Black Drama and the Harlem Renaissance

Author(s): Freda L. Scott

Source: Theatre Journal , Dec., 1985, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Dec., 1985), pp. 426-439
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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 Black Drama and the Harlem Renaissance

Freda L. Scott

When the literary and artistic aspects of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance are examin
in retrospect, the dramas of this seminal period are usually conspicuous in th
absence. The major Black dramatists of that time, such as Willis Richardson, Eu
Spence, and Randolph Edmonds are little remembered save for interested historians
or are remembered for other contributions. Their dramas are nearly never revived
The same appears true for the white playwrights who wrote dramas around B
characters, as Paul Green did. Perhaps the plays of this era are thought to be h
lessly dated, though Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones is staged fairly often, and
still highly controversial All Gods Chillun Got Wings has been revived within recen
memory. Occasionally a period Black musical is dusted off and taken from the shelf
Because of George Gershwin's music, the operatic treatment of DuBose Heywa
play, Porgy, has played nearly continuously somewhere in the world since its recre
tion as Porgy and Bess.

But what of the Black dramatists and their creations for a Black theatre? Larry Ne
a highly respected theorist, writer, and critic from the Black Arts Movement begu
the sixties, surmised: "The Black Arts Movement represents the flowering of a cult
nationalism that has been suppressed since the 1920's. I mean the 'Harlem
Renaissance' - which was essentially a failure. It did not address itself to
mythology and the life styles of the Black community. It failed to take roots, to li
itself concretely to the struggles of that community, to become its voice and spiri

It is true that the achievements of the Black playwrights of the Harlem Renaissa
period are not remembered in the same way as those of the poets and novelists. It i
true that when that period is recalled, no names like Baraka or Bullins spring forth
But did the playwrights fail to express the voice and spirit of the Black community
their time, or did they simply fail to overcome the circumstances affecting their a
Was there something they should have done which they did not do, or have they b
assessed overly harshly? Certainly the problems these playwrights faced in ascertai
ing what a Black drama should do and how it should be done remain relevant to thi
day.

Freda L. Scott teaches in the Speech Department of City Universit of New, York' City College. She recent/l taught
the Black Drama Workshop at Queens College.

1Larry Neal, "The Black Arts Movement," The Drama Review 12 (1968), 39.

426

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427 / HARLEM RENAISSANCE DRAMA

The period just before and just after World War I engulfed the entire United Sta
in wrenching, profound conflict which wrought wrenching, profound chan
Historian Geoffrey Perrett notes:

I discovered a duality I'd never expected. I had assumed the Twenties were the fi
decade of the twentieth century, with the Great War serving as the death agony of the n
teenth. And so they were. What I'd not expected to find were large areas of American
still in the grip of the Victorian /Puritan/Frontier past.
... All across American life there was a deep break in continuity, with the sense
release that liberation brings, along with all the anxiety occasioned by the unknown.2

The country was at the crossroads of being pulled in either a more conservativ
more liberal direction. The eighteenth amendment to the Constitution (1919)
away the right to drink liquor. The nineteenth amendment (1920) gave women
right to vote. The Ku Klux Klan, anti-Black, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, rose to
summit of its national prominence. Al Smith, a Catholic, ran for President. Women
hair and hemlines were suddenly cut very short. There were the Teapot Dome s
dal, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Wobblies, the Scopes Monkey Trial.

In drama, movements begun in Europe finally made significant inroads in

American theatre, naturalism and expressionism among them. The Art Theatre
the Little Theatre movements spread, and broadened possibilities for the commerci
theatre. Playwrights, while moving slowly away from melodrama, became incr
ingly interested in American folkways and culture as sources of material for a
tinctly American drama.

Among the great changes was a dramatic shift of large segments of the populatio
toward urban industrial centers. This migratory trend had a tremendous impac
the Black community. According to James Weldon Johnson, author of Black Manha
tan, a history of Black people in New York City, the severe labor shortage in the in
dustrial North, aggravated by a nearly total suppression of immigration, cau
recruiters from industry to lure Blacks northward and westward by the thous
with a free one-way railroad ticket and the promise of a better life, a life less mar
by oppression and fear. By 1930 the Black population in the North had increased six
percent, as compared with a five percent increase in the South, creating large B
communities in New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland.3

This migration brought with it a people's culture centered in its oral tradition an
most appreciated for its music. It was met with violence. The South reacted violent
against the decimation of its labor pool, forcing Blacks to flee as in the Undergroun
Railroad days. The urban areas to which Blacks moved responded with riots aga
them, the worst of which flared in several cities at once during the Red Summer o
1919. Blacks, however, were beginning to reach new levels of effectiveness in fight
back, leading the New York Times to lament, "The majority of Negroes . . . bef

2Geoffrey Perrett, America in the Twenties (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 10-11.
3 Louis M. Hacker and Benjamin B. Kendrick, The United States Since 1865 (New York: F. S. Crof
Co., 1939), pp. 69-70.

