Jonathan Shandell offers an overview of the Negro Little Theatre Movement, the twenty-year period between the 1910s and 1930s that witnessed the flourishing of small, independent theatres across the country. As Shandell notes, these theatres “took root in library auditoriums, churches, community centers, universities, and anywhere else a platform could be built and artists and audiences might gather.” This chapter spotlights a handful of these theatres – the Anita Bush Stock Company, the Ethiopian Art Theatre, the Krigwa Players, the Harlem Suitcase Company, and the Karamu Theatre of Cleveland – and discusses both their evolution and lasting impact. Along the way, Shandell chronicles the efforts of several individuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Charles Gilpin, who were instrumental to their creation. The chapter ends with a brief account of the Federal Theatre Project’s “Negro units” and their aesthetic similarity to African American little theatres.

Monica White Ndounou focuses on Bert Williams, George Walker, and Langston Hughes. Through a close reading of their seminal productions, she reveals how the artists attempted to challenge existing theatrical stereotypes and caricatures of Blackness. Ndounou reads these figures as trailblazers, paving the path for future artists who were able to present more accurate depictions of African American life on the Broadway stage. The author covers more than fifty years of theatre history, from the emergence of Williams and Walker in the late nineteenth century to the premiere of Hughes’s The Barrier on the Great White Way in 1950.

Aimee Zygmonski provides a close reading of Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman followed by a study of the creation of his Black Arts Repertory Theatre to provide an insider perspective into the development of the Black Arts Movement. Her study of Baraka’s racial and political awakening as represented in the increasing self-awareness of his character Clay allows her to identify emergent themes that would eventually inform “the Movement.” Although the Black Arts Movement did not last long, Zygmonski asserts that the awakened consciousness that resulted from this flurry of activity “reverberate[s]” in the works of more contemporary and present-day artists.

Introductory chapter for book that centers the work, labor, and effort of artists to script and share African American experiences on stage from the nineteenth century to the present day. It provides an overview of the major movements and moments in Black theatre, beginning with sorrow songs in the era of legal captivity to twenty-first-century stagings.

Douglas A. Jones, Jr. looks at performance in the antebellum period and casts a critical spotlight on the ambivalent nature of African American theatre. He looks at both the coerced performances of Black captives – such as their singing and dancing during the transatlantic crossing of slave ships and preceding their still stands on auction blocks – and those voluntarily created acts, such as the “wild songs” on plantations and, later, the productions at Brown’s African theatre, to interrogate the multiple purposes to which Black performance could be employed. He demonstrates that Black theatre in itself is not inherently liberating. It has been used to reinforce the condition of oppression. However, it has also been infused with the potential to create an “oppositional culture” capable of challenging the status quo.

Nadine George-Graves discusses the vital role that theatre plays in engaging, healing, and transforming African American communities within her account of the theatrical contributions of producer Barbara Ann Teer, playwright Ntozake Shange, and choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. She addresses the unifying and recuperative power of theatre and how Teer, Shange, and Zollar embrace Africanist practices with the intent of reaching and elevating the “spirit” of their audiences. The recognition of one’s affinity with others exists as a step toward developing a social activist movement.

Adrienne Macki challenges critics who assert that the plays of Eulalie Spence, Alice Childress, and Lorraine Hansberry were either apolitical or not sufficiently political. In her chapter, Macki reintroduces the playwrights, who were active between 1930 and 1960, and chronicles the vital roles that they played in opening the doors for Black women to have their work staged regionally as well as on Broadway. Furthermore, she makes a convincing case that their plays feature “self-actualized black characters fighting against oppression and consumption while struggling to maintain racial and gender subjectivity.”

Sandra L. Richards shares a hemispheric approach to understanding African American theatre. Centering the writings of Canadian, US, and Caribbean playwrights, she moves not only across the Americas but also the twentieth century. Richards identifies the similar concerns of geographically and temporally separated playwrights as markers of African Diaspora drama. Among the salient features of this category, which includes dramatic works by Amiri Baraka, Djanet Sears, August Wilson, and Aimé Césaire, among others, are plays that retain African cultural elements, depict resistance to colonial governing, and circulate a common or shared understanding of the operations of Blackness within a particular political moment.

