Theatre History Studies

Beyond Art vs. Propaganda? Developing Black Dramaturgies

In the pages that follow, I revisit theatre theory generated by Black female theatre artists to historicize an ongoing conversation among thinkers regarding the form, structure, and convention of Black theatre. In doing so, I illustrate that Black dramaturgy is not a new concept but rather one that can be found in the early writings of prominent Black intellectuals and artists. Reading texts by Anna Julia Cooper, Eulalie Spence, and Zora Neale Hurston, I contend that Black feminist dramaturgical thinking encompasses the "both/and" in content, [End Page 130] form, and structures as it collapses division and, instead, creates a continuum of intellectualism. The ideas presented by these three writers are often in contention. I place them in conversation, then, to underscore the complexity of Black feminist thought, where all who fall under its umbrella are not always in agreement. Untethering the oft-repeated "art vs. propaganda" debate from its masculinist ethos, I briefly gloss the arguments around these debates to evaluate their positions on Black dramaturgy and its efficacy for Black theatremaking. These works of dramatic and performance criticism by Cooper, Spence, and Hurston offer, in my view, a necessary feminist rejoinder to the masculinist undercurrent of Black dramaturgies.

Black dramaturgy perhaps can be traced back to W. E. B. Du Bois's demands for an authentic Black theatre that is "about us, by us, for us, and near us."⁵ Though published nearly a century ago, Du Bois's understanding of Black theatre continues to be practiced, both consciously and unconsciously. For Du Bois, theatre has the capacity to imbue Black communities with social and political power and can serve as a corrective to the harm perpetuated by systems of white supremacy, racism, and anti-Blackness. Du Bois's dramaturgy, then, gives credence to intentionality in performance and production, without the specificity of developmental practice. It merely engages what one sees on the stage rather than taking a holistic approach to how plays and productions are created.⁶ Oftentimes, dramaturgy and intellectual engagement with Black theatre is traced through masculinist voices, which begin with Du Bois and continue with Alain Locke and Langston Hughes.⁷ Here, instead, I want to look to Black female intellectuals to forge a scholarly network of Black women critically engaging and debating the form and function of Black theatre and performance work.

Dramaturgies of Empathy and Care: Cooper and Spence's Black Theatre

An ongoing aspect of the debate about Black theatre and performance centers on whether it should function as art or propaganda—that is, whether Black artists should be concerned with producing art as entertainment or art as politics. Positioned as firmly in the territory of Locke (art) vs. Du Bois (propaganda), Black female creators were also putting pen to paper and offering their own entry points into this critical debate in the decades following Reconstruction. In this section, I focus specifically on Cooper and Spence's dramaturgies of empathy and care to emphasize the feminist intervention to the sociological and clinical nature of the masculinist debate, though I am careful not to assert a [End Page 131] gender-based essentialism. Anna Julia Cooper, whose formative work, A Voice from the South (1892), is considered the first theoretical meditation on Black feminism, was central to this debate. Because of this, Cooper has earned her rightful place at the forefront of Black feminist intellectual history.⁸ However, as Black theatre scholar Monica White Ndounou observes, Cooper was also a theorist and practitioner of theatre who authored (and even directed) numerous plays and pageants, despite her erasure from Black theatre history.

Ndounou reckons with the overlooking and erasure of Cooper's intellectual contributions to Black theatre and performance by dismantling Cooper's moniker as "the female Du Bois" and illustrating "how she practically implemented theoretical discourse in her creative work, pedagogy, scholarship, and activism."⁹ Ndounou refers to this practice as "dramaturgical meritocracy," which involves valuing the creative labors of "neglected peoples" through using theatre and dramaturgy as a way to advocate for social and political rights, equity, and justice.¹⁰ Cooper's essay "The Negro's Dialect" (ca. 1930), for instance, presents dramaturgical analysis for consideration. In the piece, Cooper delves into the relationship between linguistics and performance, arguing against any kind of essentialism in evaluating the authenticity of an actor's portrayals. For example, she examines DuBose Heyward's Porgy (1925) and its use of "Negro dialect." To illustrate her major dramaturgical framework, Cooper employs painting as a metaphor: "Whether he works with pigments or chisel, with tone pictures or muscular action, he must reveal to you, whoever you are a human kinship, the great human fact, whatever his race and whatever his theme. DeBose Heywood can thus paint Porgy of Catfish Alley and Mamba's Daughters, not because of any personal photography from experience with 'Types' in those environs, still less because of any sermon or theorem he has to promulgate, but because he has the genius to look into that ant hill down deep enough and sincerely enough to find that 'No Fate under the hood of environing conditions is the inexorable protagonist of Man in Life's Drama, whether the hero be Oedipus or Jean Val Jean, Porgy or Othello.'"¹¹ Here, Cooper untethers an essentialist understanding of how language functions in Black theatre by looking to the way these linguistic practices are deployed and the way they work within the pieces. Her reading is both critically incisive and generous, employing the multidirectional strategies of Black feminist critique. Cooper understands that Black feminism attends to the "both/and"; she does not substitute critical rigor with generosity but rather examines how dramaturgy can be used to reveal anyone's humanity. Her use of the word "kinship" further suggests a connectivity and relationality.

