Willis Richardson, Forgotten Pioneer of African-American Drama.

Christine Rauchfuss Gray. Willis Richardson, Forgotten Pioneer of African-American Drama. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. 130 pp. $55.00.

Christine Rauchfuss Gray's slim but valuable biography Willis Richardson, Forgotten Pioneer of African-American Drama, provides a treasure-trove of information on Willis Richardson (1889-1977), the first African American to have a non-musical play, The Chip Woman's Fortune, produced on Broadway. This first full-length critical study offers for consideration Richardson's pioneering contributions and his significance in the discipline of African American drama.

Examining Richardson's unpublished autobiography "From Youth To Age," and using interviews with his family, Gray calls attention to sketchy, misleading, and unsupported information. Whereas Richardson claimed Wilmington, North Carolina, as his place of birth, his family believes that his birthplace was more likely off the coast of South Carolina. Myriad other discrepancies plague Richardson's biographical account; even his parentage is dubious. The woman he claimed to be his mother, as Gray reveals, could have been his grandmother; and the woman he identified as his older sister was likely his mother. The man who raised Richardson as his son might not have been his father; the suggestion offered here is that his father may have been a wealthy white man. Despite unreliable information, Gray manages to render a coherent overview of the complexities, disappointments, and suffering of an unromanticized artist who "was at one time considered the hope and promise of black drama."

Gray reports that the Wilmington Riots of 1898 prompted the Richardsons to move to Washington, D.C. Here young Richardson, after several schools, graduated from the M Street School (later named Dunbar High School), founded in 1870 and the first public school for African Americans in the United States. His interest in drama was encouraged and he came under the tutelage of numerous notable African Americans while at M Street School: playwright Mary Burrill (1884-1946), scholar Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1946), historian Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950), and Angelina Grimke (1880-1958).

Circa 1911, a year after his graduation, Richardson was hired as a "skilled helper" in the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, D.C., a job he held for forty-one years. This job afforded him two elements essential for a writer's productivity: a secure source of income and ample time to write. As Richardson stated in an interview, "The people had to come to the door [each morning] for a certain number of sheets [of paper] ... and I would then be free for the afternoon until around three o'clock. I would write when I didn't have anything else to do."

Richardson married Mary Ellen Jones in 1914, and they had three children. In 1916, after seeing a production of Angelina Grimke's play Rachel, Richardson made a firm commitment to study the technique of dramatic writing.

Gray writes that, according to his family, "the M Street School and W. E. B. Du Bois were among the most important influences on Richardson's life." Such was the case: In 1919, only three years after viewing Rachel, The Crisis, under the editorship of Du Bois, published the first of Richardson's six essays on the theatre. In this essay, "The Hope of A Negro Drama," Richardson stresses "that the plays written by African Americans should focus on the black community and not on racial tension and differences." He goes on to state that most of his plays would be "drawn for the most part from folk tradition, they should center on black conflicts within the black community." Richardson's subsequent essays covered a gamut of theatre-related issues, ranging from a call for a national black theatre to the criteria used to develop serious drama by black dramatists to the development of a sophisticated theatre audience.

Gray establishes that from the onset Richardson was a dramatist committed to realistic representations of ordinary blacks, eschewing those stereotypical images portrayed by white dramatists, as well as sterile black characters from black dramatists. Many of his plays promoted racial pride.

The influence of Du Bois on Richardson went beyond publishing his essays on the theatre. (Indubitably Richardson's political concerns caught the attention of Du Bois.) Du Bois requested and published Richardson's first children's play in The Brownie's Book, a magazine he helped to found. Du Bois was also responsible for Richardson's first and only Broadway production, The Chip Woman's Fortune. The Ethiopian Art Players, who took the play to Broadway, were seeking black playwrights; Du Bois put them in touch with Richardson. Du Bois's support did not go unappreciated; Richardson writes that he considered "Dr. Du Bois the greatest and most brilliant black man this country has ever produced."

Gray documents Richardson's association with influential artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Georgia Douglas Johnson, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Mary Church Terrell, Carter Woodson, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, among others, were members of a coterie Richardson met with regularly to "talk over things we had done or planned to do."

The Harlem Renaissance was percolating, and unequivocally Richardson was the August Wilson of the era. His plays were produced at reputable places such as the Drama Department at Howard University, by the Gilpin Players, and by the Krigwa Players, and were extremely popular and performed frequently at black high schools, colleges, and churches by various theatre groups.

Although Richardson hob-nobbed with the who's who of the Harlem Renaissance, his amicable relationship with Main Locke turned sour after a misunderstanding. Gray writes that "the break with Locke seems also to have wounded Richardson both emotionally and creatively, for after that point he recorded little of his life in detail."

Gray discusses the varied styles employed in some fifty plays, which ranged from children's fairy tales to domestic satire to adult drama. His subjects were equally broad, running the gamut from enfranchisement to equal access to education. In the 1930s Richardson published Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, the first anthology of plays by an African American. His plays continued to be staged throughout the 1930s but the downward trend of fewer productions had commenced.

By the 1940s, Richardson's status as a playwright was in steep decline. He was suspected of being a leftist sympathizer, mainly because of his association with Du Bois. Like other federal employees, Richardson ultimately had to sign a loyalty oath to the U.S. government. His greatest personal trouble came during that decade, with the suicide of his youngest daughter.

After Richardson retired from the Bureau in 1954, he made a valiant attempt to get further productions. The demand for his plays was nil; he realized he no longer reflected the African American experience with the arrival of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s. During the 1970s, Gray writes, Richardson was "broken by a life of large disappointment and little recognition." In November 1977, Willis Richardson, the first African American to have a serious play on Broadway, the first black drama anthologist, and a dramatist with several dozen plays to his credit, died in obscurity.

Gray wisely keeps the critical arrows at bay by acknowledging that her aim here is to establish Richardson as a significant footnote in American drama and to lay the groundwork for future scholars. She observes that "much remains to be done in this field." However, her opening the door must be applauded, and surely this, biography beckons other scholars to follow.