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THE future of African American theatre, its history shows, swings by an intricately woven hanging rope, on which sway the classes, periods, and schools of drama, along with the theatre people, organizations and coalitions. So robust and dancing is this theatre that it invites forgetting. Hidden is James Hewlett, “de son of New York” who made handkerchief-waving women and ale-swigging men forget “de vinter of our discontent”: Manuel Noah plaited the murder and mayhem in and of Mr. Brown's Richard III and his African Grove Theatre. Noah knew that without strong cables to hold up the laughter loads, African American theatre organizations would so often be born and die that there would not be certificates enough to record them, nor graves enough to bury them. If only the publisher and editor Beth Turner had been there to warn Mr. Brown:
This extraordinary assemblage must not be allowed to disperse before it tackles the increasingly serious problem of Black theatre. … While we all gather to enjoy each other, renew friendships, catch up on the news, revel in each other's achievements and celebrate surviving, … let us also take time to hone serious plans, to forge the alliances imperative to the continuation of Black theatre, to make commitments for cooperative actions and to set into place means of continuing our dialogue.
Suppose that Mr. Brown had listened. He would have knitted tougher ropes, opening lines to the African American leadership in New York City.
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