Negroes in the American Theatre

Negroes in the American Theatre. Black characters were rare on the early American colonial stage, since Negroes lacked social standing and in any case the repertory came from England; the main examples were Othello and the African prince in Southerne's Oroonoko (1695). Isaac Bickerstaffe and Charles Dibdin's comic opera The Padlock (1769) featured a drunken slave, Mungo, the precursor of many comic Negroes in American drama. Stage versions of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe turned Man Friday into a similar clown. Such Black characters as did appear—even at first those in the minstrel show—were normally played by Whites. The first outstanding Negro actor was Ira Aldridge, but he lived and worked mainly in Europe. The most effective anti-slavery play was the successful dramatization of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1859) sympathetically portrayed its heroine, though without criticizing slavery; and Ned Harrigan's vaudeville sketches contained some realistic depictions of Black people. In the 1900s musicals such as In Dahomey (1903), written and performed by Blacks and staged before White audiences, were popular; Bert Williams starred in several.

O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1920) broke new ground in creating a major Black character for the stage; it was followed by his study of intermarriage All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924). Paul Green, however, made a more extensive use of Negro folk-life, and Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures (1930) had an enormous success. The Federal Theatre Project (1935–9) provided opportunities for Black writers and performers. The 1920s brought a resurgence of Black musical shows, such as Blackbirds (1928). Jerome Kern's famous musical Show Boat (1927) had several Black characters; and the Gershwins' folk opera Porgy and Bess (1935)—based on the play Porgy (1927) by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward—had an all-Black cast, as did the musical fantasy Cabin in the Sky (1940), starring Ethel Waters, and Carmen Jones (1943) based on Bizet's Carmen.

By the 1940s Blacks were appearing in Broadway productions as ordinary cast members rather than speciality turns, as in Sidney Kingsley's Detective Story (1949), which featured a Negro policeman without reference to his colour. Plays dealt with Black problems, James Gow and Arnaud d'Usseau's Deep are the Roots (1945) being the most successful; even musicals, notably South Pacific (1949), attacked racial prejudice. Black actors, including Canada Lee and especially Paul Robeson, achieved stardom. The American Negro Theatre supported Black theatre from 1940 until the mid-1950s, its most popular production being Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta (1944; London, 1947). Blacks also began to appear in roles written for Whites. The 1964 musical of Clifford Odets's Golden Boy (1937) starred the Black singer Sammy Davis Jnr.; famous musicals such as Guys and Dolls (1950) and Hello, Dolly! (1964) were restaged with Black casts; and the outstanding Black actor James Earl Jones played not only Othello but Macbeth and King Lear. The 1950s saw the emergence of Black playwrights, among them Lorraine Hansberry (1930–65), whose A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was a big Broadway success. The civil rights movement of the 1960s increased the pressure for Black representation. The Negro Ensemble Company, formed in 1967, provided an Off-Broadway non-commercial outlet for Black talent, originating substantial works such as No Place to be Somebody (1969) by Charles Gordone (1925– ) and A Soldier's Play (1981) by Charles Fuller (1939– ), both of which won the Pulitzer Prize. Off-Broadway also offered a favourable environment for plays of protest by other Black writers: (Everett) Leroi Jones (1934– ) originally wrote plays such as Dutchman (1964) for mixed audiences, but after changing his name in 1965 to Amiri Baraka became more militantly pro-Black (A Black Mass, 1966) and later wrote as a Maoist revolutionary (The Motion of History, 1977); Ed Bullins (1935– ) located most of his plays in Black slums (Clara's Ole Man, 1965), and in his best-known work The Taking of Miss Janie (1975) the hostility of Black towards White was expressed in physical assault. In the 1980s the plays of August Wilson marked the emergence of a major Black playwright of the mainstream.