Cooper's understanding of dramaturgy, however, challenges the idea that writing marginalized characters must somehow be attached to dramatizing lived [End Page 132] experience and reality and, instead, suggests that true "genius" is to be steeped in deep research of the conditions shaping characters. That she chose characters such as Porgy from Porgy and Othello from Shakespeare's Othello and thinks critically about how theatre creates empathy situates Cooper's theories as a dramaturgical strategy and commitment that can be practiced onstage and in life. Cooper offers that dramaturgy creates pathways to a theatre steeped in empathy and care and where the most marginalized are spotlighted. This demonstrates, perhaps, what historian Martha Cutter refers to as "parallel empathy," which "asserts concordance" between a viewer and the marginalized subject. Accordingly, this phenomenon makes clear that while white writers may not be able to "step into" the shoes of the Black characters they write about, there is a shared understanding of a universal human condition based on the specific experience.¹²

Notably, Cooper's essay contains only one reference to a work authored and/or composed by a Black artist, which is "Carry Me Back to Ol' Virginny." The song, which was the official state song of Virginia and the only state song by a Black artist, was written and composed by James A. Bland, a songwriter and minstrel performer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cooper refers to the song in order to illustrate a point she makes about the origins of Black dialect—as a shared language between Black and white people in the South. Cooper writes, "'Ole Virginny' for instance is heard just as frequently among untraveled whites of that locality as among uneducated Blacks. The Negro simply speaks the language of his locale, gives back his version of what he hears."¹³ This statement emphasizes the idea that Cooper has been acknowledging a universalism to theatrical practice, but not as a way to erase the specificity of Blackness.

Eulalie Spence, a Caribbean immigrant playwright and theatre artist whose own plays include ghost stories, romances, and comedies, is much more forceful in her argument for a Black theatre that is purely for aesthetics and entertainment. Spence holds the distinction of being the first Black female playwright to have a play presented in a Broadway theatre—a feat she achieved when her Fool's Errand (1927) was produced by Du Bois's Krigwa Players. Spence also served as a mentor to Joseph Papp, founder of the Public Theater, while working as an English and drama teacher at the Eastern District High School in Brooklyn, New York. A proponent of the Lockian belief that theatre should not reinforce the assumed inferiority of the Black community, Spence looked to the medium as a site for refuge from the ills of intersectional oppression. In her 1928 essay, "A Criticism of the Negro Drama as It Relates to the Negro Dramatist and Artist," Spence defines "Negro drama" as "any drama or theatrical production which essays to portray the life of the Negro."¹⁴ This definition seems akin to the Du Boisian principles of Black theatre. However, Spence goes on to clarify exactly how [End Page 133] this is to be done in both writing and production as she singles out white playwrights like Paul Green, Dubose Heyward, and Eugene O'Neill as "point[ing] the way and herald[ing] a new dawn" for Black theatre, as she claims that Black playwrights could also learn about Black theatre and performance from their models and principles.

