Harry Elam, Jr., and Robert Alexander, eds. The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the Twenty-First Century.

Harry Elam, Jr., and Robert Alexander, eds. The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the Twenty-First Century. New York: TCG, 2004. 595 pp. $18.95.

The nine plays in this anthology, the second collection edited by Harry Elam and Robert Alexander, are arranged thematically under three rubrics: identity, history, and hip hop. Suzan-Lori Parks's In the Blood begins the first section. The play focuses on Hester, an itinerate mother struggling to feed her wayward children. Living under a bridge, she and her family of five try to survive amidst exploiters and opportunists. Next, Brian Freeman's play Civil Sex is based on Bayard Rustin, a gay civil rights activist who suffered discrimination on several fronts. This play is followed by Oni Faida Lampley's The Dark Kalamazoo, a one-person drama portraying a black woman raised in Oklahoma City--"landlocked," she calls it--coming to terms with her identity and roots.

Plays that look back in time comprise section two. August Wilson's King Hedley II is the 1980's installment of his 10-cycle history plays (one play for each decade). It takes place in Pittsburgh's Hill District, the usual location of Wilson's dramas. Hedley returns from prison to find his neighborhood devastated. Aunt Ester, Wilson's symbol of endurance and fortitude, hovers in the background out of reach. Stool Pigeon begins the play, setting the tone: "The people wandering all over the place. They got lost. They don't even know the story of how they got from tit to tat. Aunt Ester know. But the path to her house is all grown over with weeds, you can't even find the door no more. The people need to know that. The people need to know the story. See how they fit into it. See what part they play" (181). Next is Robert O'Hara's Insurrection: Holding History, a play that opens up history to a multitude of times and places. His protagonist, Ron, is a graduate student studying history in search of self-awareness, specifically by examining 19th-century slave rebellion leader Nat Turner. The play is among several in the history of African American theatre and literature which deal with the enigmatic and messianic Turner. The section ends with Lynn Nottage's Crumbs from the Table of Joy, a realistic coming-of-age story that concerns a sensitive young black woman from Brooklyn during the early 1950s.

The final section consists of plays pitting idealism against consumerism. The first, Robert Alexander's A Preface to the Alien Garden, takes place in a Kansas City crack house during the 1980s. Alexander limns a redeeming character, Lisa Body. Condescendingly nicknamed "Flygirl," Lisa fantasizes about extraterrestrials and spends her days creatively spray painting walls. Like Wilson's King Hedley, Alexander's play is unsparing in its criticism of a society that has abandoned its citizens. Following is Rhyme Deferred, by Kamilah Forbes. As the title suggests, the play is a derivation of the same Langston Hughes poem that inspired the title for A Raisin in the Sun. The "dream" in this play is accompanied by hip hop music. Two brothers, Invincible Suga Kain (described as a "flashy, bling-bling, money-loving hip-hop MC") and Gabe, mirror the conflicts of the Biblical brothers Cain and Abel. They represent two sides of hip hop: greed and ideals. Money and fame compete with art and commitment, reflecting Clifford Odets's concerns in Golden Boy of the 1930s. The section's final play, Slanguage, is the same title as an unpublished essay by Zora Neale Hurston. Like Rhyme Deferred, the play explores hip hip. Authored by a collective of five calling themselves Universes, the play, which draws on Salsa as well as hip hop, examines the difficulties of living as a poet in a world of commerce.

In their introductory essays, Elam's astute dramaturgical analysis provides context, and Alexander, a contributing playwright to the collection, adds personal insights. Given their dedication, raising objections seem insensitive. Still, there are shortcomings. For instance, both editors raise the specter of 9/11. Yet their topical remarks are gratuitous since none of the plays in the anthology take up 9/11. With one exception the plays premiered during the 1990s; the exception is Slanguage, premiering in July of 2001. Alexander's essay dwells primarily on the past, particularly on Spike Lee's 1989 film Do the Right Thing, the 1992 Rodney King-Los Angeles riots, and the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. The book's subtitle, "African American Plays for the Twenty-First Century," is therefore misleading; it is, in fact, a collection of plays that look backward. Elam draws attention to August Wilson's 1996 TCG speech, which called for theatre artists to rise up and form a National Black Theatre. Wilson's declaration, Elam remarks, "fueled a new spirit of activism within black theatre," yielding "a black theatre that is not only viable but self-sufficient" (xiv). Yet Wilson consistently offered his plays to white theatres. This decision is documented in the production history of King Hedley reported in this very anthology. The play began at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, then moved to the Seattle Repertory Theatre, Boston's Huntington Theatre Company, Los Angeles's Mark Taper Forum, Chicago's Goodman Theatre, Washington's JFK Center for the Performing Arts, and finally Broadway. His next two plays, Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf, took similar routes. If Wilson had instead offered his plays to Woody King's New Federal Theatre, the St. Louis Black Repertory Company, New Jersey's struggling Crossroads Theatre, or any number of black theatres, he would have provided the National Black Theatre movement tremendous impetus. By doing so, he might even have aided theatres that would later produce the plays contained in this anthology. For whatever reason, bypassing black theatres renders his clarion call mute. Regrettably, few challenge this double standard. Elam occasionally succumbs to academic jargon, such as "black oppositionality" (xviii), and Alexander is drawn to turgid cliches, such as, "I am a baby boomer whose sense of this world is shaped by seeing one's great potential cut down like daises mowed over by a lawnmower in the psychic shooting gallery of a bookworm's memory" (xxix). Finally, several plays aim for flashy, time-skipping structures and engage in self-indulgent word-play that fail to allow for dramatic momentum, or for the central characters to secure a hold on our interest. The plays' fragmentary designs are largely the consequences of 1990's poststructuralism, which emphasized "deconstruction" over empathy. The results are that too many plays resemble a series of disconnected postcards lacking dramatic cohesion.

These caveats notwithstanding, this anthology can be read with profit by anyone interested in the development of African American drama. Most importantly, these plays need to be produced, not merely anthologized. Robert O'Hara, in his introductory remarks, put it best when he said: "a playwright's craft can not grow and develop unless her/his work is produced" (254). Elam and Alexander's anthology should inspire producers to test the plays in venues to which they rightly belong.

David Krasner

Yale University