Bonner, Marita Odette (1899–1971)
Playwright, short story writer, and essayist, Marita
Bonner was one of the most interesting, versa-
tile, and talented figures in the theatre movement
during the Harlem Renaissance. An innovator in
form and thesis, she was ahead of her time; her
works would later influence such playwrights as
Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, and
Ntozake Shange. Despite her small literary out-
put, particularly her lack of plays, Bonner used the
stage as a platform to address a wide range of so-
cial issues related to gender, class, and race.
Bonner was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on
June 16, 1899, to Joseph Andrew and Mary Anne
(Noel) Bonner. Younger than her three siblings,
Bernice, Joseph, and Andrew, she was educated
at Brookline High School, where she excelled in
musical composition and German and contrib-
uted regularly to The Sagamore, a student maga-
zine. Between 1918 and 1922 Bonner attended
Radcliffe College, where she studied English and
comparative literature and was admitted into the
highly competitive writing seminar of Charles T.
Copeland, who cautioned her not to be a “bitter”
writer. His reprimand, which she called “a cliché to
colored people who write” (Roses and Randolph,
181), further fueled her determination to become
a writer and to protest the social ills of America. In
her senior year at Radcliffe, Bonner began teaching
at Cambridge High School in Boston. After gradu-
ating, she taught at Bluefield Colored High School
in Bluefield, West Virginia, and at Armstrong Col-
ored High School in Washington, D.C.
While in D.C., Bonner attended poet and play-
wright Georgia Douglas Johnson’s famous S
Street Salon, a weekly writers’ group, where she was
encouraged and inspired by other writers and play-
wrights, including May Miller, Zora Neale Hur-
ston, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Countee
Cullen, Jessie Fauset, Jean Toomer, S. Randolph
Edmonds, Willis Richardson, and her close friend
and mentor Johnson. Although Bonner devoted
much of her literary career to writing fiction, she
began writing plays during this period. She used
her experimental plays to voice her concern with
the racial, class, and gender inequities she was con-
vinced blacks faced. She echoed this concern in her
1925 landmark autobiographical essay, “On Being
Young—A Woman—and Colored.”
Published in Opportunity and written in black
dialect, Bonner’s first play, The Pot Maker: A Play to
Be Read (1927), which suggests a strong influence
by Georgia Douglas Johnson, indicts, through the
main character, who feels “devalued” as a woman,
the infidelity often found in oppressive, poverty-
ridden environments. Praised as her masterpiece
and most ambitious work, The Purple Flower: A
Phantasy That Had Best Be Read (1928) takes place
in a fictional world that allegorically represents race
relations in America. The characters are convinced
that only a violent revolution in a racist America
will free them from their plight and ensure the
survival of the NEW MAN. Written three decades
before the turbulent 1960s, The Purple Flower, as
critics note, signaled Bonner’s prophesy of vast
changes in America, setting the stage for such writ-
ers as Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Sonia
Sanchez, and Ed Bullins (Brown-Guillory, 18).
In Bonner’s last known existing play, Exit, an
Illusion (1929), she probes the popular Harlem
Renaissance theme of “passing,” in which light-
skinned blacks deny their black identity to become
white-identified. Passing is a major theme for the
central characters in James Weldon Johnson’s The
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Alice
Dunbar-Nelson’s Gone White. Bonner’s later one-
act plays won the $200 first prize for best play in the
1927 Crisis magazine contest. Muddled Dreams, a
fourth play, has not been located. Bonner joined
the Washington Krigwa Players, but the company
did not produce her prize-winning plays.
As the subtitles of Bonner’s first two plays sug-
gest, she apparently intended them to be read,
which may explain why they were never produced
during her life. Some critics speculate that they
were considered too avant-garde, which not only
set them apart from the plays of her contempo-
raries but also necessitated numerous technologi-
cal challenges to stage them. Nevertheless, they
were read and appreciated by several artists of
the Harlem Renaissance and were most influen-
tial to later writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice
Walker, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, and
Gayl Jones (Roses and Randolph, 166).64 Bonner, Marita Odette