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Author: Willis Richardson Publisher: Independently Published ISBN: 9781795287630 Category : Languages : en Pages : 33
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.
Author: Kate Dossett Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469654431 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 359
Book Description
Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units" set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of "white" classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the black performance community—a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made and remade black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.
Author: Macelle Mahala Publisher: Northwestern University Press ISBN: 0810145162 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 355
Book Description
Macelle Mahala’s rich study of contemporary African American theater institutions reveals how they reflect and shape the histories and cultural realities of their cities. Arguing that the community in which a play is staged is as important to the work’s meaning as the script or set, Mahala focuses on four cities’ “arts ecologies” to shed new light on the unique relationship between performance and place: Cleveland, home to the oldest continuously operating Black theater in the country; Pittsburgh, birthplace of the legendary playwright August Wilson; San Francisco, a metropolis currently experiencing displacement of its Black population; and Atlanta, a city with forty years of progressive Black leadership and reverse migration. Black Theater, City Life looks at Karamu House Theatre, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Pittsburgh Playwrights’ Theatre Company, the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, the African American Shakespeare Company, the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival, and Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company to demonstrate how each organization articulates the cultural specificities, sociopolitical realities, and histories of African Americans. These companies have faced challenges that mirror the larger racial and economic disparities in arts funding and social practice in America, while their achievements exemplify such institutions’ vital role in enacting an artistic practice that reflects the cultural backgrounds of their local communities. Timely, significant, and deeply researched, this book spotlights the artistic and civic import of Black theaters in American cities.
Author: Marvin Edward McAllister Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 9780807854501 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
McAllister offers a history of black theater pioneer William Brown's career and places his productions within the broader context of U.S. social, political, and cultural history.