Reopening a Chapter on Race

‘In Dahomey” is arguably the first full-length Broadway musical written and performed entirely by African Americans. It traveled to London, where the cast performed its famous Cake Walk for the royal family and where the show ran seven months. Evolved from the minstrel shows of the 19th century, the 1903 musical was a showcase for the popular vaudeville team of Bert Williams and George Walker. Yet amid all its singing and dancing and cracking wise, the show skated around the edges of some serious issues.

With lyrics by Paul Laurence Dunbar and book by Jesse A. Shipp, the show opens on Dr. Straight, a con man hawking hair straightener and skin whitener to a Boston street crowd. Straight is part of the Get-the-Coin Syndicate, which plans to colonize Dahomey, West Africa, promising American blacks a new and perhaps better place to live. Amid the utopian visions of Dahomey, where “Evah Darkey Is a King,” as one song put it, the show had a strong sense of realpolitik and of the moral complexities to be mined in even overtly comic situations.

Not everyone is duped by the syndicate’s promise. One such skeptical character says: “Suppose the natives . . . look upon you as intruders and . . . make war on you.” “If it comes to that,” answers a colonization proponent, “we’ll arrange with dem gentlemen like Uncle Sam did with the Indians.” “How is that?” asks the uncomprehending skeptic. “Kick the stuffin’ out of dem and put them on a reservation,” comes the answer.

“In Dahomey” is one of 51 fascinating plays by black Americans in “Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans, 1847-Today,” the most instructive and smartly compiled such collection extant (Free Press: $60, cloth; $20 for each of two volumes, paperback; 916 pages). Originally published in 1971, the book has just been updated and reissued with the addition of “In Dahomey” as well as many other works.

“Black Theatre” can be read as a collection of plays, but it is also a compelling cultural history, providing a timeline of how black Americans have depicted themselves and their white countrymen from the days of slavery, through the civil rights movement, up until the 1991 riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. And, as with “In Dahomey,” the book dares to include works that could have been relegated to history’s slush pile--which would have been a great loss.

Many well-known writers and many important plays are here. The volume includes kitchen-sink realism (Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun”), stories of the church (James Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner”), tragedies (Langston Hughes’ “Mulatto”), comic vaudevillian pieces (George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum”), astringent satire (Douglas Ward’s “Day of Absence”), poetic tapestries (Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf”), war stories (Charles Fuller’s “A Soldier’s Play”), journalistically revelatory plays (Anna Deavere Smith’s “Fires in the Mirror”), angry plays (Amiri Baraka’s “Dutchman”) and biblical plays (Zora Neale Hurston’s “The First One”). But co-editors Ted Shine and James V. Hatch have done their most creative scholarship in presenting the lesser-known chroniclers from the seldom represented early days of African American drama.

In a way, it’s the inclusion of the little-known (Ira Aldridge’s “The Black Doctor”), the seemingly inconsequential (“In Dahomey” ) and the less-than-brilliant (Victor Sejour’s “The Brown Overcoat”) that make this book such valuable reading. As Margaret B. Wilkerson writes in one of the book’s two forwards, pre-Depression black playwrights had “little hope or likelihood of having their work presented in the professional theatre or on Broadway. . . . These playwrights retained control of their work and were not subject to the political agenda and cultural ignorance of moneyed interests.”

Wilkerson displays some disingenuous logic--equating poverty and commercial failure with purity, or what she calls “authentic voices.” But whether or not we want to accept that a play is authentic in direct proportion to its obscurity, the editors did us the service of including some very valuable second- or third-rank work, plays that despite technical shortcomings are quite eloquent in revealing the strivings and dreams of their time.

The three plays in the book’s first section, “Those Who Left and Those Who Stayed,” make an especially instructive mix. The first play is by Aldridge, a classical actor born in New York who chose to make his home in England, a society more hospitable to his talents and his race, though still a far from perfect place. In “The Black Doctor,” his creaky historical melodrama from 1847, the secondary comic characters are better drawn than the serious ones, who carry a heavy freight.

