Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora.

William B. Branch, ed. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. 443 pp. $39.95 cloth/$18.95 paper.

Recently I attended the staged reading of a new play written by a relatively inexperienced young African-American playwright. The audience for this event numbered about 200. Approximately eighty percent of those attending were White, with Latinos and blacks making up the other twenty percent. All were either theatre professionals or scholars. The play, which was about the inter-familial relationship involving a group of black women from several generations, incorporated the use of realism and other traditional elements of late-20th-century American theatre with music, chant, voodoo, and ghost stories in a manner that was often awkward and naive yet nonetheless powerful and affecting. At the end of the reading, there was a discussion/critique dialogue with the audience, where words like "promising," "worthwhile," "affecting," and "positive" were used politely (one might even say patronizingly) to praise the work. Then everyone settled down to the serious business at hand which was to tell the author what was wrong with her play and how adding some elements and discarding many others would improve the work immeasurably and make it truly palatable for widespread public acceptance.

Virtually all of the criticism centered on the ingredients that I felt gave the play its unique qualities: the use of Gospel music, voodoo, chant, storytelling, and incantation. She was instructed to make the play consistent to one style or genre: "If you're going to tell a ghost story, then it all has to be a ghost story"; "if it's a musical, then it can't have only one song"; etc. I sat there thinking, This is awful. The play needs work--the young lady's inexperience was showing all over the place--but the criticism she's getting is all wrong. If she listens to and follows this advice, her play will lose all of its maverick qualities, and its originality as well. Structurally it'll become another "black family drama" that whites seem to find so comfortable and easy to comprehend.

During the discussion I said nothing, but during a reception afterwards I spoke to the young playwright and effectively told her to ignore virtually all the criticism she had heard and go with her own instincts and impulses. "It's your African voice you're hearing," I told her, "and it's pointing you in a new direction, a direction that most people in this house aren't willing to recognize, or interested in or capable of recognizing." She thanked me and went off. I have no idea if she'll follow my advice or not. But at least I got it said.

All these ideas and more came to me as I read Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora, edited by William Branch. This collection of ten plays with an introduction by the editor illustrates the fact that black theatre is informed by a multiplicity of cultural voices and forms, most of which predate the Greek theatre as defined by Aristotle and the modem theatre modeled after Ibsen. The playwrights represented include: Derek Walcott (the Caribbean), Edgar White (England), Abdias do Nascimento (Brazil), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), August Wilson and Richard Wesley (the U.S.), Mbongeni Ngema/Percy Mtwa (South Africa), Efva Sutherland (Ghana), and Amiri Baraka, who seems to inhabit a country all his own but technically hails from the United States. This is an admirably wide range of terrain, cultures, and voices.

William Branch, the editor, is a playwright (his play In Splendid Error is included in this collection) and a Professor of Theatre and Dramatic Literature at the Center for Africana Studies at Cornell University, and he has done a very good job in selecting the plays and investigating the various cultural philosophies that inform their creation. His introduction, "Black Dramatists in the Diaspora," is a speedy (perhaps too speedy) trip through the World of Black Theatre--or, more accurately, The Theatre of Black African Descent in various parts of the world. Between 1993, the year the collection was published, and now, the world has changed considerably. Therefore, my feeling that Branch, in his introduction, could've been more aggressive in making a case for the potently distinctive nature of the African and African descent voices in world theatre as an entity wholly unto itself, and not just a curious (or perhaps exotic) phenomenon illustrating black progress against a backdrop of European tradition, might simply be a sign of the times in which we live. Eurocentric dominance posing as universalism is something we all must be wary of.

This book presents a very fine collection of plays, and one that could be used in the study of the cross-fertilization of African-inspired styles. But if one were to embark on such an endeavor I would also recommend two other books: Kuntu Drama (1974) and Totem Voices (1989), both edited by Paul Carter Harrison. Together, these three anthologies would create the foundation for scholars and other theatre professionals who are attempting to teach or in any serious way critique the directions African descent and African American theatre are moving.

American Black Theatre is once again in a state of renewing or reinventing itself. This is heartening at a time when, in the offices of our larger theatrical institutions and funding agencies, a question constantly being asked is: "Do we really need Black Theatre as a separate entity? Isn't it all simply American Theatre of a different hue?" By which they really mean, "Let us homogenize Black Theatre into the established standards of mainstream White Theatre, thereby making it easier to measure with a critical yardstick that has been in existence since Eugene O'Neill," without bothering to learn or address its unique anthropological or cultural origins.

Fortunately, the new African American writers (playwrights, especially) are not buying into this. They are listening to their hearts and to the drums as well, and this challenge demands that new criticism and observations about Black Theatre take these factors into consideration. Crosswinds, edited by William Branch, provides a truly admirable place to start.