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428 / TI, December 1985

the great war, were well behaved . . most of them admitted the superiority of the
white race and troubles between the two races were unheard of."4

Grover Cleveland Redding led an armed insurrection in Chicago, in which many

Blacks and whites died, and was hanged. Marcus Garvey began building a Black na-
tionalist, back-to-Africa movement, and was eventually imprisoned. The National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People had matured into a dynamic civil
rights organization, fighting through the courts and legislative bodies for the fran-
chise, anti-lynching legislation, and equal protection under the law. The Urban League
was formed to aid Blacks in finding employment and social services in the cities.
Though there had always been pockets of Blacks in urban areas, neighborhoods were
now growing into communities.

The most important of these communities was Harlem, the then new community of
Blacks in New York. There Black humanity flowed in from all corners of the nation
and the world, in contrast with cities like Chicago, where Blacks usually migrated in
blocks from a few southern areas. By the 1920s, the Black literati situated in the capital
of Black America, within the heart of America's cultural capital, made the
breakthrough known as the Harlem Renaissance. The dawn of the New Negro, rising
to break the fetters of his stereotypical image in American society, was bursting.
America turned in wonder toward the poets, men of letters, and novelists, exemplified
by James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee
Cullen, Arna Bontemps, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes. All
of these major figures shared a vital interest in Black drama for the legitimate theatre,
though not all wrote for the stage, and the great impact of Hughes in the area of drama
would not be fully felt in the twenties.

The Stage Negro of the popular theatre reflected the status of the Black person in
America: a native American alien. He was the comic minstrel, a grotesque parody of
himself whether in blackface or out; he was Rastus or Zip Coon or Jim Dandy. He was
the faithful, often pathetic servant, epitomized by Uncle Tom. He was the tragic
mulatto cursed by Black blood as seen in The Octoroon or The Nigger. He was the
bad buck, like Porgy's Crown. He was exotic, sensual, loosely constrained by conven-
tions of morality or society: "One feels that a Negro's expression is not quite free from
the matrix of the earth from which he is extricating himself. His to-be subconscious
self is not yet out of sight. You listen as he speaks and are conscious of a strange cast of
voice. You watch him and are fascinated by his weirder shadow on the wall."5

The minstrel image of the singing, dancing, carefree darky had dominated the stage
for so many years that it had become imbedded in the American consciousness.
Through the years, Bob Cole, Will Marion Cook, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Bert
Williams, and George Walker, among others, had tried to expand the parameters of
the minstrel image with some success, but change was slow in coming. Legitimate
plays in which Black characters appeared usually conformed to stereotyping and
employed white actors to do the roles in make-up. Black stock companies which

4Perrett, p. 88.
5 George Tichenor, "Colored Lines," Theatre Arts Monthly 14 (1930), 490.

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429 / HARLEM RENAISSANCE DRAMA

played to Black audiences adapted commercially successful plays by white

playwrights, sometimes with the actors in whiteface. White theatres either barred
Blacks from the audience or provided segregated balconies. Plays by Black
playwrights were few and far between.

The Renaissance period witnessed a concerted assault on the minstrel and coon
stereotypes, primarily moving toward an appreciation of the folk roots of Black
American culture. One play often noted as a precursor of this period is Rachel, written
by a Black poet, Angelina Grimke, in 1916 and first produced in Washington, D.C.
The title character, a young Black woman who loves children deeply, denies herself
the opportunity for marriage and family, since she feels the future for Black children in
America is too bleak and painful. The stark realism and political nature of the play
startled many.

However, the production of Three Plays for a Negro Theatre by white playwright
Ridgely Torrence in New York at the Old Garden Theatre (formerly Wallack's) in
Madison Square Garden in April, 1917, marked a larger change. The plays, The Rider
of Dreams, Granny Maumee, and Simon the Cyrenian were acted by the Coloured
Players, produced by Mrs. Emily Hapgood, and directed by Robert Edmond Jones,
who designed the sets and costumes as well. In their quest for authentically American
material, several white playwrights began to explore American culture through their
perceptions of Black life, becoming most interested in the rural peasant and urban
underclass. The Black middle class was considered too homogenized, i.e., unin-
teresting.

Granny Maumee concerns an aged woman of royal African blood who lives in the
rural South and hates the whites who made a bonfire of her son for a crime he did not
commit. Granny Maumee was blinded when she tried to reach her son through the
flames. Tragically, one of the white perpetrators of the lynching fathered a child by
one of her granddaughters. At first, Granny Maumee seeks retaliation on father and
child through voodoo, but her Christian precepts overcome her, so she forgives, and
dies. The Rider of Dreams centers on a working rural woman with a daydreaming
husband. The action revolves around her efforts to realize her own dream of owning a
home. Simon the Cyrenian is a pageant-like drama about the Black man who carried
Christ's cross to Calvary. The plays were critically acclaimed for their realism, their
use of Black actors, their avoidance of stereotypes, and the integration of Blacks in the
audience. Critic George Jean Nathan placed two of the cast, Opal Cooper and Inez
Clough, on his list of the ten best actresses of 1917.6 Unfortunately, the show opened
the day before the United States entered World War I and its potential run was
stunted.