Heather Nathans centers the representation of slave rebellions and rebellious Black characters on the theatrical stage “from the colonial era through the beginning of the twentieth century.” She reveals how dramatic representations of captive uprisings were influenced by actual events. For example, the revolution in Haiti (formerly Saint Domingue), which was led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in 1791, inspired the scripting of numerous plays about unrest and revolution in “Hayti,” among other places. Nathans reveals that plays, penned by both White and Black playwrights, frequently depicted the unjust conditions to which Black men and women were subjected. They framed rebellion and revolt as justifiable acts.

Faedra Chatard Carpenter centers the representation of theatrical whiteness within her chapter through analyses of the plays of four playwrights: Adrienne Kennedy, Douglas Turner Ward, Lydia Diamond, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Although the dramas studied by Carpenter chronologically range from Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) to The Bluest Eye (2006), which reveal a contemporary engagement with ideas of race and embodiment, the author opens her chapter by noting that critical whiteness studies has a long history within African American communities. She memorably writes, “black folks have been analyzing White folks for quite some time.” The novel contributions of her chapter are her emphasis on how the critical evaluation of whiteness by Black artists is part of African American theatre, and her reminder of the power of theatrical spectacle to engage with issues of race.

Leticia Ridley centers on Black Queer drama. After briefly discussing the influential legacies of Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin, she proceeds to offer a close analysis of select works of Tarell Alvin McCraney (Choir Boy), Robert O’Hara (Bootycandy), Aziza Barnes (BLKS), and Christina Anderson (How to Catch Creation). She reminds the reader of the importance of attending to intersectional experiences as she addresses plays set variably in a private school, church, and nightclub featuring characters of differing social classes.

Samuel O’Connell reads a single case study, Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 Broadway musical Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death. Beginning with an overview of the relevant critical writings related to whether Black music can reflect cultural and racial experiences, O’Connell contends that the genre of soul music, which Van Peebles incorporates within his stage play, succeeds in capturing the rhythm and politics of late 1960s and early 1970s Harlem. A theatrical innovator, Van Peebles challenged the accepted format of the integrated musical, a musical with a unified (and thematically related) book and music, and pioneered a new type of Black musical form, the fragmented musical, which was better equipped to reflect the racial and political frictions that were occurring in the midst of the Black Power and the Black Arts movements.

Harry J. Elam, Jr. temporally locates his chapter in the “age of Obama,” the period following the election of Barack Obama as the first Black president of the United States. After the 2008 election, he notes a shift in the way that critics and scholars talked about race, particularly Blackness. Quoting art curator Thelma Golden, Elam investigates, through four case studies, whether the “post-black” is “the new black.” He looks at the 2009 Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Eisa Davis’s Bulrusher, and Fred Ebb and John Kander’s musical The Scottsboro Boys to address race politics, the reemergence of blackface, and the topic of mixed-race identity within the contemporary theatre.

Ariel Nereson spotlights choreography as an integral component of African American theatre, especially Black Broadway. Although she accounts for the long history of Black musicals, her chapter focuses on the contemporary work of choreographers Garth Fagan (The Lion King) and Camille A. Brown (Choir Boy, Cabin in the Sky). In addition to creating substantial employment opportunities for Black dance-artists, Black choreographers have redefined modern dance vocabularies and techniques through their inventive use of moment, embrace of Africanist elements, and skilful embodied storytelling to reflect Black experiences.

Soyica Diggs Colbert explores the dramas of the Harlem Renaissance, which were usually nurtured in Washington, DC, to reveal how dramatists such as Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Willis Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marita Bonner, among others, created dramas that asserted the “value” of African American life. Writing during a period when not only the lynchings of Black men and women were common but also rarely punished, these artists’ assertion of Black respectability demanded a reassessment and, indeed, a revaluation of Blackness.