Writing about the out-of-town premiere of her play A Raisin in the Sun in a letter to her mother, Lorraine Hansberry remarked:

Hansberry’s emphasis on telling the truth and infusing her plays with comedy and pathos equally describes the works of Eulalie Spence and Alice Childress, whose plays blazed a trail for Hansberry with their investment in the overlapping effects of racism and class status within mid-twentieth-century black life. Accordingly, this chapter not only engages class, race, and gender issues; it serves a recuperative purpose that introduces the theatres of two seminal playwrights who inspired, or otherwise forged a path for Hansberry.

The interstices of the Great Depression, World War ii, and the Civil Rights Movement shaped the careers of these three significant African American playwrights. All three nurtured their dramaturgy and activism in New York while working with the social and cultural leaders of their era, each achieved critical acclaim, and each saw her plays published and produced during her lifetime. Though it is challenging to categorize their work, as all three have resisted tidy structuralist groupings, their plays are at once about black life and culture, and about all humanity.

On the evening of June 28, 1849, Frederick Douglass attended a performance by Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders, one of the few all-black minstrel troupes before the Civil War. In spite of his “disgust” at minstrelsy’s racist grotesqueries, Douglass decided to go to the theatre because of his “love of music” and “curiosity to see persons of color exaggerating the peculiarities of their race,” as he put it in his review that ran in his newspaper, The North Star, the following day. Midway through the review, Douglass turned from his assessment of the Serenaders’ act to reflect on the political potential of black performance in general. He writes: “It is something gained, when the colored man in any form can appear before a white audience; and we think that even this company, with industry, application, and a proper cultivation of their taste, may yet be instrumental in removing the prejudice against our race.” In other words, if African Americans controlled the means of production – even if they appropriated the form of blackface minstrelsy, which by the late 1840s was virulently anti-black – their aesthetic and cultural efforts could help redress racial inequality. Much to Douglass’s dismay, however, Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders simply “exaggerate[d] the exaggerations of our enemies” and “cater[ed] to the lower elements of the baser sort.”

In his brief review, Douglass articulated a profound degree of ambivalence regarding the use of performance in the work of black uplift. His ambivalence was born of the decidedly fraught relation that enslaved Africans and their descendants have had with cultural performance since the time of their earliest arrivals in the early seventeenth century. Simply put, Douglass perceived how dominant performance practices entrenched sociopolitical norms such as slavery and white supremacy, but he also recognized how slaves and free people of color used performance to fashion modes of protest and pleasure.

At the height of summer, 2011 and during the waning months of the same year, two high-profile events featuring women of color caught the world’s attention by breaking through gender barriers that have long histories in the United States and in other parts of the world. Media organizations sat up and took note while critics marveled at the fortuitous timing: three African American female playwrights’ individual works ran concurrently on Broadway, a feat that many still regard as extremely unusual, especially given conservative trends of the Great White Way along gender and color lines. The good fortunes of playwrights Katori Hall, Lydia Diamond, and Suzan-Lori Parks began anew a conversation not just about the historically few African American plays on Broadway, but, more particularly, about the infrequent productions of works by contemporary African American female playwrights. Director Kenny Leon told The New York Times, “I can’t remember the last time there were three women playwrights on Broadway during the same season, let alone three African-American women.”

I evoke this recent scenario involving triumphant women of color to demonstrate that African American female playwrights, like these exemplary sisters, continue to be active agents of change on behalf of women – both in the United States and outside its borders – and they are doing so with an expert command of their craft and of the world stage. While some might see the coincidental convergence of Hall’s The Mountaintop, Diamond’s Stick Fly, and Parks’s adaptation of Porgy and Bess upon Broadway as cause for celebration, skeptics might well discount all of the hoopla and label their good fortune as merely happenstance. Pessimism aside, however, might one conclude that Broadway’s recent bumper crop of black female works signals the imminence of more frequent productions? Could the intersection of their work at this historical moment also herald a long overdue recognition that today’s African American female playwright has indeed found her voice and is able to leverage it in a mighty way that would have a more universal impact?

