Black Theatre USA: Plays By African Americans, 2 vols.

James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, eds. New York: Free P, 1996. 916 pp. $60.00 cloth/$40.00 paper.

In 1974, Black Theater USA: Forty-Five Plays by Black Americans, 1847-1974, edited by James V. Hatch with Ted Shine, was published by The Free Press. It included the work of forty-two authors and represented a major leap forward in the quantity of literature available to readers and scholars with an interest in African American theater. Recently revised and expanded, Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans is a two-volume work. Volume One covers The Early Period, 1847-1938, and Volume Two includes plays from The Recent Period, 1935-Today.

The newly revised and expanded Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans is an important addition to the body of anthologies about the Black theatre. It includes plays representative of the last twenty years and introduces the reader to major African American playwrights of earlier periods. Those educators who teach courses providing an overview of Black theatre will find that the two volumes, which represent the largest collections of plays by African American authors in a single work, allow for thematic and chronological approaches to the material.

The number of uses for African American theatre anthologies has increased. Theater programs include increasing numbers of African American students seeking plays by African American authors for acting and directing texts. Scripts are important to students and scholars seeking historical and theatrical resource materials. And with the contemporary focus on multi-cultural theatre, the number of venues that may be interested in producing plays by African American authors has increased. These new volumes provide a valuable assortment of plays that are unavailable in any other single source.

Among the plays added to the newly revised and expanded edition of Black Theatre USA are W. E. B. Du Bois's Star of Ethiopia, Paul Laurence Dunbar & Jesse A. Shipp's In Dahomey, Liberty Deferred by John D. Silvera & Abram Hill, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men by Lonne Elder III, Ben Caldwell's Prayer Meeting, George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum, and others. Some of the newly included plays bolster the anthology's breadth; others raise questions that can be illuminated by a closer look at the two volumes.

The foreword to The Early Period, 1847-1938, written by Margaret Wilkerson, reflects on the importance of the earlier edition of Black Theatre USA and on the perspectives associated with the plays themselves. As with the earlier edition, the plays here are grouped by historical period or theme, and an introduction is provided both to the sections and to each individual play. The date of the first production of each play is also given, along with important biographical data about the play's author. This first volume of the revised edition is quite successful in providing a variety of perspectives from early African American playwrights.

Perhaps the most important new additions to this volume are In Dahomey (Shipp & Dunbar) and Star of Ethiopia (Du Bois), which allow the reader a firsthand examination of texts by authors who are critical in the development of Black theatre. The volume also includes Zora Neale Hurston's The First One and Silvera and Hill's Liberty Deferred, plays unavailable in any other work. However this volume, in which the editors seem so carefully to have considered the placement and importance of early theatrical figures, also includes Charles Fuller's 1981 drama A Soldier's Play. While this work is undoubtedly significant in its subject matter and certainly notable for having won a Pulitzer Prize, its placement in this volume which deals with the historical period through 1938 is disconcerting. In addition, Liberty Deferred is excerpted rather than presented in its totality. The introduction to the play provides an overview of the entire play, but the reader is not provided access to the entire script.

As I stated at the outset, a work that attempts to be inclusive of so much history is bound to have its shortcomings. The editors had the wisdom to allow Amiri Baraka to state much of the difficulty with the second volume (The Recent Period, 1935-Today) in his introduction, which may provide fodder for student discussions. In addition, Kalamu ya Salaam's preface to his play Blk Love Song #1 provides an insightful discussion of the Black aesthetic in relationship to Black theatre. A critical issue that looms over this volume is the simmering nature of the political and social conflict from 1935 to the present, which is reflected in the more militant attitudes of the characters in the plays and in the attitudes and concerns of the playwrights themselves. Perhaps a more direct acknowledgment of this concern would have lead to a more careful framing of the plays.

ntozake shange's for colored girls ... and Anne Deveare Smith's Fires in the Mirror are significant plays worthy of discussion, but, due to publishers' restrictions, they are excerpted in the anthology. If the publishers of these plays feel so strongly that these works are property to be sold and cannot see the value their being included in a volume of this sweep, then perhaps the plays ought to have been omitted. An essay that describes the impact of the two works would have been more useful than these excerpts. I am unaware of any anthologies that publish representative portions of works by Lillian Hellman, Beth Henley, Wendy Wasserstein, or other notable white women writers.

The section entitled "Modern Women Writing on Women," which includes Robbie McCauley's Sally's Rape (1989), Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962), and Alice Childress's Wine in the Wilderness (1969), is likewise problematic, since the term modern would not seem to apply equally well to these three works. The first two of these plays adhere structurally to an aesthetic that is representative of the post-modern approach to theatre. Another section is entitled "Black Theatre for Black People," which seems like a politically correct identifier for plays that clearly represent the militant theatre of the sixties. "New Plays, New Ideas, New Forms" is the title for a section which includes Aishah Rahman's The Mojo and the Sayso (1989). But the use of the word form in the title might suggest that Kennedy should be included here, even though Rahman is McCauley's chronological contemporary. In short, several section titles appear out of place.

But the larger problem with the second volume seems to be how it should be seen as a companion to the first. In volume two, the editors seem to have produced a kind of unsatisfying middle ground: The plays are grouped thematically in the first half of volume two, but this becomes a problem as the plays change in structure and theme in the postmodern/absurdist era.

In general, the introductions to the plays themselves are largely biographical discussions of the authors that provide traditional historical background. Several, however, are provocative and may lead readers to do additional research. Unlike the earlier edition, several of the introductions to the plays in the new edition are provided by persons other than the editors, and these provide welcome new voices and variations in perspective.

The bibliography for the volumes seems limited to historical resources and does not include critical analyses that would serve to frame these plays. A notable omission is the work of contemporary writers whose focus and approach are based in a Black aesthetic. While Carlton Molette's Black Theatre: Premise and Presentation and Hill's Theatre of Black Americans are cited, none of the work of Paul Carter Harrison is included. The omission seems to reflect a limited concern with contemporary critical analysis. Many of the plays included in this volume deserve to be examined from post-modern, Afrocentric, and other contemporary critical approaches which could illuminate the plays from varying critical perspectives.

The revised and expanded Black Theatre USA is certainly a valuable addition to the resource materials available on the African American theatre. At its best, it is a document which is inclusive of plays which scholars will have difficulty locating in one or two volumes. Hence, the principal importance of this collection is that it provides a wide variety of representative plays and authors.