Download or read book A History of African American Theatre written by Errol G. Hill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-17 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents

Download or read book Black Thunder written by William B. Branch and published by Signet Book. This book was released on 1992 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology of nine contemporary plays (all produced between 1975 and 1990) actively confronts the racial realities of American culture and celebrates the African American experience with originality and meaning. Playwrights include George C. Wolfe, Leslie Lee, Steve Carter, Amiri Baraka, P.J. Gibson, William Branch, Alexander Simmons, Ed Bullins, and August Wilson.

Download or read book Reading Contemporary African American Drama written by Trudier Harris and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Textbook

Download or read book Living with Lynching written by Koritha Mitchell and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynching victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of households being torn from model domestic units by white violence. In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens. The Left of Black interview with author Koritha Mitchell begins at 14:00. An interview with Koritha Mitchell at The Ohio Channel.

Download or read book Black Theater City Life written by Macelle Mahala and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Macelle Mahala’s rich study of contemporary African American theater institutions reveals how they reflect and shape the histories and cultural realities of their cities. Arguing that the community in which a play is staged is as important to the work’s meaning as the script or set, Mahala focuses on four cities’ “arts ecologies” to shed new light on the unique relationship between performance and place: Cleveland, home to the oldest continuously operating Black theater in the country; Pittsburgh, birthplace of the legendary playwright August Wilson; San Francisco, a metropolis currently experiencing displacement of its Black population; and Atlanta, a city with forty years of progressive Black leadership and reverse migration. Black Theater, City Life looks at Karamu House Theatre, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Pittsburgh Playwrights’ Theatre Company, the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, the African American Shakespeare Company, the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival, and Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company to demonstrate how each organization articulates the cultural specificities, sociopolitical realities, and histories of African Americans. These companies have faced challenges that mirror the larger racial and economic disparities in arts funding and social practice in America, while their achievements exemplify such institutions’ vital role in enacting an artistic practice that reflects the cultural backgrounds of their local communities. Timely, significant, and deeply researched, this book spotlights the artistic and civic import of Black theaters in American cities.

Download or read book In Search of a Model for African American Drama written by Philip U. Effiong and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2000 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Search of a Model for African-American Drama, is a comparative study of how these three dramatists seek and devise new models to address the specific conditions of Blacks in America. Each writer relies on a different approach, each powerful, yet apparently contradictory. The author examines the dramatists' work in detail, exploring common and contrasting themes and models.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance written by Kathy A. Perkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance is an outstanding collection of specially written essays that charts the emergence, development, and diversity of African American Theatre and Performance—from the nineteenth-century African Grove Theatre to Afrofuturism. Alongside chapters from scholars are contributions from theatre makers, including producers, theatre managers, choreographers, directors, designers, and critics. This ambitious Companion includes: A "Timeline of African American theatre and performance." Part I "Seeing ourselves onstage" explores the important experience of Black theatrical self-representation. Analyses of diverse topics including historical dramas, Broadway musicals, and experimental theatre allow readers to discover expansive articulations of Blackness. Part II "Institution building" highlights institutions that have nurtured Black people both on stage and behind the scenes. Topics include Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), festivals, and black actor training. Part III "Theatre and social change" surveys key moments when Black people harnessed the power of theatre to affirm community realities and posit new representations for themselves and the nation as a whole. Topics include Du Bois and African Muslims, women of the Black Arts Movement, Afro-Latinx theatre, youth theatre, and operatic sustenance for an Afro future. Part IV "Expanding the traditional stage" examines Black performance traditions that privilege Black worldviews, sense-making, rituals, and innovation in everyday life. This section explores performances that prefer the space of the kitchen, classroom, club, or field. This book engages a wide audience of scholars, students, and theatre practitioners with its unprecedented breadth. More than anything, these invaluable insights not only offer a window onto the processes of producing work, but also the labour and economic issues that have shaped and enabled African American theatre. Chapter 20 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Download or read book Willis Richardson Forgotten Pioneer of African American Drama written by Christine R. Gray and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1999-12-30 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1920s and 1930s, Willis Richardson (1889-1977) was highly respected as a leading African-American playwright and drama anthologist. His plays were performed by numerous black high school, college, and university drama groups and by theater companies in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., Cleveland, Baltimore, and Atlanta. With the opening of The Chip Woman's Fortune (1923), he became the first African American to have a play produced on Broadway. Several of his 46 plays were published in assorted magazines, and in his essays, he urged black Americans to seek their dramatic material in their own lives and circumstances. In addition, he edited three anthologies of plays by African-Americans. But between 1940 and his death in 1977, Richardson came to realize that his plays were period pieces and that they no longer reflected the problems and situations of African-Americans. In the years before his death, he attempted vigorously yet unsuccessfully to preserve several of his plays through publication, if not production. But the man who has been called the father of African-American drama and who was considered the hope and promise of African-American drama died in obscurity. Richardson has even been neglected by the scholarly community. This critical biography, the first extensive consideration of his life and work, firmly reestablishes his pioneering role in American theater. The book begins with a detailed chronology, followed by a thoughtful biographical essay. The volume then examines the nature of African-American drama in the 1920s, the period during which Richardson was most productive, and it analyzes his approach to drama as a means of educating African-American audiences. It then explores the African-American community as the central theme in Richardson's plays, for Richardson typically looks at the consequences of refusals by blacks to help one another. The work additionally considers Richardson's history plays, his anthologies, his dramas intended for black children, and his essays. A concluding chapter summarizes his lasting influence; the book closes with a listing of his plays and an extensive bibliography.

