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Willis Richardson, Forgotten Pioneer of African-American Drama

Author : Christine R. Gray

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Page : 156 pages

File Size : 42,88 MB

Release : 1999-12-30

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0313000921

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Book Description

During the 1920s and 1930s, Willis Richardson (1889-1977) was highly respected as a leading African-American playwright and drama anthologist. His plays were performed by numerous black high school, college, and university drama groups and by theater companies in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., Cleveland, Baltimore, and Atlanta. With the opening of The Chip Woman's Fortune (1923), he became the first African American to have a play produced on Broadway. Several of his 46 plays were published in assorted magazines, and in his essays, he urged black Americans to seek their dramatic material in their own lives and circumstances. In addition, he edited three anthologies of plays by African-Americans. But between 1940 and his death in 1977, Richardson came to realize that his plays were period pieces and that they no longer reflected the problems and situations of African-Americans. In the years before his death, he attempted vigorously yet unsuccessfully to preserve several of his plays through publication, if not production. But the man who has been called the father of African-American drama and who was considered the hope and promise of African-American drama died in obscurity. Richardson has even been neglected by the scholarly community. This critical biography, the first extensive consideration of his life and work, firmly reestablishes his pioneering role in American theater. The book begins with a detailed chronology, followed by a thoughtful biographical essay. The volume then examines the nature of African-American drama in the 1920s, the period during which Richardson was most productive, and it analyzes his approach to drama as a means of educating African-American audiences. It then explores the African-American community as the central theme in Richardson's plays, for Richardson typically looks at the consequences of refusals by blacks to help one another. The work additionally considers Richardson's history plays, his anthologies, his dramas intended for black children, and his essays. A concluding chapter summarizes his lasting influence; the book closes with a listing of his plays and an extensive bibliography.



The Chip Woman's Fortune

Author : Willis Richardson

Publisher : Independently Published

Page : 33 pages

File Size : 16,50 MB

Release : 2019-02-03

Category :

ISBN : 9781795287630

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Book Description

In 1922, Willis Richardson wrote The Chip Woman's Fortune. On January 29, 1923, the play was performed by the Ethiopian Art Players in Chicago. In April 1923, the play moved to New York. On May 7, 1923, The Chip Woman's Fortune had a short run at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Eight days later, it became the first play by an African American to reach Broadway. The chip woman, in The Chip Woman's Fortune, is named Aunt Nancy. She contributes to the household where she resides by picking up chips of wood and lumps of coal from the streets. We find her living with Silas and caring for his ill wife, Liza, whom we learn is making a steady recovery under Aunt Nancy's care. Silas learns that the family's greatest treasure, a Victrola record player, is about to be repossessed because of financial strain that has left him unable to make payments on the outstanding debt owed on the machine. After learning that, Aunt Nancy has managed to save some money from street donations she receives, Silas decides that it is time for her to contribute more than the nursing care provided to his wife, and the wood chips and coal lumps she collects for use by the family.



Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

Author : Cary D. Wintz

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 708 pages

File Size : 14,61 MB

Release : 2012-12-06

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1135455368

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Book Description

From the music of Louis Armstrong to the portraits by Beauford Delaney, the writings of Langston Hughes to the debut of the musical Show Boat, the Harlem Renaissance is one of the most significant developments in African-American history in the twentieth century. The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, in two-volumes and over 635 entries, is the first comprehensive compilation of information on all aspects of this creative, dynamic period. For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Encyclopedi a of Harlem Renaissance website.



Staging Faith

Author : Craig R. Prentiss

Publisher : NYU Press

Page : 234 pages

File Size : 17,18 MB

Release : 2014

Category : Art

ISBN : 0814708080

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Book Description

In the years between the Harlem Renaissance and World War II, African American playwrights gave birth to a vital black theater movement in the U.S. It was a movement overwhelmingly concerned with the role of religion in black identity. In a time of profound social transformation fueled by a massive migration from the rural south to the urban‑industrial centers of the north, scripts penned by dozens of black playwrights reflected cultural tensions, often rooted in class, that revealed competing conceptions of religion's role in the formation of racial identity. Black playwrights pointed in quite different ways toward approaches to church, scripture, belief, and ritual that they deemed beneficial to the advancement of the race. Their plays were important not only in mirroring theological reflection of the time, but in helping to shape African American thought about religion in black communities. The religious themes of these plays were in effect arguments about the place of religion in African American lives. In Staging Faith, Craig R. Prentiss illuminates the creative strategies playwrights used to grapple with religion. With a lively and engaging style, the volume brings long forgotten plays to life as it chronicles the cultural and religious fissures that marked early twentieth century African American society. Craig R. Prentiss is Professor of Religious Studies at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the editor of Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity: An Introduction (New York University Press, 2003).



Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre People, 1816-1960

Author : Bernard L. Peterson Jr.

