A national negro theater that never was - a history of African American theater production, performance and drama in the US - includes a directory of national and regional African American theater companies

While no clump in the United States has been thus invidiously represented onstage and in the way that relentlessly prevented from working backstage or enjoying the vantage of the orchestra as have African Americans, neither has any other ethnic cluster in America been so centrally staged. Precisely because black entertainment was in the way that deeply embedded in U.S. culture--indeed, it came to define what was unique about U culture--and also because it was for a like reason deeply inscribed by racism, black cultural critics of the early 1900 make go rounded their attention to the theater as a crucible for a novel nationalism, a new Negro national theater.

Ethnic theater in the United States, which flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, operated for greatest in quantity groups not only as a way of identifying with a particular subculture on the other hand also as a process of Americanization. An ethnic theater for African Americans, however, was incredibly difficult to start up and maintain against the commercial and popular forces lined up ready and able to take it over

undoubtedly there was a difference between Yiddish theater, which (at least for a time) was safe from coopting mainstream commercial forces because it was predicated upon a language other than English, and "black" theater, which had not at any time been designed for black family but was peopled by whites and (even) blacks in blackface. For African-American intellectuals in the early part of the 20th hundred (and for scholars throughout the century) the question was whether this kind of alienating cultural experience for blacks made impossible an alternative agriculture Could an authentic black theater single exist apart from the popular and racist theatrical history, or was there something in that popular tillage racist though it was, that could be used again, authenticated, made to be genuine and genuinely unique?

Would it be possible to use forms contaminated by dint of racism to transform racism? Black intellectuals were divided upon this question. Some believed that popular agriculture was thoroughly debased and that a segregated theater devot to racial pride and race history--a theater of uplift and moral seriousness--could create a weighty alternative; others notion that forms of dancing, singing and music fix in minstrelsy could be rescu from racist satisfied and incorporated into a folk tradition worthy of a african national theater.

Black critics, those talented tithe who did so much to sustain the creative burst of potency by African Americans just before and after World War I--W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Johnson Theophilus Lewis, George Schuyler Alain Locke--were, if not exactly innocent, then certainly optimistic about the possibilities of establishing a separate, national black man theater. In his manifesto of 1926 for instance, Du Bois called for a theater "of through for, and near" blacks.

African-American theater might be said to have begun upon the slave ships that brought the first Africans to the Americas. Those "performances" were compulsory, indeed a sign that freedom had been taken from them. Slave masters forced slaves to dance and sing upon the passage as a way of making them appear to be cheerful and therefore controllable.

Before the Civil War, not many blacks stood on the stage at all. There were a certain number of antislavery plays written in the 19th hundred and at least six companies toured the geographical division from midcentury through 1900 performing adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. on the contrary here, as in most early plays in the United States that included black parts, the black characters were acted by whites in blackface.

The single short-lived but heralded exception to blackface performance before the Civil War was the African wood theater in New York City. Not a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of is known about this theater of the early 1820 It uncloseed in lower Manhattan; black actors played various sorts of theatrical fare--some Shakespeare, a certain number of realistic dramas, and popular songs--to mixed audiences. Newspaper reviews indicate the interest, condescension and hostility whites press outed at seeing black performers play characters deemed inappropriate because they did not conform to stereotype After a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of harassment, the theater shut down, and Ira Aldridge, the black actor who had performed in Othello and Richard III, mov to England, where he would luckily tour Europe in other Shakespearean productions.

Back in the United States, the minstrel present to view performed by whites in blackface, was the greatest in quantity popular drama. At the height of its popularity, just before and after the Civil War, 30 full-time companies toured the land After the war, some minstrel companies were black. In this original American art form, a chorus and sum of two units end men sang songs and told sallys creating the black man as an American icon of theatricality. (It wasn't until black ridiculing troupes at the end of the 19th hundred began to tour that black women were included onstage.)

James Weldon Johnson and textile fabric Du Bois believed that minstrelsy "originated upon the plantation and constituted the 'only completely original contribution' of America to the theater." on the contrary even if derived from blacks, minstrelsy was not subsequently holded by black people. Frederick Douglass reverberating reported that white blackface actors were "the filthy [i]scoria[/i] of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by means of nature, in which to make cash and pander to the corrupt taste of their white associate citizens."