In American theatre we have several ways of thinking about theatre and community, and most of them are negative. “Community theatre” is disparaged as amateur kitsch, though it may be important for non-professionals. Some performance subgenres actively disengage community – for example, an “art-for-art’s-sake” ideology, purporting art does not exist for the audience’s sake. We also have the business of theatre that attends to community cum subscribers, raising debates about art, economics, and the financing of aesthetics. Many community outreach programs have come to create “community” as a euphemism for “ghetto,” and focus on bringing culture to the underprivileged (unfortunately, sometimes condescendingly). In the midst of these uses we often lose sight of the meaning of community in the performing arts that functions to create solidarity and emotional connections among people. At the core of African American performance history, I submit, is the phenomenological desire for and commitment to a sense of shared community. The ebbs and flows of the personal relationships between any given artist or group of artists devoted to work by, for, about, or near people of African descent, and the inspiration and commitment to those people, comprise the fodder and tradition of African American performance.

Premiering as part of the 1971 Broadway season, Melvin Van Peebles’s turbulent, strange, violent, authentic, funny, realistic, and pointedly exaggerated musical Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death debuted on Broadway with the expectation from critics that it would not run for more than two weeks. The same year that Marvin Gaye introduced a sense of political consciousness to the Motown sound with his landmark album What’s Going On? also brought Sweet Sweetback’s BaadAsssss Song, which revolutionized independent cinema – all but creating the blaxploitation genre in film. Sweetback’s multi-hyphenate writer-director-producer-composer-star, Melvin Van Peebles, stormed onto Broadway, that “Great White Way,” with not one but two musicals depicting contemporary black life for white and black audiences: Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death and Don’t Play Us Cheap. With these two shows, Van Peebles changed the look, sound, content, and audience that had typically come to define successful Broadway musicals, and by extension American musical theatre itself. With his vision of black life on “the Block” in Ain’t Supposed to Die, Melvin Van Peebles brought the contemporary aesthetics of black creative expression to Broadway, and made it a success with the show ultimately running for 325 performances, earning a number of Tony Award nominations including Best Musical and Best Original Score. Despite Van Peebles’s success with Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, though, the aesthetic intervention into musical theatre was short-lived, as politically conscious musicals were gone from Broadway as early as 1975.

In June, 1996, playwright August Wilson delivered a keynote address at the biennial gathering of the Theatre Communications Group (TCG), a professional organization of theatre artists and scholars. Arriving at the podium, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who was widely considered to be the most influential voice active in the American theatre, surveyed the assembled audience. He saw the leaders of prominent regional theatres in the country, emerging young artists eager to take their places, and critics whose pens had the power to attract (or drive away) corporate and governmental funding. There were several hundred attendees. The vast majority of them were white. Wilson was not surprised by the composition of his audience. Having developed his seven history plays on the African American experience, which were part of a planned ten-play cycle, at regional theatres across the country en route to Broadway, the accomplished playwright was well aware of the complexion of American theatre. His success, his standing at the podium on that day and, more generally, as one of the world’s greatest living playwrights, was aided by many of the people who sat before him. Now, they were awaiting his remarks.

Wilson’s “provocative” and “passionate” address, which would later be published under the title “The Ground on which I Stand,” triggered a national conversation, within the arts, about race, multiculturalism, and cultural separatism. It catalyzed a series of debates, including a couple featuring August Wilson and his primary antagonist, theatre critic Robert Brustein. It inspired scholars to interrogate the relevance of the “color line” at the end of the twentieth century and within the theatre. Standing at the podium, Wilson asserted that more opportunities needed to be made available to non-white artists to create and engage in work that reflects their unique cultural experiences and history. He criticized colorblind casting practices for not acknowledging cultural difference. He called for the creation of ethnic theatres whose missions would be to champion the work of and create opportunities for artists of color.

1. You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones

2. And all kinds of Swing Mikados

3. And in everything but what’s about me—

4. But someday somebody’ll

5. Stand up and talk about me.

6. And write about me—

7. Black and beautiful—

8. And sing about me.

9. And put on plays about me!

10. I reckon it’ll be

11. Me Myself!

12. Yes, it’ll be me.

13. Langston Hughes, “Note on Commercial Theatre” (1940)

Toward the end of the twentieth century, several black theatre artists with Broadway experience articulated conflicting views of “the Great White Way.” In 1972, Woodie King, Jr. and Ron Milner jointly declared, “Broadway … is a contented fat white cow. If you slip in and milk her for a minute – well, then more black power to you, brother … it’s a weird price she’s asking. She wants you to be a singing hyena, dancing on the graves of yourself and everyone you know.” A decade later, Lloyd Richards, the first black director on Broadway (A Raisin in the Sun, 1959), observed that “[Broadway] still has the connotation of Mecca. Who doesn’t want to go to Mecca?” Over the past 200 years, countless black American artists have contributed to the development of American theatre in direct and indirect ways. Those with a Broadway pedigree tend to be more readily remembered than those who also have had a major influence on theatre even in their absence or exclusion from Broadway.

