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13 - Black theatre in the age of Obama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

By
Harry J. Elam Jr.
Edited by
Harvey Young
Harvey Young
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois
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Summary

10 years after writing the essay “equation for black people on stage” I’m standing at the same crossroads asking the same questions. No sweat. Sometimes you can walk a hundred miles and end up in the same spot. The world ain’t round for nothing right? What is a black play? The definition is housed in the reality of two things that occurred recently and almost simultaneously: 26 August 05, playwright scholar poet king August Wilson announces he is dying of cancer, and hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. It feels like judgment day. What I’m talking about today is the same and different. I was tidy then. And now Im tidier. Tidier today like a tidal wave.

  1. What is a black play?

  2. A black play is angry.

  3. A black play is fierce.

  4. A black play is double voiced but rarely confused.

  5. A black play got style.

  6. A black play is of the people by the people and for the people.

  7. A black play is smooth but not slick, heavy but not thick, can’t be tamed, often does not comb its hair, wipes its mouth with the back of its black hand or with a linen napkin whichever is more readily available.

  8. A black play is late.

  9. A black play is RIGHT ON and RIGHT ON TIME.

  10. A black play is deep.

  11. A black play is armed / to the teeth.

  12. A black play bows to god then rows the boat ashore.

  13. A black play makes do if it got to / fights / screams / sings / dreams / WORKS IT / talks in code and tells it like it is ALL UP IN YA FACE.

  14. A black play gives you five.

  15. A black play is robust and alive.

  16. A black play is in the house and looking good, too.

  17. A black play is bad motherfucker.

  18. A black play does not exist.

  19. Every play is a black play.

  20. SAY WHAT?

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre , pp. 255 - 278
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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References

Parks, Suzan-Lori, “New black math,” Theatre Journal, 57.4 (December, 2005): 576–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B., “Krigwa Player Little Negro Theatre,” The Crisis, 32 (July, 1926): 135Google Scholar
Campbell, Mary Schmidt, “African American Art in a Post-Black Era,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 17.3 (November, 2007): 317–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Golden, Thelma, “Post-Black,” in the exhibition catalog to the “Freestyle” exhibition, Studio Museum of Harlem (2001), 1
Parks, Suzan-Lori, “An Equation for Black People Onstage,” in The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 20Google Scholar
Jones, LeRoi [Amiri Baraka], “The Revolutionary Theatre,” in Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966)Google Scholar
Wilson, August, “The Ground on which I Stand,” Callaloo, 20.3 (1998): 493Google Scholar
Sotiropoulos, Karen, Staging Race: Black Performers in the Turn of the Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, Josephine, “The Seduction of the Stereotype,” in Performing Asian America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 96Google Scholar
Neal, Mark Anthony, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar
Elam, Michele, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar
Davis, Eisa, Bulrusher, in New Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2006, ed. D. L. Lepidus (New York: Smith and Kraus, 2007)Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folks (New York: Penguin, 1969)Google Scholar
Spillers, Hortense, “All the Things You Could Be by Now, if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race,” Boundary 2, 23.3 (Fall, 1996): 104Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston, Mulatto, in Five Plays by Langston Hughes, ed. Webster Smalley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 23Google Scholar

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