In 1918 the Provincetown Players produced O'Neill's The Moon of the Caribees,
which included Black characters, with an all white cast. In 1919, however, Black
actors performed in their production of his The Dreamy Kid. Then came The Emperor
Jones starring Charles Gilpin in 1920. A century later, Gilpin had become the link be-
tween James Hewlett, Ira Aldridge, and those, including the monumental Robeson,

6James Haskins, Black Theater in America (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1982), p. 56.

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430 / TJ, December 1985

who would follow. The Emperor Jones, an expressionistic foray into the mental state
of a Black pullman porter turned outlaw who meets his destiny on a Caribbean island,
was often praised and condemned in the same breath. Loften Mitchell's comment that,
"For all its dramaturgical excellence, The Emperor Jones remains ludicrous,"' may
serve as a summation.

Though The Emperor Jones was found innovative and exciting, many in the Black
community were outraged that Brutus Jones, "a crap shooter and escaped convict,"8
should be permitted onstage. There was fear that the budding interest in the portrayal
of "authentic" Black life in the Art Theatre and on the commercial stage would
blossom into a new flowering of old, undesirable images. An alarm was sounded:

As the Russians guarded their arts as much as they could from Westernization, so will
the Negro have to guard his from one hundred percent Americanization. Particularly must
he be on his guard against the white friends of his art who will urge its development in the
direction of their prejudiced imagination. A very great advantage which Negro art has en-
joyed has been white contempt or indifference towards it, qualities which are rapidly
changing now to interest and to eventual commercial and intellectual exploitation.9

Paul Robeson, in response to criticism of his appearances in O'Neill's Emperor Jones

and All God's Chillun Got Wings, had a different view: "We are too self-conscious,
too afraid of showing all phases of our life - especially those phases which are of
greatest dramatic value." 10 Could Brutus Jones be seen as an artistic creation with
universal meaning, though from a unique ethnic background, or would he become
just another bad buck? Was this simply more exploitation? How should the Black
community respond? As interest grew, so did controversy.

Shuffle Along, a musical written, produced, and performed by Blacks in 1921,

struck a major blow against stereotyping. The book was written by Flournoy Miller
and Aubrey Lyles, a famous comedy team, with music and lyrics by Eubie Blake and
Noble Sissle, who had been foremost among musical performers who refused to ap-
pear in blackface. Blacks played straight romantic love scenes and sang love songs,
which, until that time, was unheard of on Broadway. Some of the tunes, particularly
"I'm Just Wild About Harry," became perennial hits. The success of this show at the
Sixty-third Street Theatre began a vogue in Black musicals. The Theatrical Syndicate
had all but removed Blacks from commercial theatres for several years. Shuffle Along
marked a breakthrough for the Black musical performer, and made musical theatre
history." Interest in Black life and culture, however, was fast becoming a fad, making
Harlem a tourist attraction and playground for whites seeking adventure.

The first major breakthrough for a Black playwright on the Broadway level oc-
curred in 1923, when Willis Richardson's one-act play, The Chip Woman's Fortune,

7Loften Mitchell, Black Drama; the Story of the American Negro in the Theatre (New York:
Hawthorne Books, 1967), p. 75.
8 Roseann Pope Bell, The Crisis and Opportunity Magazines: Reflections of a Black Culture, 1920-1930
(Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1974), p. 167.
9 Raymond O'Neil, "The Negro in Dramatic Art," The Crisis 27 (February 1924), 157.
10 Paul Robeson, "Reflections on O'Neill's Plays," Opportunity 2 (December 1924), 369.
11James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1930), pp. 186-89.

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431 / HARLEM RENAISSANCE DRAMA

was produced with Oscar Wilde's Salome and a treatment of Shakespeare's Comedy
of Errors and performed by the Ethiopian Art Players, originally from Chicago. Two
producers, Raymond O'Neil and Mrs. Sherwood Anderson, brought the group from
Chicago to Harlem's Lafayette Theatre, then to the Frazee Theatre on Forty-second
Street.12 The Chip Woman's Fortune, an urban domestic drama about an impover-
ished elderly Black woman who assists in saving the Black family she boards with
from a minor catastrophe, was the first non-musical play by a Black dramatist to ap-
pear on Broadway. The play met with critical success as a realistic slice of life which
acknowledged some of the problems Blacks faced due to discrimination, but which
sought simply to portray a specific family solving a specific problem among
themselves. Despite this critical success, the Black playwright remained a stranger to
Broadway, unheard from again until 1925.

A prolific writer who was employed in Washington, D.C. as a government clerk,

Richardson was influential in the development of Black drama. The playwriting con-
tests sponsored by the Black periodicals The Crisis and Opportunity afforded him
widespread recognition. He was a favorite of the Krigwa Players and Howard Players
(though it took two years to convince the white president of Howard University to
allow the performance of Richardson's plays on campus). Richardson became a noted
critic and editor, compiling Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, and, with
Mary Miller, Negro History in Thirteen Plays.