The following analysis considers the presence of early black American artists who paved the path and opened the doors to Broadway for future African Americans. Performers like George W. Walker (1873–1911); his partner, Bert A. Williams (1874–1922); and the prominent Harlem Renaissance poet and Broadway playwright, Langston Hughes (1902–67) were conscious of the limited and often subservient representations of black folk in the theatre. These artists actively challenged what Miles M. Jefferson refers to as the “Eternal Menial” in the migration of their work from the theatrical margins to Broadway.

Drama in the Harlem Renaissance begins with Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (1916). As an expression of the impact of lynching on women and families, the play considers the implications of the ghastly practice in terms of black female reproductivity. At the end of the first act, the eponymous protagonist learns that her father and half brother were lynched. She questions her mother about the current state of black people in the South and declares:

Rachel’s declaration comingles a belated response to learning that a lynch mob murdered her father and her desperate acknowledgement that there will be no redress, legal, social, or communal, for the traumatic experiences that her adopted son Jimmy suffers when taunted on his way home from school by a group of boys shouting racial slurs and throwing rocks. The melodramatic tone counterbalances the excessive violence used to police black people and calls attention to how blackness functions as a stigma in the first decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the play, based on her familial history of racially motivated violence, Rachel vows not to have children. While a radical stance, Rachel demonstrates a black female character’s attempt to mediate the racial trauma and violence endemic to her world. This chapter offers an overview of significant writers of the Harlem Renaissance by closely reading their plays with the aim of spotlighting how their themes are consonant with New Negro and Harlem Renaissance ideologies.

More than with most figures in the Western intellectual tradition, understanding Burke’s contributions requires some knowledge of his biography. This is especially important for his political ideas, for he wrote no sustained and systematic work of political theory. His views have to be derived from a long and varied series of writings and speeches, all of which were responses to particular occasions and problems. Without knowing these contexts, readers are liable to misconstrue his arguments. A succinct narrative of Burke’s career thus provides an essential background for detailed thematic studies, for his life both generated and constrained the production of the writings and speeches that are his legacy to the world.

Early years: 1730–1765

Born in Dublin in 1730, Burke lived in Ireland until 1750, when he left to study law in London. The importance of his Irishness is universally acknowledged, though scholars disagree about the precise nature of its influence. His father was a Protestant and an attorney, possibly, but probably not a convert from Roman Catholicism. Nothing is known of his father’s background. His mother came from a well-documented family of Catholic gentry, who had lost much, though not all, of their property. Burke was one of four children who survived infancy. As a child, he suffered poor health, and was sent to stay with relatives in the Blackwater valley in County Cork, perhaps for as long as five years (1735–40). In 1741, he was sent to a boarding school at Ballitore, County Kildare, kept by Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker who had emigrated from Yorkshire. Burke retained fond memories of Ballitore and his master. In 1744, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, then a bastion of the Protestant establishment, and still primarily a training college for the Church of Ireland. There he followed the regular four-year arts course, graduating in February 1748. His academic record was undistinguished. Shortly after graduating, he helped to write and edit the Reformer, a short-lived periodical on the plan of the Spectator. The remainder of his time in Dublin is a blank. From this bare outline, one conclusion can confidently be drawn: Burke’s Irishness was a complex inheritance.

Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History (1953) marked an important stage in his evolution into America’s Carl Schmitt. In its final chapter, he made the contentious claim that Burke, despite his readiness to invoke a universal natural law, was a historicist, in the sense that he regarded human rights, for instance, as the product of historical circumstances and not as deriving from abstract, universal principle. He was like Hegel in his preference for what is over what ought to be – a charge first made by Lord Acton that survives to the present day. In Strauss’s account, Burke unwittingly contributed to the erosion of the classical/Christian belief in a universal moral law and to the establishment in its place of the modern belief in the cultural relativity of values. This conclusion relocated Burke rather abruptly from what had seemed to be his increasingly secure position as an exemplary exponent of an anti-theoretical, pragmatic, even utilitarian approach to politics. His anti-revolutionary stance had regularly been praised as characteristically British or English, although his caution about circumstance and consequence was also often taken to be, at heart, utilitarian. These two elements formed a composite upon which his reputation rested easily for more than a century. Occasionally, tremors arising from his views on Ireland and India, or from allergic reactions to the florid complexion of his prose, or even, in Woodrow Wilson’s case, to his ‘brogue’, or from an alleged incoherence in his political philosophy or even from the accusation that he didn’t have one, shook the plinth on which he stood. The Burke who had so successfully opposed 1789 to 1688, the Irishman who was more British than the English could ever be, the crypto-Catholic who had a deeper vision of Anglicanism than any Anglican since Hooker, the former supporter of rebellion who became the scourge and analyst of revolution, presented so great a paradox that for two hundred years its resolution or dissolution became a structuring feature of the commentary upon him. The fright of the French Revolution had brought out his deepest convictions in a suddenly articulated but long-implicit political theology. Even when the apocalyptic tone faded, Burke’s polemic against ‘theory’ retained its force as the most enduring and identifiable feature of his work, adopted and adapted in the service of many causes.

Context, Origins, and Publication

Reflections on the Revolution in France was by far the most famous literary response to that liminal event of political modernity. It has often since been held to define and shape the conservative alternative to revolutionary principles. It purports to be a letter explaining, to a Frenchman, the author’s views on the Revolution and distinguishing between what we would today call the political cultures of Britain and of revolutionary France. The epistolary device – widely used by Burke – had a basis in fact. Charles-Jean-Francois Depont, a young French acquaintance, had written asking Burke for assurance that the French were, ‘worthy to be free, could distinguish between liberty and licence, and between legitimate government and despotic power’ (C, VI: 32). Burke’s initial reply, expressing grave misgivings about the Revolution, had been withheld, lest it compromise Depont, in favour of a brief noncommittal response, now lost. The opening of Reflections refers both to Depont’s second letter pressing Burke for a reply and to the withheld letter, which had finally been sent. However, although Burke presents Depont’s letter as the occasion for writing Reflections, it would be naïve to see it only in this way, or indeed, addressed only to the French.

Coincidently, on 4 November, the date of Depont’s first letter, another event contributed decisively to the nature of Reflections, shaping its opening passages and rendering the English its real target audience (as Burke would put it in a letter: ‘my Object was not France, in the first instance, but this Country’ [C, VI: 141]). This was the address (Burke provocatively calls it a ‘sermon’) given by Rev. Richard Price to the dinner of the ‘Revolution Society’, an association of dissenting ministers meeting annually to celebrate the Revolution of 1688.

During the American crisis of 1763–83, Edmund Burke was recognised, on both sides of the Atlantic, as ‘a friend of America’, primarily because of his determined efforts to seek a reconciliation between Britain and the American colonies on the question of taxation and his bitter criticisms of the efforts made by Lord North’s ministry to subdue the American rebellion by oppressive legislation and military aggression. Modern scholars, however, are divided over Burke’s response to the American crisis. Some maintain that Burke was well informed about American affairs, made vigorous and practical efforts to conciliate the American colonies, and played a leading role in attacking the war that Lord North’s ministry waged against the American rebels. Other scholars have argued that Burke never really fully appreciated the American position, wrongly believed that the root cause of the dispute was taxation, and used the war primarily to advance the interests of his own party. This chapter will explore the evidence that can be used to sustain these contrasting viewpoints and will suggest that he was aware of the contradictions in his position and strove to reconcile them.

Burke’s Knowledge of American Affairs

Among the many MPs who spoke or wrote on American affairs during twenty years of crisis, very few had any first-hand or deep knowledge of the situation in the American colonies. Only a tiny handful had been born in America or had spent substantial time in the colonies as merchants or landowners, civil administrators, or military officers. Burke himself never visited the American colonies, never corresponded regularly with any American Patriot during the crisis and never read widely in the American literature produced by the colonial critics of British policies. On the other hand, it is difficult to find many politicians of the period who made such an effort to educate themselves about American affairs as Burke did. Even before he entered parliament, Burke collaborated with his friend, William Burke, in producing a substantial Account of the European Settlements in America that was published in two volumes in 1757.