Spence's considerations become most potent for a historiography of Black dramaturgy in her observations regarding principles for creating Black theatre. Lamenting the idea that "everyone thinks he can write a play" and observing that other cultural forms such as the novel are taken more seriously, Spence writes, "A play to be read! Why not the song to be read not sung, and the canvas to be described, not painted! To every art its form, thank God! And to the play, the technique that belongs to it!"¹⁵ Spence recognizes the specificity of theatre's form and function ("to be read"; "the technique that belongs to it"). Her dramaturgical principles are to "portray the life of his people, their foibles, if he will, and their sorrows and ambition and defeats."¹⁶ Spence is, thus, a proponent of "the beauty of the black ordinary" and staging mundane, quotidian representations of Black life instead of spectacularized violence or social commentary.¹⁷ Raging against the "propaganda" in Black theatre, Spence, instead, offers that the dramaturgy of Black theatre should provide "a little more laughter … and fewer spirituals," suggesting that the goal of Black theatre is to be a reprieve from structural and systemic oppression.¹⁸

As a playwright, then, Spence's work reflects the dramaturgical practices she offers in her essay. For example, Fool's Errand, her most successful and well-known work, centers Maza, who is accused by her neighbors of being pregnant out of wedlock. This accusation occurs because baby clothes are found and are later revealed to have been made by Maza's mother, the actual pregnant person in the community.¹⁹ While one could certainly read a political bent to the story (the town is rural and working-class, all of the characters speak with a noticeable dialect that could be attributed as African American Vernacular English, and there is a rather obvious Black feminist commentary on a young woman's alleged sexual impropriety), it is far more likely that, based on Spence's essay, the play's humor, entertainment, and portrayal of mundane Black life remain its dramaturgical centerpieces. This is demonstrated in the play's climatic moment where Maza is being actively confronted about her assumed pregnancy by Pastor Williams and other community members. Though Pastor Williams is discussing how her actions are against Christian doctrine amid other acts of moral grandstanding, the scene is painted in a humorous fashion with melodramatic dialogue from the pastor and echoing from the congregation (that is, other members of the town).²⁰ Additionally, the title itself refers to the colloquial [End Page 134] use of the phrase "fool's errand," which signals a task or activity that cannot be completed. This, to me, exemplifies the purpose that Spence puts forth in her essay, which shows the humor and entertainment found in Black life.

One of Spence's other plays, Her: A Mystery Play in One Act (1927), exhibits her propagation of Black theatre as art and entertainment. The play centralizes Martha and Pete, an older married couple who live in a house belonging to landlord John Kinney. Martha mentions having trouble sleeping, attributing this to someone she refers to only as "her."²¹ Kinney brings in a young couple, Alice and Sam, who are interested in renting a room. As the couple eventually wants to move in, Martha warns them that the rooms are "haunted."²² Toward the play's conclusion, Martha reveals the identity of "her," an old tenant of Filipino descent who died by suicide. I point to this play as an example of Spence's dramaturgical principles being put into practice because it serves the main purpose of being a ghost story and a mystery. While, like Fool's Errand, race, gender, and ethnicity can be read upon it, Her primarily functions as a piece of artistic entertainment for those who may enjoy such haunting narratives.

The essays mentioned here offer but a small snapshot of early-twentieth-century theories and practices of Black theatre. Both Cooper and Spence engage with the framing of Blackness on the musical stage, specifically through Heyward and the Gershwins, the authors of Porgy and Bess. Cooper and Spence's observations are equally generous to the Gershwins and Heyward. Where many had been critical of the musical's characterizations and its inauthentic racial representation, the musical's score is still widely praised, with many of its songs—"Summertime" and "I Loves You Porgy," for example—becoming essential jazz standards. Furthermore, Porgy and Bess has received near-canonicity as a staple of Black musical theatre, despite no Black people—beyond the onstage performers—comprising its original authorial team.²³ I would be remiss, however, not to highlight the musical labor of Anne Wiggins Brown and Eva Jessye, two Black women who contributed to the original score. Brown's singing voice (she originated the role of Bess) provided a co-composition to the score, perhaps animating Black cultural theorist Lindon Barrett's contention of "the singing voice" as a way to "provide … one important means of formalizing and celebrating an existence otherwise proposed as negative and negligible."²⁴

Deeply examining the sonic and dramaturgical strategies, then, of the Gershwins and Heyward in creating Porgy and Bess, one might take the work of Cooper and Spence to illuminate and illustrate precisely what makes it a long-standing work in the Black theatre canon. What we can learn from Cooper, in particular, is around dramaturgical empathy and care, where the lived experience of the author is not as important as the material that is employed. As she argues [End Page 135] in her essay regarding the characterization of the Black characters in Porgy and Bess, the most important thing the authors of the piece offered was an attempt to understand Black humanity through centralizing these characters as well as the presence of Black women such as Brown and Jessye as members of the creative team. Spence, in a slight departure from Cooper, hails writers such as Du-Bose Heyward and Eugene O'Neill for their playwriting and narrative skill that can be instructive to the work of Black theatre. This consideration does not situate them in their racial, ethnic, and cultural identity but rather speaks to what she sees as a universality in their storytelling abilities. To observe Brown and Jessye as collaborators on Porgy and Bess, one might view Spence's considerations as championing their creative skill rather than just their identities in the artistic process.