In 1924, a one-act version of Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom was published in

American Mercury. But with the production of Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun
Got Wings (which had also been published earlier in American Mercury) at the Prov-
incetown Playhouse, the proverbial fan was hit. A Hearst publication editorial badly
stated:

Gentlemen who are engaged in producing plays should not make it any harder for their
friends to protect them from censorship. ... They should not dramatize dynamite because
while helping the box office, it may blow up the business.
We refer to the play in which a white woman marries a black man and at the end of the
play, after going crazy, stoops and kisses the Negro's hand.
It is hard to imagine a more nauseating and inflammable situation, and in many com-
munities the failure of the audience to scrap the play and mutilate the players would be
regarded as a token of public anemia.13

The theatre at the time was engaged in a battle against institutionalized censorship
in the manner of the Lord Chamberlain's office in England. Some minor changes in the
play were negotiated. All God's Chillun Got Wings opened without overt incident.
James Weldon Johnson commented that

All God's Chillun Got Wings did not prove to be another Emperor Jones. ... It may be
as the play began to grow, Mr. O'Neill became afraid of it. At any rate, he side stepped the
logical question and let his heroine go crazy; thus shifting the question from that of a col-
oured man with a white wife to that of a man living with a crazy woman. The play, as a

12 Lindsay Patterson, ed., Anthology of the American Negro in the Theatre, A Critical Approach (New
York: Publishers Co., 1967), p. 89.
13 Johnson, p. 194.

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432 / TI, December 1985

play, did not please white people, and, on the other hand, it failed to please coloured peo-
ple. ... However, the play ran for several weeks, and Paul Robeson increased his reputa-
tion by the restraint, sincerity and dignity with which he acted a difficult role.14

The next play by a Black playwright which appeared on Broadway did so in 1925
under nearly miraculous circumstances. Garland Anderson, searching for a mode in
which to express his positive thinking beliefs, wrote Appearances, a full-length
melodrama concerning a Black bell-hop who overcomes a false accusation of rape.
Anderson, himself a hotel employee in San Francisco, raised production money
through public readings, promotional devices such as presenting a manuscript to
President Coolidge, and gathering numerous backers. Appearances' first run, at the
Frolic Theatre, was not very successful, but the play was revived a few years later in
New York and made a fairly good impression in London. As Johnson states, "The
play may not be an altogether convincing argument for the theories it advances, but
the author himself is."'" Appearances was Anderson's only play. He later became a
minister.

Producer David Belasco, a vocal supporter of Appearances, saw Blacks as an infu-

sion of lifeblood into pallid American drama: "The theatre of tomorrow must reckon
with a new force, the race of Ham. The Negro from today onward will compel
recognition through the sheer power of his intrinsic mine of talent. No race can sur-
pass the Negro for his instinctive stage ability. He is a natural actor with a sufficient
background of tragedy to make him fertile ground."16 Belasco presented Lulu Belle at
the Belasco Theatre in April, 1926. Written by Edward Sheldon (author of The Nig-
ger) and Charles MacArthur, this melodrama boasted an integrated cast of fifty-eight.
Some of the white actors played Black characters. Lulu Belle was portrayed by Lenore
Ulric, while a major Black actress, Evelyn Preer, played her best friend, Ruby Lee.
Lulu Belle was a jazz-age Harlem vamp who rejected her faithful Black lover for the
glamor of life in Paris as the mistress of a French nobleman. Her jilted lover, after
many misadventures, followed her there, only to be rejected again. In a fit of passion,
the beleagured lover strangled Lulu Belle, despairing over her body as the curtain fell.
Carmen had come to Harlem. The play was an unqualified hit. Though a consensus of
Black critics found Lulu Belle disturbing due to its emphasis on the lurid, sensational
aspects of life in Harlem and its "yellow journalism" type of realism, Opportunity, the
Urban League's journal, stated hopefully that Belasco "makes it easier for the next
step - an all Negro cast in a serious presentation of some other and more significant
slice of Negro life." 17

Debate intensified over this directional problem: the quest for commercial success
versus the quest for a theatre of Black identity. There was the unresolved question as
to whether the goal of commercial success could be reconciled to the purpose of ser-
vice to the Black community. If there was to be a Black drama, how should it be

14 Ibid., pp. 195-96.

15 Ibid., p. 205.
16Frederick Bond, The Negro and the Drama (Washington, D.C.: The Associated Publishers, Inc.,
1940), p. 64.
17Hubert H. Harrison, "The Significance of 'Lulu Belle,' " Opportunity 4 (1926), 228.

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433 / HARLEM RENAISSANCE DRAMA

presented? By whom? For whom? The white playwright was relatively unfettered in
choice of setting, character, subject matter. Would there be the same freedom for the
Black playwright?