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Page : 441 pages

File Size : 26,29 MB

Release : 2000-10-30

Category : Performing Arts

ISBN : 0313065039

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Book Description

This directory includes over 500 African American performers and theater people who have made a significant contribution to the American stage from the early 19th century to the beginning of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Entries provide succinct biographical and theatrical information gathered from a variety of sources including library theater and drama collections, dissertations and theses, newspaper and magazine reviews and criticism, theater programs, theatrical memoirs, and earlier performing arts directories. Among the professional artists included in this volume are performers, librettists, lyricists, directors, producers, choreographers, stage managers, and musicians. The individuals profiled represent almost every major category and genre of the professional, semiprofessional, regional, and academic stage including minstrelsy, vaudeville, musical theater, and drama. Persons of historical significance are included as well as those stars and theatrical personalities that were well known during their time but who are relatively forgotten today. This comprehensive volume will appeal to theater and musical theater, Black studies, and American studies scholars. Cross-referenced throughout, this reference also includes an extensive bibliography and appendices of other theater personalities excluded from the main text. Separate indexes list the personalities, teams and partnerships, and performing groups, organizations, and companies.



Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater

Author : James Fisher

Publisher : Scarecrow Press

Page : 1003 pages

File Size : 11,51 MB

Release : 2011-06-01

Category : Performing Arts

ISBN : 0810879506

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Book Description

From legends like Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller to successful present-day playwrights like Neil LaBute, Tony Kushner, and David Mamet, some of the most important names in the history of theater are from the past 80 years. Contemporary American theater has produced some of the most memorable, beloved, and important plays in history, including Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, Barefoot in the Park, Our Town, The Crucible, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Odd Couple. Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater presents the plays and personages, movements and institutions, and cultural developments of the American stage from 1930 to 2010, a period of vast and almost continuous change. It covers the ever-changing history of the American theater with emphasis on major movements, persons, plays, and events. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 1,500 cross-referenced dictionary entries. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the history of American theater.



Theorizing Black Theatre

Author : Henry D. Miller

Publisher : McFarland

Page : 285 pages

File Size : 23,31 MB

Release : 2014-01-10

Category : Performing Arts

ISBN : 0786460148

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Book Description

The rich history of African-American theatre has often been overlooked, both in theoretical discourse and in practice. This volume seeks a critical engagement with black theatre artists and theorists of the twentieth century. It reveals a comprehensive view of the Art or Propaganda debate that dominated twentieth century African-American dramatic theory. Among others, this text addresses the writings of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, Sidney Poitier, and August Wilson. Of particular note is the manner in which black theory collides or intersects with canonical theorists, including Aristotle, Keats, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Shaw, and O'Neill.



African American Autobiography and the Quest for Freedom

Author : Roland L. Williams Jr.

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Page : 174 pages

File Size : 23,46 MB

Release : 2000-01-30

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0313097151

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Book Description

Slave narratives were one of the earliest forms of African American writing. These works, autobiographical in nature, later fostered other pieces of African American autobiography. Since the rise of Black Studies in the late 1960s, leading critics have constructed black lives and letters as antitheses of the ways and writings of mainstream American culture. According to such thinking, black writing stems from a set of experiences very different from the world of whites, and black autobiography must therefore differ radically from heroic white American tales. But in pointing to differences between black and white autobiographical works, these critics have overlooked the similarities. This volume argues that the African American autobiography is a continuation of the epic tradition, much as the prose narratives of voyage by white Americans in the nineteenth century likewise represent the evolution of the epic genre. The book makes clear that the writers of black autobiography have shared and shaped American culture, and that their works are very much a part of American literature. An introductory essay provides a theoretical framework for the chapters that follow. It discusses the origins of African American autobiography and the larger themes of the epic tradition that are common to the works of both black and white authors. The book then pairs representative African American autobiographies with similar works by white writers. Thus the volume matches Olaudah Equiano's slave narrative with The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave with Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall. The study indicates that these various works all recognize the importance of learning as a means for attaining freedom. The final chapter provides a broad survey of the African American autobiography.



Documents of the Harlem Renaissance

Author : Thomas J. Davis

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Page : 288 pages

File Size : 41,12 MB

Release : 2021-01-13

Category : History

ISBN : 1440855579

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Book Description

This book explores the transformative energy and excitement that African Americans expressed in aesthetic and civic currents that percolated during the opening of the 20th century and proved to be a force in the modernization of America. This engaging reference text represents the voices of the era in poetry and prose, in full or excerpted from anecdotes, editorials, essays, manifestoes, orations, and reminiscences, with appearances by major figures and often overlooked contributors to the Harlem Renaissance. Organized topically and, within topics, chronologically, the volume reaches beyond the typical representation of the spirit and substance of the movement, examinations of which are typically confined to the New York City community and from U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 to the depths of the Great Depression in 1935. It carries readers from the opening of the Harlem Renaissance, which began at the top of the 20th century, to its heights in the 1920s and '30s and through to its artistic and literary echoes in the shadows of World War II (1939–1945).



Living with Lynching

Author : Koritha Mitchell

Publisher : University of Illinois Press

Page : 274 pages

File Size : 44,94 MB

Release : 2011-10-01

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0252093526

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Book Description

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynching victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of households being torn from model domestic units by white violence. In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens. The Left of Black interview with author Koritha Mitchell begins at 14:00. An interview with Koritha Mitchell at The Ohio Channel.