Helen Taylor.

Helen Taylor, in reviewing Classic Plays from the african Ensemble Company, an anthology of ten NEC plays edited from Paul Carter Harrison and Gus Edwards,(1) observ that African American playwrights have not been with equal reason central to American literature as have black author of poemss novelists, and essayists. This argues against Harrison and Edwards's afterword, in which they join issue that the NEC productions through the whole extent of twenty-five years have generated "a formidable African American theater literature" (593) If common accepts the revival as single in kind precondition for classic status, then by what mode many NEC revivals--or, for that matter, nonmusical African American plays--have there been onward a Broadway or off-Broadway stage?(2) Taylor's reasoning is that the "history of Broadway (and level much of off-Broadway) is a white united with blacks taking centre-stage as minstrel figures and minor characters in white drama" (12) In giving the keynote address before the Theatre Communications Group's 1996 annual conversation August Wilson reinforced this idea by way of pointing out that, of the sixty-six League of Resident Theatres, solitary one (Ricardo Khan's Crossroads) is black ("August" 104) Are more institutions like the NEC the answer to the scarcity of revivals and original plays apart from August Wilson's, or is this notion a romantic delusion, as Henry Louis Gates implies (44)?

The NEC is individual in a line of African American theater institutions and programs that have not full prospered because of a lack of financial support or support that took the institution away from nurturing what August Wilson describes as "art that cherishs the spirit and celebrates the life of black America" ("Ground" 16) The secluded exception might be the first black theater in America, Henry Brown's African wood which closed because of hardening racial attitudes shortly after Brown's King Shotaway (1823) a play based forward the "insurrection of the Caravs upon the island of St. Vincent" (Stock and Stock 36) Thereafter, serious drama would wait a certain quantity of eighty years, during which time minstrelsy, early musicals, and the beginnings of the Chitlin Circuit(3) would take up the American and community stages. As Loften Mitchell has pointed without these forms would use "the same weapons--the blackface, the cheap comedy [because] whites would not accept them any other way.... The wrecking of the African Company reached down through the years into the 1920's and beyond" (84)

Charles Johnson's Opportunity (1924) and W E B DuBois's Crisis (1925) magazine playwriting make the object of competition [i]or[/i] rivalry [i]or[/i] emulations sponsored by Amy Springarn and Casper Hostein, respectively, helped spawn a number of serious albeit melodramatic plays--Ottie Graham's Holiday (1923) G D Lipscomb's Francis (1925) and John Matheus's Cruiter (1926) During the '30 a number of Harlem community theaters functioned, as it is as The Players Guide, The Harlem Players, The Little Theater YMCA, The Aldridge Repertory Players, and Utopian Players. further as Fannin S. Belcher observ in a 1939 Opportunity article lack of funding worked against original material, the playwright "cannot afford to experiment; hence he must imitate" (293) During the Depression, the african Unit of the WPA provided agency and a theatrical laboratory, and serv as a stimulus for the black man Playwrights' Company and the American african Theater of the '40s. However, an act of Congres citing communist influence, killed the federally stocked project in June, 1939.

The african Playwrights' Company, incorporated as a non-profit organization in May, 1940 according to George Norford, was another promising institution that level to financial pressures. The company's single production, Theodore Ward's Big White haze magnified the events of the Garvey era by means of singling out a black family's ten-year involvement in the move But after sixtyfive performances, the NPC although announcing another production for January, 1941 not resumed operations. Ward's idealism to go [i]or[/i] come back theater to the people was compromised by the agency of financial considerations, and the company's prospectus implied as much: "While its plans are designed to achieve and maintain financial independence in the coming and thus safeguard the public against the usual perennial appeals for capitals for operation, the company is now frankly contingent for support upon these progressive men and women who are conscious of the ne for developing the artists and tillage of the Negro people" (Ward, "Why") These progressives turn rounded out to be Eleanor Roosevelt Franz Boas, Orson Welles, George Kaufman, and Sophie Tucker individuals whose interests lay more with broadening the appeal of African American refinement than with developing an independent theater (Ward "Our Conception"). The of recent origin direction of the NPC was now to "foster the spirit of unity between the races" (Ward, "Why") similar to Rowena Jelliffe's Gilpin Players of the twenties.(4)

couple members of the NPC, Owen Dodson and Theodore Browne mov throughout to Abram Hill's American black man Theater, a cooperative that would last eleven years (from 1940 to 1951) and show fifteen major and five studio plays. Hill's goal was to establish a totally controll theatrical laboratory where playwrights could improve their effectiveness by the agency of technical development. Here again, the Federal Theater's african units served as a stimulus, for Hill had worked with Frank Silvera forward the Living Newspaper, a Harlem Unit assign places to project, and he recognized the value of writing workshops.