The Black playwright was in a bind. Most interested parties seemed to agree that a
body of Black drama must be built, but the Black playwright was faced with having to
choose between pleasing the overwhelmingly white audience of the commercial
theatre or writing for a Black audience, which wished to see its image with less distor-
tion, but could not provide a commensurate material reward.

W. E. B. DuBois, founding editor of The Crisis, the monthly journal of the

N.A.A.C.P., surmised that a Black drama must be built, from scratch, by Blacks for a
Black theatre. DuBois had been calling for a Black theatre for years, and had written
and produced a pageant, The Star of Ethiopia, himself. Through The Crisis, he
founded Krigwa (Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists). Krigwa sponsored a literary
contest which included a playwriting competition and fostered a Little Theatre com-
pany, the Krigwa Players. In a 1926 Crisis article on the Krigwa Players, DuBois in-
cluded a now frequently quoted manifesto:

... The plays of a Negro theatre must be: 1. About us. That is, they must have plots
which reveal Negro life as it is. 2. By us. That is, they must be written by Negro authors
who understand from birth and continued association just what it means to be a Negro
today. 3. For us. That is, the theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences and be sup-
ported and sustained by their entertainment and approval. 4. Near us. The theatre must be
in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people.18

The first Krigwa literary contest took place in 1925. The plays submitted were
judged by Eugene O'Neill, Charles Burroughs, and Lester A. Walton. Willis Richard-
son won first prize ($75.00) for The Broken Banjo. The central character of The
Broken Banjo, a folk drama of the rural South, is a Black man who has become
estranged from his wife and her family, whose sole friend and source of solace is his
banjo, which he plays poorly. The protagonist finds himself forced to fight a white
man who attempts to break his banjo; he accidently kills the white man. The banjo
ends up at his home. While he is out of the house his wife's brother, who knows of the
murder, breaks the banjo and betrays him to the police. His wife, rallying the support
of other family members, vows to do all she can to aid him. The need for family
cooperation and unity is stressed, with the banjo possibly serving as a symbol of a
nearly lost African heritage, a heritage which valued the extended family. As in most
of the folk plays, dialect is used.

The Church Fight, a satire in which Parson Procrastinator defeats the efforts of a
disgruntled committee, led by Sister Instigator and Brother Judas, to remove him from
the church, won second prize ($40.00) for Ruth Ada Gaines-Shelton. Third prize went
to For Unborn Children, a propaganda play against interracial marriage by Myrtle
Athleen Smith. In contrast to All God's Chillun Got Wings, the protagonist, a Black
lawyer, is finally persuaded that an interracial marriage would be a dereliction of duty
to his race, and explains this to his fiancee. Following his realization, he must face a

Is"Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre," The Crisis 32 (1926), 134.

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434 / T1, December 1985

lynch mob which has learned of his romantic relationship.19 All three plays were con-
cerned thematically with issues pertinent to the Black community and two of its major
institutions, the family and the church. For Unborn Children also explored tensions
within the Black middle class.

The contest grew and continued through the end of the decade. Willis Richardson
won so often that he was made a judge. Krigwa literary societies were started in
several areas of the country to encourage Black artists of all types, and the Krigwa
Players gained sister companies in Washington, D.C. and several other cities. Other
frequent contest winners in the drama area included Eulalie Spence and Randolph
Edmonds. DuBois, among the leadership of the intellectual community he called the
Talented Tenth, which he felt should determine the direction of the Black community,
was concerned with establishing political and social perspective for his people through
the role models provided in the new Black drama. Despite his concerns, contestants
were admonished to

Write about things as you know them. .... In the Crisis, at least, you do not have to
confine your writings to the portrayal of beggars, scoundrels and prostitutes; you can write
about ordinary decent colored people if you want. On the other hand do not fear the
Truth. Plumb the depths. If you want to paint Crime and Destitution and Evil paint it. Do
not try to be simply respectable, smug, and conventional. Use propaganda if you want.
Discard it and laugh if you will. But be true, be sincere, be thorough, and do a beautiful
job.20

Mass audiences, Black or white, still tended to choose entertainment over uplift,
and entertainment usually meant clinging to images fixed in the past. Out of concern
for this problem, The Crisis sent questionnaires to major Black and white artists, pro-
ducers, and publishers on their obligations or lack thereof toward the sincere por-
trayal of Blacks. Replies were printed in several issues. Respondents included H. L.
Mencken, DuBose Heyward, Mary W. Ovington, Langston Hughes, Alfred A.
Knopf, Vachel Lindsey, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Jessie Fauset, Countee
Cullen, Julia Peterkin, and others. Even Carl Van Vechten, author of the cheaply sen-
sational Nigger Heaven, which DuBois found "a blow in the face . . . an affront to the
hospitality of black folk and to the intelligence of white," 21 was asked to contribute.
The series was called "The Negro in Art / How Shall He Be Portrayed /A Symposium."
Van Vechten stood at one end of the spectrum: "The question is: Are Negro writers
going to write about this exotic material while it is still fresh or will they continue to
make a free gift of it to white authors who will exploit it until not a drop of vitality re-
mains?" 22 Jessie Fauset, novelist and Crisis staff member stood at the other: ". . . peo-
ple are keenly interested in learning about the better class of colored people. They are
quite willing to be shown." 23 Between stood Hughes: ". . . the true literary artist is go-
ing to write about what he chooses anyway regardless of outside opinions .... It's

19"Krigwa," The Crisis 30 (1925), 275-78.

