11 - Women playwrights who cross cultural borders

Summary

At the height of summer, 2011 and during the waning months of the same year, two high-profile events featuring women of color caught the world’s attention by breaking through gender barriers that have long histories in the United States and in other parts of the world. Media organizations sat up and took note while critics marveled at the fortuitous timing: three African American female playwrights’ individual works ran concurrently on Broadway, a feat that many still regard as extremely unusual, especially given conservative trends of the Great White Way along gender and color lines. The good fortunes of playwrights Katori Hall, Lydia Diamond, and Suzan-Lori Parks began anew a conversation not just about the historically few African American plays on Broadway, but, more particularly, about the infrequent productions of works by contemporary African American female playwrights. Director Kenny Leon told The New York Times, “I can’t remember the last time there were three women playwrights on Broadway during the same season, let alone three African-American women.”

I evoke this recent scenario involving triumphant women of color to demonstrate that African American female playwrights, like these exemplary sisters, continue to be active agents of change on behalf of women – both in the United States and outside its borders – and they are doing so with an expert command of their craft and of the world stage. While some might see the coincidental convergence of Hall’s The Mountaintop, Diamond’s Stick Fly, and Parks’s adaptation of Porgy and Bess upon Broadway as cause for celebration, skeptics might well discount all of the hoopla and label their good fortune as merely happenstance. Pessimism aside, however, might one conclude that Broadway’s recent bumper crop of black female works signals the imminence of more frequent productions? Could the intersection of their work at this historical moment also herald a long overdue recognition that today’s African American female playwright has indeed found her voice and is able to leverage it in a mighty way that would have a more universal impact?