The Musical as Drama

the momentum of greatness in the plays of August Wilson.
Many of the conventions we have been discussing for the mu-
sical are at work in Wilson’s plays too, and if the American the-
atre can respond to the completion of Wilson’s cycle of plays,
or to the tragedy of his death, by bringing African-American
drama into the visibility it deserves—the long tradition of
African-American drama, I mean, which reaches back to the
Harlem Renaissance and beyond—the musical may finally
learn to include the minorities it has largely done without.
Then the genre will lay claim to the political seriousness in-
herent in its aesthetics. The power of the genre is largely the
power of minorities in the first place, but we are looking ahead
to a musical theatre where one does not have to notice who is
missing. This will be the theatre of book-and-number aesthet-
ics we have been describing, but it will open the way to think-
ing about politics and theatre together more fully and more ex-
actly than we can now. I think the new shows will have what we
have been talking about: a power of reflection running be-
tween the different modes of book and number, a sense of the
irreverence of the genre, and a feeling for the anger and beauty
of radical multiplicity. The image created by this kind of drama
is of people who can create a coherent world accessible to any-
one who can catch the beat and who refuse to accommodate
themselves to the powerful and their technological tricks. I am
not really talking about musicals in that sentence, which I have
tried to phrase so as to include other qualities of life and art,
but musicals are an image of what I am talking about, a social
life worth aiming for.

WHAT KIND OF DRAMA IS THIS? 211