20"Krigwa, 1926," The Crisis 31 (1926), 115.
21W. E. B. DuBois, "Nigger Heaven," The Crisis 33 (1926), 81.
22 "The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?," The Crisis 31 (1926), 219.
23 "The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?," The Crisis 32 (1926), 72.

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435 / HARLEM RENAISSANCE DRAMA

the way people look at things, not what they look at, that needs to be changed."24 No
consensus was ever reached.

A central issue to the public debate was the question of whether the Black American
has a distinctly separate aesthetic or has become too assimilated into the mainstream
culture to stand aesthetically alone, as exemplified in this commentary on a debate
between Black intellectuals George S. Schuyler and Langston Hughes in Opportunity,
edited by Charles S. Johnson:

The opposing discussions of George S. Schuyler and Langston Hughes in the Nation on
the question of Negro art offer evidences of a sort of mental fermentation which
is ... more significant than the conclusions of either. Mr. Schuyler denies that there is
such a thing as Negro art and regards the "Aframerican" and "merely a lamp-blacked
Anglo-Saxon." Mr. Hughes contends that there is a Negro art and laments that Negro art
expressions are being choked by ... "the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold
of American standardization ..."
... neither does Mr. Schuyler mean that there is no beauty in Negro life, nor Mr.
Hughes that Negroes are . . . creatures with amusing peculiarities ...
We must expect a deal of misunderstanding here. The question is still open as to whether
or not there is or can be such a thing as distinctive Negro art. . . . if there could be, it
would not remain distinctive for long. It is more important now that we develop artists and
let the question of a distinctive art settle itself ... .25

Opportunity's literary contests had also begun in 1925. The play judges included
Montgomery Gregory, a professor at Howard University and founding director of the
Howard Players, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, and Edith Isaacs. The first
winning play was Frances by J. D. Lipscomb. Frances told the story of a young
woman in rural Mississippi who was promised to a white landowner as a concubine
by her uncle, in return for ownership of a plot of land. A series of events leads the
uncle to learn that he cannot pursue his dreams at the price of integrity. Frances is
saved, but the uncle and the landowner (who never legalized the deed to the land), kill
each other. Several significant social and political aspects of the Black struggle are
combined with an exciting story, a story told in a way the commercial stage would not
accept.

Humble Instrument by Warren A. MacDonald and Color Struck by Zora Neale

Hurston tied for second place; The Bog Guide by May Miller took third. Willis
Richardson, Eloise Bibb Thompson, and Zora Neale Hurston (for Spears) received
honorable mentions.26 As in the Crisis contest, the plays were of Black authorship and
short enough to be published in the journals. Subsequent judges included Ridgely
Torrence, Paul Green, and Lula Vollmer, and Eulalie Spence was among later win-
ners. The Opportunity contests also appear to have ceased when the Depression
ensued.

A look at the aesthetic debates and the literary contests may pinpoint the failure of
which Larry Neal spoke. A successful movement must have a clear-cut direction,

24"The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?," The Crisis 31 (1926), 278.
25 "American Negro Art," Editorial, Opportunity 4 (1926), 238-39.
26,"Opportunity Contest Number One," Opportunity 3 (1925), 142-43.

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436 / TI, December 1985

while allowing plenty of space for diversity and variety. Artistically, the Harlem
Renaissance opened the door for diversity and variety, but was unclear in direction.
The two major forces, the integrationist (mainstream recognition and success as the
primary goal) and the cultural nationalist (theatre of Black identity primarily by, for,
and about Blacks), could not reconcile themselves. In addition, the cultural leadership
chose not to fully establish its own criteria for the evaluation of Black art, measuring it
instead by the standards of Euro-American models. The Crisis, for example, published
a manifesto for Black theatre by, for, and about Blacks, yet impaneled white judges
for the contests. On some of the panels of both the Crisis and Opportunity contests,
white judges outnumbered Black.

Part of the reluctance of the Black leadership to take aesthetic matters fully into its
own hands lies in a long standing, still unresolved problem of duality. It is the duality
of which DuBois spoke in The Souls of Black Folk which describes the identity prob-
lem faced when the Black person must see himself both as he knows himself and as the
predominant white society sees him. The two disparate images cause pain, confusion,
and self-doubt. Survival often depended upon the agonizing choice of which image to
select for which occasion. The choice of response to a given situation could be a mat-
ter of life and death.

Another aspect of the problem was financial /institutional. White patronage sup-
ported individual Black artists financially; white controlled outlets, such as publishing
firms, were the means of broad-based exposure. White artists like Van Vechten in-
fluenced such organizations to promote Black works. The general economic/
political / social situation upon which artistic autonomy could be based was missing.

