African American Drama
August Wilson is an African American playwright and one of this country’s
greatest dramatists. His magnum opus is “The ‘Century’ or ‘Pittsburgh’ Cycle,” a
collection of ten engrossing plays (see the Study Guide on Wilson in Part III of
this volume). Paving the way for Wilson and others was Charles Gordone, who
in 1970 became the first African American playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize
in drama for No Place to Be Somebody (1969). In succeeding years black dramatists
considerably enhanced the repertoire of the American theater, with several garner-
ing Pulitzers.
A Soldier’s Play, by Charles Fuller (1982 Pulitzer), exposes racial assump-
tions and hatreds on a segregated military base in 1944. The eleven playlets, or
“exhibits,” in The Colored Museum (1986), by George C. Wolfe, satirize black
stereotypes, history, and culture. He also wrote the book (that is, the script) for
and directed Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), a “warts-and-all” musical biography of jazz
pioneer Jelly Roll Morton. Suzan-Lori Parks writes provocatively, poetically,
and often allegorically about stereotypes, discrimination, the United States’
racial history, and the resilience of black America in the four-part Imperceptible
Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989), The Death of the Last Black Man in the
Whole Entire World (1990), and Venus (1996). Topdog/Underdog (2002 Pulitzer)
follows the long-standing rivalry between African American brothers named
Lincoln and Booth to its violent conclusion.
Musicals and revues either celebrating African American composers and
themes or with African American casts or creators delighted diverse audiences.
Successful productions include Purlie (1970), Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope (1972),
The Wiz (1975), Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978), Dreamgirls (1981), Sophisticated Ladies
(1981), The Tap Dance Kid (1983), Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk (1996),
The Lion King (1997), Caroline, or Change (2002), and The Color Purple (2005).
Feminist Drama
Prize-winning dramas and comedies by women about their gender’s repression,
victimization, rejection of rules imposed by a patriarchal society, and quest for
selfhood enlivened contemporary American theater. Ntozake Shange presents
such themes in African American culture in her “choreopoem” for colored girls
who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1975). María Irene Fornés, a
native of Cuba who writes on familiar feminist issues, regularly experiments with
the forms of her theatrical pieces by combining modernism, magical realism, film
techniques, humor, and nonrealistic staging. These traits distinguish Fefu and Her
Friends (1977), Mud (1983), and The Conduct of Life (1985).
Mississippi native Beth Henley peoples her plays with Southern women,
often eccentrics and grotesques, whose lives are marked by violence, ostracism,
disease, and heartache; they are also fighters, whose struggles earn them a mea-
sure of hope for a better future. In her first play, the Southern Gothic comedy
Crimes of the Heart (1979), three quirky sisters reunite and commiserate about
their unsatisfactory love lives, including the abusive husband shot by the youngest
sibling; two of them succumb to guilty but liberating laughter at their domineer-