African Americans in the American Theatre

During much of the colonial era, African Americans' lack of social position and the concomitant prejudices denied them any place in the earliest American theatre. Similarly, because virtually all dramatic entertainment during these years was of English origin, they were rarely presented as characters in plays seen in the colonies. The most notable exception was, of course, Othello, who was always performed by a white actor. Later Thomas Southern's Oroonoko, reputedly based on the real story of an African prince sold into slavery during the time of Charles II, was briefly popular. In 1769 the John Street Theatre saw the American premiere of Isaac Bickerstaffe and Charles Dibdin's comic opera The Padlock, which had first been presented the year before at Drury Lane and which introduced the comically drunk, profane character of Mungo, who nonetheless suggested the plight and bitterness of his race as he lamented, “Me wish to de Lord me was dead!” This duality of the illiterate, shiftless yet sometimes shifty buffoon and of the shamefully downtrodden appeared frequently in characterizations of blacks for the next hundred or more years, although it was the comic stereotype that prevailed. Lewis Hallam Jr. was the first American Mungo. The popularity of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe led to numerous stage versions, such as Robinson Crusoe and Harlequin Friday (1786) and The Bold Buccaneers; or, The Discovery of Robinson Crusoe (1817), which offered a similarly clowning Friday. However, minor black characters did begin to appear in American plays at this time. The figure of Ralpho in The Candidates, a play written before 1770 but possibly never mounted, could well be the first African American depicted in American drama. Inevitably, as the free black community grew in the North, some took to the stage. In the 1820s an actor named James Hewlett apparently headed a small company in New York that performed such works as Richard III and Othello. The first black actor of distinction, Ira Aldridge, served behind the scenes with some white companies and acted with black troupes, but, unable to find work commensurate with his abilities, spent most of his career in Europe. As a rule only white men played black characters. Actresses, out of prejudice or vanity, long demurred, and even Edwin Forrest, failing to convince any leading lady to play in blackface opposite him in The Tailor in Distress (1823), drafted an African‐American washerwoman for the role. The stereotyped Negro was given widespread popularity by T. D. Rice in the 1830s. His great song‐and‐dance turn, “Jim Crow,” besides reinforcing the standard stage picture of the African American, presaged the imminent rise of the minstrel show and was a harbinger of the importance of blacks and black music to the American lyric stage. So was the dancing of William Henry Lane, who performed as Master Juba, and who helped evolve the Irish jig into contemporary black stepping.

Within a few years of the rise of minstrelsy and the growing abolition sentiment in the North, a number of protest dramas were spawned. By far the most famous and effective was the dramatization of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which from 1852 on was for many years the most successful contemporary American play. Although in retrospect its characterizations betray much of the condescension toward blacks long patent, it was a cogent argument for freedom, if not real equality, for slaves. Another extremely popular work of the time, Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, took an equivocal stance, depicting slavery and the Southern viewpoint with some approbation, but decrying the plight of an innocent half‐breed. In the very late 1870s and in the 1880s, Edward Harrigan's portraits of African Americans were among the best known and most interesting on the American stage. Although all of Harrigan's figures verged on caricatures—and these included his Germans, Italians, Jews, and fellow Irishmen—they were all drawn with a compassion and depth of understanding unique for the day. Thus, one of his most famous figures was Mrs. Welcome Allup, or Rebecca Allup, a sassy but wise maid, who was always played in blackface by Harrigan's great partner, Tony Hart. Indeed, Harrigan created a whole society of memorable Negro figures. As Harrigan's career was closing, African Americans began to develop a theatre of their own, largely musical. After the Civil War they organized their own minstrel troupes and later turned to writing black musicals, patterned after contemporary white musicals and originally offered only in theatres catering to black audiences. When ragtime entered our musical mainstream, these black songs began to be heard by highly receptive white audiences, and before long shows, both written and performed by blacks, were mounted in regular theatres. The first of these was an afterpiece called The Origin of the Cake Walk (1898), more popularly known by its subtitle, Clorindy. However, the most popular black musical comedies were those starring Bert Williams and his partner George Walker. They included In Dahomey (1903), Abyssinia (1906), and Bandanna Land (1908). The Johnson brothers, Will Marion Cook, and Paul Dunbar were among the leading writers. In 1910 Williams joined the Ziegfeld Follies, becoming the first African‐American entertainer to receive equal billing with whites in a Broadway show. The vogue for these “Negro” musicals quickly passed, and not until the 1920s did black artists truly begin to make a mark on Broadway. Eugene O'Neill had employed black characters in some of his early one‐act plays, but his Emperor Jones (1920), with Charles Gilpin playing the memorable title role, created the first important African‐American figure in original American dramatic literature. He later wrote an interesting study of an interracial marriage, All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924). Other important black plays of the era, all written by whites, included In Abraham's Bosom (1926) and Porgy (1927). Whatever their authorship, these plays allowed theatregoers to see the finest African‐American actors of the day (Charles Gilpin, Paul Robeson, Rose McClendon) in significant roles. But logical casting of black roles was not yet prevalent. Many such characters in contemporary plays were performed by whites in blackface, one of the most notable being Lenore Ulric, who assumed the title part of the black prostitute in Lulu Belle (1926).