Download or read book The Escape Or A Leap for Freedom written by William Wells Brown and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A well-known nineteenth-century abolitionist and former slave, William Wells Brown was a prolific writer and lecturer who captivated audiences with readings of his drama The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom (1858). The first published play by an African American writer, The Escape explored the complexities of American culture at a time when tensions between North and South were about to explode into the Civil War. This new volume presents the first-edition text of Brown's play and features an extensive introduction that establishes the work's continuing significance. The Escape centers on the attempted sexual violation of a slave and involves many characters of mixed race, through which Brown commented on such themes as moral decay, white racism, and black self-determination. Rich in action and faithful in dialect, it raises issues relating not only to race but also to gender by including concepts of black and white masculinity and the culture of southern white and enslaved women. It portrays a world in which slavery provided a convenient means of distinguishing between the white North and the white South, allowing northerners to express moral sentiments without recognizing or addressing the racial prejudice pervasive among whites in both regions. John Ernest's introductory essay balances the play's historical and literary contexts, including information on Brown and his career, as well as on slavery, abolitionism, and sectional politics. It also discusses the legends and realities of the Underground Railroad, examines the role of antebellum performance art--including blackface minstrelsy and stage versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin--in the construction of race and national identity, and provides an introduction to theories of identity as performance. A century and a half after its initial appearance, The Escape remains essential reading for students of African American literature. Ernest's keen analysis of this classic play will enrich readers' appreciation of both the drama itself and the era in which it appeared. The Editor: John Ernest is an associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and author of Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature: Brown, Wilson, Jacobs, Delany, Douglass, and Harper.

Download or read book Mnemopoetics written by Valérie Bada and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its very beginning, African American drama has borne witness to the creative power of the slaves to maintain their human dignity as well as to fashion a complex culture of survival. If the memory of slavery has always been at the heart of the African American theatrical tradition, it is the way in which it is processed and inscribed that has developed and is still changing. Through the close reading and socio-historical analysis of eight plays from 1939 to 1996, the author seeks to unravel the fluctuating patterns in the shaping of the theatrical memory of slavery long after its abolition. To do so, she defines the concept and practice of mnemopoetics as the making of memory through imagination as well as the critical approaches that decipher and interpret cultural productions of memory. As a constellation of processes akin to the fluidity of memory, mnemopoetics blends creative representation and critical exploration to suggest that the cultural creation of memory necessarily entails a self-reflexive involvement with its own interpretation. If slavery embodies the deep, foundational memory of America, African American drama represents the open, communal space where it becomes possible to convert the irretrievable nature of a vicarious past into the redeeming function of a collective memory.