Meanwhile there was still a far distance between the perceptions of the Black and
white critical establishments, a distance which would contribute to the problems faced
by Black playwrights interested in entering the commercial theatre arena. In
Abraham's Bosom is a case in point.

Near the end of 1926, Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom, "the biography of a
Negro" in seven scenes, opened at the Provincetown Playhouse. Green, one of the
Carolina Playmakers, a circle of scholars and playwrights interested in folk material,
often wrote plays about Blacks. This one starred Jules Bledsoe, Rose McClendon, and
Abbie Mitchell. The headline of Brooks Atkinson's review read, "The range runs all
the way from the boistrous and infectious gaiety of the race to the religious ecstasy
and the madness of the hunted and baffled creature of mixed blood who is the central
tragic figure." 27

That creature is Abraham McCranie, who dreams of becoming a leader and

educator of his people, but who, driven to destitution, despair, and insanity, kills his
white half-brother. There are echoes of The Emperor Jones in the use of ghost tableux
and a terrified run through the forest by a Black man being punished for getting
beyond himself. Atkinson stated in a later article that the crux of the tragedy lies in a

27J. Brooks Atkinson, "In Abraham's Bosom," New York Times 31 December 1926, Sec. D, p. 10,
col. 2.

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 437 / HARLEM RENAISSANCE DRAMA

line spoken by one of Abraham's co-workers in Carolina turpentine country: "Give a

nigger a book and you might as well shoot him." 28The play moved to the Garrick
Theatre and won the Pulitzer Prize.

Many Black critics praised In Abraham's Bosom, feeling that the treatment of the
subject matter, the tragic mulatto, was sympathetic. DuBois differed. Though he felt
that Green was sympathetic, DuBois thought the drama ". .. ill balanced . . . the
same defeatist genre of Negro art which is so common and at present inescapable. It
arises from the fact that the more honestly and sincerely a white artist looks at the
situation of the Negro in America the less he is able to consider it in any way bearable
and therefore his stories and plays must end in lynching, suicide or degeneracy." 29

The white critical establishment considered Green to be the most qualified

playwright to write about Black life. Barrett Clark, in an article for Theatre Arts
Monthly, stated that Green's writings in Black dialect "are a more genuine contribu-
tion to American poetry than the highly finished work of many of our distinguished
Negro writers. . . . He will soon perceive that it is the artist's function to paint, to
state, to exhibit and not to argue, to prove, or philosophize." 30 Paul Green is quoted
in the same article as stating, "The American professional stage . . . is an industry and
not an art as I had thought . . . it is a business run to the pattern of supply and de-
mand." 31 Too far a departure from the acceptable fantasies about Blacks would be bad
for business. Any playwright who would seek commercial acceptance would be
obligated to bear this in mind, with potentially more painful possible consequences for
the Black playwright.

The Theatre Guild produced Porgy by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward in 1927, the
same year that the musical Showboat opened on Broadway. Also that year, the
Krigwa Players performed Fool's Errand by Eulalie Spence in the Fifth Annual Interna-
tional Little Theatre Tournament, another first for Blacks on Broadway, since the
finalists competed in a Broadway theatre. Fool's Errand is a comedy about gossipy
church sisters, who, suspecting that the daughter of one of their number is ap-
proaching unwed motherhood, try to arrange a marriage. The Krigwa Players won
one of four $200.00 prizes and the play was published by Samuel French.32

The next play by a Black playwright to reach Broadway was Meek Mose by Frank
Wilson, who had been a member of the original cast of In Abraham's Bosom. Meek
Mose opened at the Princess Theatre in 1928, but did not run. The plot concerns two
factions of a Black community, one non-militant, the other militant, who disagree on
trusting whites in a land development scheme. The non-militants, led by the gentle
Mose, move from their land to the seemingly worthless tract given them by the whites
in trade, but oil is discovered there, so all ends happily. Meek Mose was not strong
enough to draw support from Blacks or whites.

28J. Brooks Atkinson, "By J. Brooks Atkinson," New York Times 20 February 1927, Sec. VII, p. 1,
col. 1.

29W. E. B. DuBois, "In Abraham's Bosom," The Crisis 34 (1927), 12.

30 Barrett Clark, "Paul Green," Theatre Arts Monthly 12 (1928), 732, 736.
31Ibid., p. 735.
32"Dramatis Personae," The Crisis 34 (1927), 128.

