people — something, by the way, that gets harder to do as one grows older — and must be able to rise above himself or herself. . . . For me personally, playwrighting is a way of flying, of getting out of myself and taking on another sensibility.”

But Wesley, who also wrote the scripts for the movies “Uptown Saturday Night” and “Let’s Do It Again,” had a warning: Black playwrights must “stop assuming that the black experience and culture of poverty are one and the same..

A wide range of life’s complexities and challenges are examined in plays such as Wilson’s “Two Trains Running,” Baldwin’s “Blues for Mister Charlie,” Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf,” Wesley’s “Mighty Gents” and Hansberry’s “A Raisin in The Sun.”

“They are definitely not, as I was to find out when I read a major article on a poor white family who had moved from Appalachia to Chicago,” he said. “When they got there, the father couldn’t find work. The mother had to work while he stayed home, becoming more and more frustrated.

“He lost his position in the family. Family discipline broke down. The children got into trouble. Except for their color, the description of what happened to them was what we had thought to be an exclusive phenomena of black urban ghettos. I began to realize that what we playwrights had been writing about had little to do with blackness per se, but with a culture of poverty. I became concerned with understanding where the black experience ended and culture of poverty began. And I began centering my plays on people instead of concepts.”

My favorites of more than 250 plays that I have seen, most in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, were written by playwrights who shared the visions of Fuller, Rahman and Wesley. I have divided them into four basic, often overlapping, categories.

One category of plays focuses on historical events and/or individuals. These include Charles Fuller’s “The Brownsville Raid,” P.J. Gibson’s “My Mark, My Name,” James De Jongh’s “Do Lord Remember Me,” Ray Aranha’s “The Estate,” Laurence Holder’s “When the Chickens Come Home to Roost” and “Zora,” William Bourdine’s “Deadwood Dick, Legend of the West or They Went Thataway” and Rahman’s “Lady Day: A Musical Tragedy.”

Sidney Poitier Ruby Dee in 1959 Broadway debut of “A Raisin in the Sun,” one of many plays focusing on "black family life, black community life or black culture."

A second category: Plays mostly focusing on black family life, black community life or black culture, which include Abram Hill’s “Strivers Row,” Melvin Van Peebles’ “Ain’t Supposed To Die a Natural Death,” James Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner,” Louis Johnson’s “Madame Odum,” Steve Carter’s “Nevis Mountain Dew,” Roger Furman’s “The Long Black Block,” Ivy McRae's “Run’Ners,” Alice Childress’ “Wine in the Wilderness,” William Wellington Mackey’s “Behold Cometh the VanderKellens,” Douglas Turner Ward’s “Day of Absence” and Wesley’s “The Past Is Past.”

The next category is plays that focus on aspects of the movement for civil and human rights. These include Joseph Walker’s “The River Niger,” Lennox Brown”s “Wintry Train,” Clarence Young 3rd’s “Perry’s Mission,” Barbara and Carlton Mollette’s “Rosalie Pritchett,” Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshana’s “Sizwe Banzi is Dead” and Wesley’s “The Black Terror.”

Finally, there are plays that illuminate the destruction that black self-hatred can bring on the self-hater and the community at large.

The characters have basically completely accepted the basic tenets of white supremacy or racism. These include Fuller’s masterful “A Soldier’s Play,” Charles Gordone’s “No Place to Be Somebody” and Ed Bullins’ “The Electronic Nigger.”

I once wrote that in black theater, artists —especially playwrights — “must do more than tell it like it is. Instead, they must strive to tell the whole truth about the people of whom they write, dealing with their strengths as well as their weaknesses, their heroes as well as their outlaws; with Wall Street and international affairs as well as Harlem and Southside Chicago; with love relationships as well as warped ones; and with the possibility of nuclear war as well as brawls on 125th St.

Theater artists must use their much-talked-about artistic vision to help people better understand both the world around them and the world of the past.”

The playwrights cited above have done just that.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/black-playwrights-keepin-real-article-1.1604961#ixzz2t5IenFEE