William B Branch.

William B Branch, ed Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. 443 pp $3995 cloth/$1895 paper.

newly I attended the staged reading of a just discovered play written by a relatively inexperienced young African-American playwright. The audience for this termination numbered about 200. Approximately eighty percent of those attending were White, with Latinos and blacks making up the other twenty percent All were either theatre professionals or scholars. The play, which was about the inter-familial relationship involving a cluster of black women from several generations, incorporated the use of realism and other traditional constituents of late-20th-century American theatre with music, chant, voodoo, and phantom stories in a manner that was many times awkward and naive yet nonetheless powerful and affecting. At the conclusion of the reading, there was a discussion/critique dialogue with the audience, where words like "promising," "worthwhile," "affecting," and "positive" were used politely (one might on the same level say patronizingly) to praise the work. Then everyone settl down to the serious business at hand which was to disclose the author what was bad with her play and by what means adding some elements and discarding many others would improve the work immeasurably and make it sooth to say palatable for widespread public acceptance.

Virtually all of the criticism center in succession the ingredients that I felt gave the play its unique qualities: the use of the cross music, voodoo, chant, storytelling, and incantation. She was instructed to make the play consistent to individual style or genre: "If you're going to rehearse a ghost story, then it all has to be a apparition story"; "if it's a musical, then it can't have merely one song"; etc. I sat there thinking, This is awful. The play povertys work--the young lady's inexperience was showing all athwart the place--but the criticism she's getting is all inappropriate If she listens to and tread on the heels ofs this advice, her play will let slip through the fingers all of its maverick qualities, and its originality as well. Structurally it'll become another "black family drama" that whites pretend to find so comfortable and easy to comprehend.

During the discussion I said nothing, further during a reception afterwards I spoke to the young playwright and effectively told her to ignore virtually all the criticism she had heard and go on foot with her own instincts and impulses. "It's your African voice you're hearing," I told her, "and it's pointing you in a of recent origin direction, a direction that most numerous people in this house aren't willing to recognize, or interested in or capable of recognizing." She thanked me and went opposite I have no idea if she'll tread on the heels of my advice or not. further at least I got it said.

All these ideas and more came to me as I read Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora, edited through William Branch. This collection of ten plays with an introduction by means of the editor illustrates the fact that black theatre is informed at a multiplicity of cultural voices and forms, most numerous of which predate the native of greece theatre as defined by Aristotle and the modem theatre gaugeed after Ibsen. The playwrights delineateed include: Derek Walcott (the Caribbean), Edgar White (England), Abdias do Nascimento (Brazil), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), August Wilson and Richard Wesley (the US) Mbongeni Ngema/Percy Mtwa (South Africa), Efva Sutherland (Ghana), and Amiri Baraka, who assumes to inhabit a country all his avow but technically hails from the United States. This is an admirably wide range of terrain, refinements and voices.

William Branch, the editor, is a playwright (his play In Splendid Error is included in this collection) and a Professor of Theatre and Dramatic Literature at the Center for Africana Studies at Cornell University, and he has done a same good job in selecting the plays and investigating the various cultural philosophies that inform their creation. His introduction, "Black Dramatists in the Diaspora," is a flying (perhaps too speedy) trip between the sides of the World of Black Theatre--or, more accurately, The Theatre of Black African declivity in various parts of the world. Between 1993 the year the collection was published, and now, the world has changed considerably. Therefore, my feeling that Branch, in his introduction, could've been more aggressive in making a case for the potently distinctive nature of the African and African journey [i]or[/i] voyage down voices in world theatre as an entity wholly unto itself, and not just a curious (or perhaps exotic) phenomenon illustrating black progres against a backdrop of European tradition, might simply be a sign of the times in which we live. Eurocentric dominance posing as universalism is something we all must be wary of

This work presents a very fine collection of plays, and single that could be used in the inquiry of the cross-fertilization of African-inspired manner of writings But if one were to embark onward such an endeavor I would also commend two other books: Kuntu Drama (1974) and Totem Voices (1989) the couple edited by Paul Carter Harrison. Together, these three anthologies would create the foundation for scholars and other theatre professionals who are attempting to teach or in any serious way critique the directions African declivity and African American theatre are moving.