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438 / TI, December 1985

An interesting development of 1929 was the melodrama Harlem, a collaboration

between white author W. S. Rapp and Black author Wallace Thurman. This play was
a success, and though it showed quite a bit of the sordid, seamy side of Harlem, it was
admired on all sides for the vitality and realism of its characters. The central
characters are the members of the Wilson family who have migrated to Harlem from
the South, and who, despite the valiant efforts of the mother, succumb to the vices of
the Harlem underworld. Several Black critics did object to Thurman's participation in
the exploitation of the erotic/exotic stereotype; Thurman retaliated that he had the
right, as an artist, to expose the problems of his race. The dilemma continued. It is
also interesting to note that Thurman, try as he might, was never permitted tickets in
the white section of the theatre in which his play was being performed.33

Black audiences were highly receptive to The Green Pastures by Marc Connelly and
Roark Bradford. At least the more spiritual side of Black life was being exploited. This
Biblical folk fantasy of De Lawd and his people, peppered with the magnificent sing-
ing of the Hall Johnson choir, was a huge commercial success. It opened at the
Mansfield Theatre and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1930.34

The Depression marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. The finan-
cial house of cards which had supported the cultural revolution of which the art of the
Harlem Renaissance was a part, collapsed. Survival would take precedence over all.
The next progressive era for theatre would arrive with the W.P.A. During the
Renaissance period five Black playwrights reached Broadway: Willis Richardson,
Garland Anderson, Eulalie Spence, Frank Wilson, and Wallace Thurman. The only
commercial success was Thurman and Rapp's Harlem. Though the Black playwright
did not make much headway in the commercial theatre, a beachhead was established.
Meanwhile, several white playwrights gained commercial success through their inter-
pretations of the Black experience. There were many more plays by white playwrights
produced than were mentioned here, ranging in quality from turgid to critically suc-
cessful. Employment for the Black actor on the legitimate stage become more viable.

Black communities throughout the country, in the same spirit as the Yiddish
theatre, the Abbey Theatre and the Moscow Art Theatre, set to work building
amateur and Little Theatre companies where Black playwrights, in increasing
numbers, could develop their crafts and a body of Black drama. The commercial stage
and white audience, though newly fascinated with the depiction of the "real" Black ex-
perience on stage, showed minimal interest in depictions presented by Black
playwrights. It does not appear to have occurred to companies which professed an in-
terest in not-necessarily-commercial drama, such as the Provincetown Players and the
Theatre Guild, to look to or encourage the development of Black playwrights to
depict Black themes.

In some quarters, the possibility that there could be such a thing as Black drama, or
that Black subjects could carry the universal themes of great drama, was dismissed

33Doris E. Abramson, Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925-1959 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1969), p. 42.
3 Johnson, pp. 219-24.

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439 / HARLEM RENAISSANCE DRAMA

altogether. Those who felt that there was such a thing as Black drama disagreed as to
whether Black drama meant any play, no matter by whom or for whom, which
essayed subject matter particular to Black people or was written to be played by a
predominantly Black cast, or whether Black drama meant plays exclusively by, for,
and about Black people. Then there was the question of what should be shown on the
stage. Some felt that the Black artist must concentrate on constructive role models and
instructive propaganda in order to offset the damage done by centuries of stereo-
typing. Others advocated the privilege of the artist to show the warts as well as the
beauty, to tell whatever truth might be found, despite the possibility that the sur-
rounding society, which would welcome any excuse to rationalize its prejudices,
might willfully distort the images created.

Though the Black playwright faced difficult circumstances, the resurgence of the
Black performer, the slowly progressive movement of the popular theatre away from
melodrama and minstrelry, and the interest of white playwrights in breaking new
ground in the American theatre marked the beginnings of change. Social conditions in
America were being altered, little by little, as the tempo of the civil rights movement
quickened. The increased exposure of Black artists in other fields, and the develop-
ment of arenas in which Black playwrights could gain experience, exposure, and an
opportunity to catch up with the novelist and poet in artistic skill, combined to pro-
vide, if not a Renaissance for the Black playwright, a period which precipitated some
major gains for Black drama in the 1930s.

The Black playwrights and Black theatre may not have succeeded in leaving behind
a superstructure, but they did, with the encouragement of organizations such as
Krigwa, begin foundations for future generations of Black playwrights to build upon.
They did so amid confusion, in a nation fraught with duality: the duality of a society
being pulled simultaneously, violently, toward far left and far right; the duality of the
unreconciled images of Blacks as seen by Blacks versus the view of the dominant
culture; the duality of a system which values individuality, yet discriminates against
the individual according to group identity; the duality of a theatre in which art and
commercialism are strange bedfellows. There was confusion, but there were also
goals: "We want colored folks to add the new diversion of the drama to their
lives. ... It will stimulate and broaden cramped lives; it will bring inspiration, ambi-
tion, satisfaction." 3 The Black playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance period did not
fail to create, to begin a process of development which has not stopped. Their plays
record the lives, problems, and aspirations of a people.36

35 Mark Seyboldt, "Play-Writing," The Crisis 29 (1925), 164.

36Two helpful anthologies include Plays of Negro Life edited by Alain Locke and Montgomery
Gregory (New York: rpt. J. and J. Harper, 1969), which contains plays by both Black and white
playwrights, and Black Theater U.S.A.: Forty-five Plays by Black Americans, 1847-1974, edited by
James V. Hatch and Ted Shine (New York: Macmillan, 1974).

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