The 1920s also saw a revival of interest in black musicals, sparked by the runaway success of Shuffle Along (1921), whose songs were written by the African‐American team of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. But these musicals still trafficked in stereotypes that had been a theatrical stock‐in‐trade for two centuries and in plots very like those employed in the Williams and Walker shows. Many, like the Blackbirds series, were plotless revues. A few musicals written by whites, such as Deep River (1926), Show Boat (1927), and Great Day (1929), attempted to look at the black predicament with fresh eyes, though even Show Boat used a white actress to portray one of its leading black figures. But the lyric for that musical's “Ol' Man River” expressed sentiments not unlike those of Mungo's 160 years before. The 1930s saw a number of prominent African Americans play roles on Broadway, but usually in all‐black productions or in specialty numbers. Ethel Waters was a major song‐and‐dance figure, but she starred mainly in revues with white casts where her numbers could be separated from the rest of the show. Only in Cabin in the Sky (1940) did she have a role in a plotted musical, this time with an all‐black cast. Twice in her later career—in Mamba's Daughters (1939) and in The Member of the Wedding (1950)—she gave memorable performances in dramas. Bill Robinson was the most famous African‐American song‐and‐dance man of the period, but he was relegated to the all‐black Blackbirds revues, and later to a Gilbert and Sullivan parody, The Hot Mikado (1939).

Many of the period's experimental operas and musicals made use of all‐black casts. The Virgil Thomson–Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), in a controversial production, featured a cellophane set and a cast of African‐American singers recruited from New York black churches. Porgy and Bess (1935), George Gershwin's lyric and compassionate “folk opera” based upon Porgy, attracted only small audiences at first on Broadway and was only really recognized as the classic it is in its 1942 revival and in subsequent Broadway productions in the 1950s and 1970s. Later musicals, also written by whites, such as Carmen Jones, which Oscar Hammerstein II derived from Bizet's Carmen, attempted new perspectives. The period also saw the production of a large number of protest plays, many concerned with the conditions of African Americans; the Federal Theater Project and its offshoots were especially active. Many of these plays were too strident for most playgoers' tastes. Stevedore (1934) told of a black longshoreman framed for a crime he didn't commit. John Wesley's They Shall Not Die (1934), produced by the Theatre Guild, depicted the Scottsboro Trial about some Alabama black youths accused of rape. The African‐American poet Langston Hughes wrote a dozen plays of various types and lengths during the decade. Mulatto (1935), describing the plight of half‐castes, with Rose McClendon as the black mistress of a white plantation owner, had a long run, while Do You Want to Be Free? (1938) ran on weekends for many weeks at the Harlem Suitcase Theater. By far the most successful black‐acted, albeit white‐written, play of the era was The Green Pastures (1930). Away from Broadway, in Harlem, the Lafayette Theatre featured black casts in black‐related plays. The Federal Theater sponsored a Negro Theatre group that produced a version of Macbeth set in Haiti, with a mixed white and black cast. From this base producers John Houseman and Orson Welles later presented the most distinguished black drama of the period, Native Son (1941), Richard Wright's adaptation of his novel. The outstanding African‐American actor of the time, Paul Robeson, was outside America during much of the 1930s but returned as Othello (1943) with José Ferrer and Uta Hagen.