Download or read book Plays of Negro Life written by Alain Locke and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The drama of negro life is developing primarily because a native American drama is in process of evolution. Thus, although it heralds the awakening of the dormant dramatic gifts of the Negro folk temperament and has meant the phenomenal rise within a decade's span of a Negro drama and a possible Negro Theatre, the significance is if anything more national than racial. For pioneering genius in the development of the native American drama, such as Eugene O'Neill, Ridgley Torrence and Paul Green, now sees and recognizes the dramatically undeveloped potentialities of Negro life and folkways as a promising province of native idioms and source materials in which a developing national drama can find distinctive new themes, characteristic and typical situations, authentic atmosphere. The growing number of successful and representative plays of this type form a valuable and significant contribution to the theatre of today and open intriguing and fascinating possibilities for the theatre of tomorrow"-- Introduction.

Download or read book Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal written by Kate Dossett and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-01-29 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units" set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of "white" classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the black performance community—a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made and remade black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.

Download or read book The Roots of African American Drama written by James V. Hatch and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1992-01-04 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biographic information and a bibliographyof other plays follow each script, providing readers with added sources for study.

Download or read book African American Theatre written by Samuel A. Hay and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-03-25 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the history of African American theatre from its beginnings to the present.

Download or read book Contemporary Plays by African American Women written by Sandra Adell and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American women have increasingly begun to see their plays performed from regional stages to Broadway. Yet many of these artists still struggle to gain attention. In this volume, Sandra Adell draws from the vital wellspring of works created by African American women in the twenty-first century to present ten plays by both prominent and up-and-coming writers. Taken together, the selections portray how these women engage with history as they delve into--and shake up--issues of gender and class to craft compelling stories of African American life. Gliding from gritty urbanism to rural landscapes, these works expand boundaries and boldly disrupt modes of theatrical representation. Selections: Blue Door, by Tanya Barfield; Levee James, by S. M. Shephard-Massat; Hoodoo Love, by Katori Hall; Carnaval, by Nikkole Salter; Single Black Female, by Lisa B. Thompson; Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine, by Lynn Nottage; BlackTop Sky, by Christina Anderson; Voyeurs de Venus, by Lydia Diamond; Fedra, by J. Nicole Brooks; and Uppa Creek: A Modern Anachronistic Parody in the Minstrel Tradition, by Keli Garrett.

Download or read book White People Do Not Know how to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies Gentlemen of Colour written by Marvin Edward McAllister and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: McAllister offers a history of black theater pioneer William Brown's career and places his productions within the broader context of U.S. social, political, and cultural history.

Download or read book African American Theater written by Glenda Dicker/sun and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-08-23 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in a clear, accessible, storytelling style, African American Theater will shine a bright new light on the culture which has historically nurtured and inspired Black Theater. Functioning as an interactive guide for students and teachers, African American Theater takes the reader on a journey to discover how social realities impacted the plays dramatists wrote and produced. The journey begins in 1850 when most African people were enslaved in America. Along the way, cultural milestones such as Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Freedom Movement are explored. The journey concludes with a discussion of how the past still plays out in the works of contemporary playwrights like August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks. African American Theater moves unsung heroes like Robert Abbott and Jo Ann Gibson Robinson to the foreground, but does not neglect the race giants. For actors looking for material to perform, the book offers exercises to create new monologues and scenes. Rich with myths, history and first person accounts by ordinary people telling their extraordinary stories, African American Theater will entertain while it educates.