Aldridge clearly invests too much nobility in his title character, Fabian, a gifted mulatto physician serving European society. Fabian has repeatedly saved the life of a sickly white lady named Pauline he secretly adores, and yet is cruelly spurned by her family. He enters, hyperventilating: “I, a mulatto, and late a slave, dare to love the daughter of a white man--the daughter of him who was my master! It is madness--madness!”

The rest of play includes suicide attempts by virtually every character who is thwarted in love, the storming of the Bastille, and a murderous mob descending upon Pauline when it is found she has been with a black man. Fabian ends up taking a bullet meant for Pauline and simultaneously producing a document that will save her from any further harm. Aldridge’s idealization of Fabian’s faultless character is on the surface no different from any hand-wringing melodrama of the day, except that it uses the melodrama as an argument for race equality.

Given that Aldridge occupied a position uniquely apart from the hardships of American blacks, his at-best serviceable melodrama can be seen as the moving cri de coeur it was. Further, his more lighthearted and better-written secondary characters hint at the plays he might have written had he not carried quite so keen a social burden.

The second playwright in this section, Victor Sejour, left his home in New Orleans for Paris at age 17 and never came back. He wrote and acted for the Parisian theater. His play “The Brown Overcoat” is a drawing room comedy that has no black characters in it at all. It depicts the bickering breakup between a shallow baron and his irritating mistress, who argue incessantly over whether his overcoat is brown or maroon. How astonishing to compare this trivia to another play written the same year--1858--by a black man who had no European escape route. Born into slavery, William Wells Brown later became an abolitionist and one of the most prominent writers (poet, novelist and historian) of his day.

“The Escape; Or, a Leap for Freedom” depicts one slave, Cato, who embodies what we might assume was a racist plantation stereotype: the cowardly, shuffling, incompetent slave. Contrasted with Cato is the noble Glen, a slave in love with the equally noble Melinda. They are owned by Mississippi whites who like to think of themselves as pious. Wells shrewdly depicts the slave owners discussing God’s works while threatening to whip an insubordinate slave.

Naturally, the plays in the book’s second half are better known. The reason was bluntly stated by co-editor Ted Shine in the book’s original introduction, unfortunately not included here. “Black playwrights were slow to emerge in our society because of slavery and racial injustice,” he wrote. At the time, Shine was obviously still smarting from the recent publication of “Fifty Best Plays of the American Theater” (complied by John Gassner and Clive Barnes), a book still prominent on library shelves and in classrooms. The book, noted Shine, contains not a single play by a black writer, not even “A Raisin in the Sun,” a 1959 Broadway hit that starred Sidney Poitier and won Hansberry the New York Drama Critics Award.

Some of the introductions to the individual plays contain, it seems, less-than-rigorous scholarship. “In Dahomey” is said to have run for four years, and there is no explanation why that figure differs from the one found in most references: 53 performances at the New York Theatre, seven months in London. One play, Angelina Grimke’s “Rachel,” is said to have been rescued from obscurity when a 1990 production at Spelman College, directed by Tisch Jones, proved that the “play still spoke to audiences today.” The intro is signed “Tisch Jones.”

And, if the absence of certain plays, like Charles Gordone’s “No Place to Be Somebody,” seems odd, the unexplained exclusion of August Wilson is bizarre. In an interview, editor James Hatch said that he did try to secure a play by Wilson, “obviously the major black playwright at the moment,” but that the asking price was too high. Still, Wilson’s name is not even mentioned in Amiri Baraka’s preachy foreword to the modern period, a disservice to readers and one that reveals questionable judgment on the parts of both Baraka and the editors, who did not insist that Wilson be mentioned.

These constitute quibbles, though, measured against the full force of these collected plays. The book is of course free of what the editors called (in the first edition) non-primary sources--famous plays about blacks written by whites, like “Porgy and Bess,” by DuBose Heyward and the Gershwins, George Aiken’s stage adaptation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and Marc Connelly’s Old Testament pageant “Green Pastures,” which the book’s editor Ted Shine has called “a plagiarism and a fake.”

“Black Theatre USA,” by contrast, is unequivocally a primary source, the real thing.