World War II helped create greater interest in the problems of black America. The dramas continued to be written largely by whites and tended to be protest plays, albeit with more balance and less radical rhetoric. One such play, Deep Are the Roots (1945), enjoyed a long run. One popular attraction, Anna Lucasta (1944), was written by a white about white people but it was cast with black actors when no producer would mount it with a white cast. During this decade several producers attempted to cast blacks in roles that did not specifically call for them, such as one of the policemen in Detective Story (1948). Broadway musicals, such as Finian's Rainbow (1947) and South Pacific (1949), dealt with racial prejudice. Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars (1949) adapted Alan Paton's novel Cry, the Beloved Country, about (Patron wrote more than one novel) South African blacks. Much more significant, however, were the efforts of white songwriter Harold Arlen, who wrote several musicals featuring black casts and calling in the talents of major African‐American performers: Pearl Bailey, Juanita Hall, Lena Horne, and Diahann Carroll. Starting with two specialty numbers for Dooley Wilson in Bloomer Girl (1944), Arlen created shows about black life with appropriate jazz‐derived music. St. Louis Woman (1946) deals with a high‐stepping black society in St. Louis around a racetrack in 1898, while House of Flowers (1954), with a book by Truman Capote, describes a trade war between two brothels on a West Indian isle and had one of Arlen's most exquisite scores. Later musicals included a 1964 adaptation of Clifford Odets's famous Golden Boy, with Sammy Davis Jr. as the prizefighter, and Purlie (1970), which Ossie Davis adapted from his comedy Purlie Victorious (1961), about a preacher's encounter with Southern prejudice. African‐American entertainers now had the chance to star in interracial casts, such as Leslie Uggams in Hallelujah, Baby! (1967) and Diahann Carroll as a black model in an interracial romance in No Strings (1962). The emergence of African‐American playwrights on Broadway gathered momentum in the 1950s with such plays as Louis Peterson's Take a Giant Step (1953), a failure, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), a success. Other notable plays included Martin Duberman's In White America (1963) and James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie (1964). During this time black performers not only occasionally played roles that were not specifically “Negro” in character, but even some that were specifically white. An example of the former was Diana Sands in The Owl and the Pussycat (1964); the most heralded example of the latter was Canada Lee as de Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi (1946), a role he played in white makeup. Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival gave African Americans a chance to play other classic roles, notably James Earl Jones as King Lear. Jones also played Othello (1982) on Broadway opposite Christopher Plummer but gave his most powerful performance in The Great White Hope (1968), in which he portrayed the black boxing champion Jack Jefferson.

The civil‐rights revolution of the 1960s gave great impetus to an increased black presence on every level of the theatre, particularly Off Broadway. There was a whole new wave of protest plays, this time all written by blacks, including those like Leroi Jones's (later Imamu Amiri Baraka) The Slave (1965) and The Toilet (1965) and Ed Bullins's The Taking of Miss Jamie, which included direct physical assaults on whites onstage. Jones's The Dutchman (1964), about a white woman seducing and then killing a middle‐class black on a subway, was his most effective play and captured the complexity of the race problem in America perhaps better than any other work of the period. Another important development was the foundation of the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), sponsoring plays written by blacks and played by black casts. During its existence the NEC had many noteworthy new works, some of which transferred to Broadway.

In the last half of the 1980s, August Wilson emerged as an important new dramatist. While too many African‐American playwrights made a big splash with a powerful work and were rarely heard from again, Wilson has managed for two decades to present a series of critically acclaimed plays, which often found success on Broadway. In the last decades of the 20th century, African Americans onstage have been most visible in musicals. While most Broadway shows feature African Americans in the cast, there have been many successful musicals that were predominantly black, such as The Wiz (1975), Dreamgirls (1981), Ain't Misbehavin' (1978), Eubie! (1978), Sophisticated Ladies (1981), Black and Blue (1989), Five Guys Named Moe (1992), Jelly's Last Jam (1992), Bring on da Noise, Bring on da Funk (1996), and The Lion King (1997). By the millennium African Americans were noticeably visible in all aspects of American theatre, whereas in the past they were primarily performers only. George C. Wolfe runs the Public Theatre and other nonprofit theatres across the country, which have African Americans in management, directing, and designing. And while theatre companies with a racial agenda still exist, almost every theatre in America is sometimes a vehicle for African‐American artists of all kinds.