Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal

Abstract

Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated “Negro Units” set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged Black versions of “white” classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the Black performance community—a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made and remade Black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of Black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider Black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of Black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.

Black Theatre Archives and the Making of a Black Dramatic Tradition

“…Employing significant numbers of African Americans as actors, technicians, directors, dramatists, and administrators, these units were, relatively speaking, well-documented, and many of their playscripts and production materials were preserved in the official federal theatre archive. 2 The archive of the Federal Theatre, as well as theatre anthologies and histories of the 1930s give the impression that playwriting was a man's job. Fewer than twenty percent of dramas staged by the project were written by women, and few women of color were given opportunities to develop new work.…”

“…For histories and archives of dramatic literature tend to foreground the creative genius of individual playwrights in ways that reinscribe men as creators of culture at the expense of women. 4 Federal Theatre Archives at GMU, the Library of Congress and the National Archives hold a wealth of black theatre manuscripts developed on the Federal Theatre Project. The vast majority are attributed to individual male playwrights.…”