Sonic Black Dramaturgy: A Hurstonian Method

In contrast to Cooper and Spence, Zora Neale Hurston never quite neatly fit into either of the two camps (art vs. propaganda) of the Black theatre intelligentsia. Her theories of Black life and Black performance promulgate the intersections of the aesthetic and political; she was both uninterested in art as political but simultaneously politicized her apathy toward sociopolitical debates regarding racial representation. While Cooper and Spence, for example, are notably generous to the portrayals of Black characters by white authors, Hurston is unfazed by intention and develops a theory of Black dramaturgy that is attentive to lived experience. One such way she achieves this critique is specifically through sound. Indeed, I contend that the major dramaturgical intervention Hurston performs is a sonic one, where she critiques not just the representational aspects of Porgy and Bess's characters, for example, but also what she sees as its sonic inauthenticity. I likewise maintain that her Black dramaturgical intervention is centered on music and sound as she claims the narrative of the musical "is not too true to our lives and I want to do something more penetrating."²⁵

Gershwin's Porgy and Bess brought to a head that which had been in the making for at "least a decade. There is no more Negro music in the U.S. It has been fused and merged and become the national expression. In fact, it is now denied, (and with some truth) that it never was pure Negro music, but an adaptation of white music. That is as over-simplified as the former claim that it was something purely negroid. But the fact remains that what has evolved here is something american [sic], and has come to be the national expression, and is as such influencing the music of the world."²⁶ Hurston's criticisms and observations [End Page 136] are grounded in a sonic dramaturgy here. The so-called Gershwin sound and its place as a cultural behemoth in Black music theatre history is not an authentic representation of Black people as it is often said to be; it is merely a surrogation of Black bodies into the well-established conventions of familiar white music. Praising a work like Porgy and Bess displaces the important work of Black authorship, work that writers and composers like Hurston are actively doing. Where the Gershwin sound is nearly universally praised despite its cultural extraction and exploitation, Hurston dares to be different.²⁷ A turn to two of Hurston's essays, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" and "Characteristics of Negro Expression," reveals much about her own theoretical approaches to the practice of Black dramaturgy. I consider two lines of inquiry: 1) excavating Hurston's theories of Blackness and how those inform her perspective and critical framework and 2) how these two essays demonstrate Hurston's complex understanding of the possibilities of performance and cultural expression for Black artistic producers.

First appearing in World Tomorrow, the publication of the pacificist organization Fellowship of Reconciliation, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1925) reflects on Hurston's response to racial interpellation. Decades before postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon would declare, "Look! A Negro!" in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and influence generations of Black critical theorists' ideas about Black being and living, Hurston deemed herself "everybody's Zora" and interrogated the circulation of normative characteristics of Blackness both inter- and intra-racially.²⁸ "I remember the very day that I became colored," Hurston muses, a subtle reflection on the ontological imposition of racialization alongside her own imaginative and creative expressions of Blackness. "When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown—warranted not to rub nor run," she writes. Akin to "the Fanonian moment" and Fanon's interpellation into Blackness as he is hailed by a white child, Hurston's "becoming" occurs at thirteen years old, as she moves from being nestled in an all-Black town and surrounded by those who look like her to traveling outside of her small Florida world and having Blackness imposed on her.²⁹ For Hurston, Blackness transforms from invisible to spectacularized in the process. Unlike Fanon, however, Hurston understands that Blackness is not simply an imposition but a construction, one that is made through the body. Throughout the essay, Hurston contends with her own unmaking and remaking of Blackness through gesture, sound, and feeling.

