JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Indiana State University and St. Louis University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African American Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.126.108 on Sun, 22 Jun 2014 17:51:48 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditionshas become either a very expensive middle-class night out or an experience for a small avant garde. In both cases theatre does not seem to enjoy the widespread popular support that other forms of culture-sports, music, film-continue to elicit. And even with the celebration of history, better critics, and better funding, there may simply not be a way to reinstall a nineteenth-century popular art form back into the late twentieth century. But perhaps that doesn't matter, with performers like Rhodessa Jones, Anna Deavere Smith, and The Hittite Empire, along with others Hay celebrates in this book, who continue to find that only the theatre allows them to talk that talk. Supervised by Hallie Flanagan, a theatre professor from Vassar, it employed an average of more than 10,000 theatre workers, operated 185 producing units in 28 states, and created and sustained a weekly audience of as many as half a million people. Among its most important (and, until recently, leaststudied) legacies were its "Negro Units," dedicated to producing plays on black subjects for black audiences. Hundreds of actors, directors, designers, technicians, and playwrights were employed by as many as eighteen Negro Units in New York, Chicago, Seattle, Hartford, Los Angeles, and smaller cities around the country. Defying the external forces of racism, bureaucracy, and politics, and overcoming internal disputes over aesthetics and ambition, the members of these units came closer than any group of African-American theatre artists before (and arguably since) to founding a truly national black theatre. Until 1974, however, when Lorraine Brown and John O'Connor uncovered and began cataloging the Federal Theatre's "lost" archives found in an old airplane hanger in Baltimore, few books covered the Federal Theatre, much less the Negro Units, in any real depth. Hallie Flanagan's Arena (1940) and Doris Abramson's Negro Playwrights and the American Theatre (1967), both of which treat the Negro Units only in passing, were among the central printed resources. In 1980, E. Quita Craig's Black Drama of the Federal Theatre Era provided a fine and much needed analysis of the period's black plays, but gave less attention to the era's black theatre-that dynamic interplay of playwrights, actors, directors, designers, producers, audiences, and critics that makes the theatre perhaps the most complex of the arts.Blueprintsfor a Black Federal Theatre, 1935...
