Making some noise: Writers of color and the contemporary theatrical landscape

BY MADELEINE OLDHAM

HISTORICALLY, THE AMERICAN THEATRE has largely excluded Black writers from its canon. August Wilson’s work received a rare exception, as did one play by Lorraine Hansberry… and that’s about it. For decades, common parlance posited that production-worthy writing by Black authors didn’t exist. Artistic directors insisted that they just simply “chose the best plays.” We are finally as a field beginning to see this for the bias it is, and recognizing that our culture demands and deserves a more expansive ideology, particularly when it comes to our storytelling.

For so long, western societies have assumed the white male experience as the baseline; and the people holding the power, wealth, and influence drove the choices about what stories got told. This hierarchical structure assumes a tacit agreement among the culture at large, and handily dismisses work that fails to fall in line. Important Black playwrights have written seminal texts for a very long time, and yet plays by Adrienne Kennedy, Alice Childress, Ed Bullins, or Amiri Baraka rarely receive productions on our stages. Literary giants Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and James Baldwin all wrote for the theatre. It’s not that Black writers didn’t exist; the mainstream decision-makers just weren’t paying attention.

However, perhaps as a result of this glaring blind spot, generations of people of color and women learned how to see the world through the eyes of characters who didn’t necessarily look like them. From Willy Loman’s everyman struggles to Stanley Kowalski’s tragic brutality, these iconic stories encouraged audiences to ponder big questions about human nature, and their narratives were considered universal. Maybe, ironically, that’s why it took so long to invite a more inclusive conversation: the people with the power rarely had to imagine themselves in the shoes of someone “other.”

This seems to have finally begun to shift: critics, artists, and audiences alike have recognized that we are living through a significant moment in the American Theatre, where artists of color are being embraced. Many large theatres program plays by Black playwrights regularly, and not just in February for Black History Month. Names like Lynn Nottage, Dominique Morisseau, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, and Suzan-Lori Parks appear regularly on year-end lists of the most produced playwrights. Another wave of successful writers is following hot on their heels, with Jocelyn Bioh, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Michael R. Jackson, and Ngozi Anyanwu gaining nationwide attention and acclaim for their work. Their plays, as well as those of a long list of peers, tell both American and international stories; work about the United States might focus on the African American experience, and it also might not. The New York Times ran a series of recent articles on what some people are considering a new Black canon, and what the NYT calls “a generation of Black playwrights whose fiercely political and formally inventive works are challenging audiences, critics, and the culture at large to think about race, and racism, in new ways.”

Perhaps the next step involves eroding the expectation that Black playwrights always write about race, and imagining a world where the same license afforded to white writers applies to writers of color: the liberty to write the story they want to write, whatever that happens to be. In the meantime, despite there being more work to do, we can take a moment to acknowledge that progress has been made. It’s impossible to predict which of today’s plays will stand the test of time, but it’s a good bet that our future canon will look very different from the one behind us.