This moment of "becoming" Black for Hurston illustrates what Black queer [End Page 137] performance scholar E. Patrick Johnson identifies as Blackness as "a simulacrum until it is practiced—i.e. performed."³⁰ Johnson further contends that Blackness offers "a way to rethink performance theory by forcing it to ground itself in praxis, especially within the context of a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist, homophobic society."³¹ Black performance, thus, sees Blackness not simply as an ontological imposition and reality but as an identity made through embodiment, practice, and creative intervention. No one knows this better than Hurston. Grounded in her own experience of seeing how and when she "became" Black, Hurston also begins to see performance as a method to intervene in her own interpellation into Blackness and the Blackness of others. Thus, it is not a fixed category of her personal identity, but rather one that she must step into (and disrupt) once it is imposed upon her. Later in the essay, Hurston reflects on how this defining moment of interpellation followed her throughout her life. After moving to New York to attend Barnard College, Hurston remarks, "'Beside the waters of the Hudson' I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again."³² Hurston untethers Blackness from complexion here and instead links it to the phenomenological. Blackness, for Hurston, is constructed through what it is not: whiteness. Thus, feeling Black, feeling as "a dark rock," serves as a reminder of anti-Blackness.

Hurston builds upon her ideas about the construction, practice, and performance of Blackness in her "Characteristics of Negro Expression." Deemed by performance theorist Dwight Conquergood as the first essay on Black performance studies, Hurston theorizes Blackness as a set of embodied practices, disentangling it from being solely understood as a state of being or visual category. Hurston is concerned not only about whether one is Black but rather how one practices Black. Put another way, Hurston questions "by what means" and "in what way" is Blackness performed in cultural expression instead of only looking to the assumed race of the performer.

Both "Colored Me" and "Characteristics" importantly see Hurston linking practices of Blackness to music and sound. Because of this, Hurston's observations on Black cultural practices remain prescient for demonstrating sound as a method for her praxis of Black dramaturgy. For example, in "Characteristics," this sentiment is potently expressed when Hurston critiques the sonic inauthenticity of Black performers like the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Hurston writes of what she calls a "trick style of delivery" where Black singers (in this case, the Fisk Jubilee Singers) take the content and lyrics of Negro spirituals but transpose them into a white choral sound. Hurston contends that the Jubilee Singers—Fisk's as [End Page 138] well as others from Tuskegee University and Hampton University—"helped to spread this misconception of Negro spirituals" and "this Glee Club style has gone on so long and become so fixed among concert singers that it is considered quite authentic." Hurston ultimately concludes "that not one concert singer in the world is singing the songs as the Negro songmakers sing them."³³ Hurston critiques the trend in the mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where Black song is not necessarily Black sound here. In this way, then, the circulation of Black music, even when attached to Black bodies, is adhering to a sonic practice that, in Hurston's conception, is divorced from the conditions that shape the practice of Blackness through communal engagement—to understand Blackness, one must be in relation with other Black people.

The Future of Black Dramaturgy

What turning to these essays by Cooper, Spence, and Hurston serves to underscore are the ways that Black dramaturgy has opened up new avenues for Black theatrical practices. While much of the debate around structures, conventions, and principles of Black theatre and performance have centered Black male intellectuals and scholars, I argue that Cooper, Spence, and Hurston propose their own critical perspectives on how dramaturgy can be used to center empathy, respite, and community. While each critic has their own unique points of view on how Black theatre should be read, received, and created, they are mostly united in their contentions that real Black art centers connectivity, collaboration, and compassion as core values—whether through art or propaganda.

These critical debates in the early twentieth century offer vital antecedents for many of the artistic statements, manifestos, and structures that other Black feminist and womanist theatre makers later produced. While Douglas Turner Ward's "American Theatre: For Whites Only?," Amiri Baraka's "The Revolutionary Theatre," and August Wilson's "The Ground on Which I Stand" continue to be staples of contemporary Black theatre practice, essays by Black female artists—Aishah Rahman's "Tradition and a New Aesthetic" (1990), Glenda Dickerson's "The Cult of True Womanhood: Towards a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre" (1987), and Pearl Cleage's "Calling in the Spirits: How Theatre Can Help Us Tell the Truth" (2016), among them—are also further expanding and changing the conversation on the purpose, practice, and principle of Black theatre and performance.³⁴ What these essays reveal is that Black theatre, especially from Black feminist and womanist perspectives, is a viable form of artistic creation with endless potential for Black political, cultural, and social intervention. [End Page 139]