BLACK STAGE REPORT

FIRST, A DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT A STORY about how Black theatres grapple with issues of inequity, though that certainly is a part of their history and their founding, which I’ll try to contextualize here. This is a story about how art is made against the odds, how new voices enter the field despite covered ears, and how hearts are opened through the power of live theatre.

The American theatre has largely been conceived as a white American art form designed to tell the stories of white Americans to each other, evoking nostalgia and escape every time the curtain rises. This has been the norm for much of this country’s history, but the kettle has been whistling loudly for the last 40 years with the message that it’s long past time for American stages to reflect and present more of the range of American life. Indeed it is no coincidence that the regional theatre movement, which began in the early 1960s, and the Civil Rights movement were celestially aligned. The full realization of human rights includes, though it is not limited to, the sharing and appreciation of culturally specific stories, customs, and art. That is why in 1966, when Stokely Carmichael pronounced in his Black Power speech that “a broad nose, a thick lip, and nappy hair is us, and we are going to call that beautiful whether they like it or not,” it incited an artistic revolution. African American artists took that as a charge to move their narratives from vaudeville and the folklore tradition to the theatre with an “-re.”

The steeping of the Black Arts Movement within the Black Power Movement also presented an opportunity for African American artists to imagine themselves in roles they were often prevented from playing. There could be a Black Ophelia or Julius Caesar, a bronze Willy Loman or Blanche DuBois. In fact, many Black actors went to theatre school and studied the Greek tragedies and Shakespearean classics, but had been relegated to playing servant and clown roles, if they were given parts at all. Most of the country’s African American theatres were founded to give Black actors an opportunity to play diverse roles and to offer Black playwrights the chance to tell honest, original stories about their communities.

As August Wilson said in his famous “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech at the 1996 TCG conference, the Black Power movement of the ’60s was “the kiln in which I was