Doris Abramson lecture, "Critical Response to Early Broadway Production of Plays by Black Playwrights," at the University of Iowa, June 5, 1973
Speaker 1: The following is an address from the Fifth Annual Institute for Afro-American Culture recorded at the University of Iowa, June 5th, 1973. The topic for the Institute was the Afro-American On Stage and Film. Critical Response to Early Broadway Production of Plays by Black Playwrights is the subject for this address by Doris Abramson, a Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and currently the Drama Editor of the Massachusetts Review. Introducing Dr. Abramson is Darwin Turner, Director of the Institute for Afro-American Culture at the University of Iowa.
Darwin Turner: Our speaker for this afternoon is Doris Abramson who is a native of Amherst, Massachusetts. She received her undergraduate education at the University of Massachusetts in English. Her Master's from Smith University and her PhD from Columbia. Both of the latter degrees in Theater. She's presently an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but she has had more years of experience than I shall name teaching oral interpretation directing. She's written articles in such magazines as Educational Theater Journal and Massachusetts Review, written articles naturally on drama both on the drama of such Blacks as William Wells Brown and Langston Hughes and on such non-Black drama as English and continental drama. She's recently director Shaw's Major Barbara and Ionesco's Exit The King. And she's presently serving as Drama Editor of the Massachusetts Review. She's best known, perhaps among individuals in this Institute, for her publication Negro Playwrights in the American Theater 1925-1958. And this afternoon she will be talking about the Reactions of Critics to Early Broadway Productions by Black Playwrights. Doris Abramson.
Doris Abramson: I'm very honored to be here and I feel very humble about being here. The title finally that I decided upon for this paper is Who Said What? Critical Responses to Early Broadway Productions of Plays by Black Playwrights. I want to say, first of all, that I'll feel very strange reading some of the words that I have to read in order to quote some of the criticism. As a student of theater history, I can't neglect any of this evidence but as a person, I hate to even say some of the things I'll have to read. In the mid-50's Francis Fergusson reflecting on the American theater found it necessary to enclose those words, that idea, in quotation marks. "We have, of course," he wrote, "no permanent theatrical establishment. And if there is an American theater in some other sense it has never been identified critically or historically. The American theater was, at best," he said "an ill defined notion."
Doris Abramson: Even though the little theater movement of the '20's and the socially conscious theater of the '30s and a more recent off-Broadway stir had been making a noise about moving us away from strictly commercial theater, Fergusson could only conclude that Broadway is the most constant element in our theater's life. The normal place of that art with us. Theater experimenters could not, it seems, set art or social conscience against profit and win. Broadway was, and to some extent still is, a business where value is equated with success. Where plays are products and we, the audience, are consumers to be sold a commodity called entertainment. Broadway was, and still is, deeply entrenched in our market ruled society.
Doris Abramson: It is true that what used to be called tributary theater, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, academic, regional, community has grown so that in our time we tell ourselves that we are not bound to Broadway, but the possibility of Broadway success hovers over many tributary enterprises. Take for example the recent production of Joseph A. Walker's play The River Niger. It started as a Negro ensemble company production at the St. Mark's Playhouse, then moved to Broadway's Brooks Atkinson theater and is now slated to become a film. The New York Times informs us that the producer has plunked down $100,000 plus a percentage of the profits for the privilege of bringing the acclaimed drama of a Harlem family the screen. Joseph Walker will write the screenplay.
Doris Abramson: This kind of success story doesn't happen often, but often enough to make Broadway what most Americans mean when they say the American theater. And those words are still in quotation marks because Broadway too often reflects little than the smartly produced, well-packaged result of American artistic ingenuity. It rarely makes a statement about life to persons who care to be enlightened. There are exceptions and The River Niger may be one of them. What I want to explore with you is the production of some earlier plays by Black playwrights on the Great White Way, or rather the critics response to those plays. Not because Broadway is the only or the best American theater, but because it has loomed large in our myths, our dreams.
Doris Abramson: As Claude McKay put it, "As in a dream I stand and gaze at Broadway, shining Broadway. Only my heart, my heart is lonely." I'm going to limit my discussion to the '20's and '30's of this century. I'm going to call on the judgements of both daily reviewers and drama critics, those who write under the pressure of a deadline and those who take time, a week or more, to consider what they have viewed. Partly in response to the so-called Negro renaissance of the '20's and to the pan-ethnic concerns of the New Deal of the '30's, white critics started to review what were then called Negro plays, whether by Black or white playwrights. More often the latter. Whether privately or publicly sponsored. Even when supportive, their criticism seems, from our perspective, patronizing. It is interesting to observe how their choice of words reflects the racism that permeates our society.
Doris Abramson: For the most part, I shall be quoting white critics. To suggest one of the reasons why there were not at this time many Black critics, I'd like to read to you what happened to Claude McKay in 1922 when he was invited as Drama Critic of the Liberator to review a theater guild Broadway production. "Complimentary tickets in hand, he appeared at the Fulton Theater accompanied by Liberator artist, William Gropper," and some of you will recognize this from Claude McKay's autobiography A Long Way From Home. "So on the appointed night, we presented ourselves at the box office of the Fulton. It was with keen pleasure that I anticipated seeing this fantastic play of Leonid Andreyev's, He The One Who Gets Slapped, a curious and amusing theme. The stubs were handed to Gropper and we started toward the orchestra, but the usher with a look of quizzical amazement of his face stopped us. Snatching the stubs from Gropper and muttering something about seeing a manager, he left us wondering and bewildered. In a moment he returned with the manager. 'Uh, the wrong date,' the manager stammered and taking the stubs marked orchestra he hurried off to the box office returning with others marked balcony. Suddenly, the realization came to me.
Doris Abramson: I had come here as a drama critic, a lover of the theater and a free soul, but I was abruptly reminded those things did not matter. The important fact with which I was suddenly slapped in the face was my color. I am a Negro. He the one who gets slapped. Gropper and I were shunted upstairs. I was for refusing to go, but Gropper quite properly urged compromise. So brooding darkly, madly burnt, seared and pieced and overburdened with hellish thoughts, I with Gropper beside me have averting his delicate pale face, his fingers run through his unkempt mop of Black hair shading his strangely childlike blue eyes sat through Leonid Andreyev's play. Andreyev's masterpiece, they call it. 'A masterpiece, a cleverly melodramatic stringing together, a buffoonery serio-comic philosophy sensational love hungriness and doll baby impossibilism staged to tickle the muckish emotions of the bourgeois mob,' so I thought. I sat there apart, alone, Black and shrouded in Blackness quivering in every fiber my heart denying itself and hiding from every gesture of human kindliness. Hard in it's belief that kindliness is to be found in no nation or race.
Doris Abramson: I sat inwardly groaning through what seemed a childish caricature of tragedy. Ah, if the accident of birth had made Andreyev a Negro, if he had been slapped, kicked, buffeted, pounded, niggered, ridiculed, sneered at, exquisitely tortured, near lynched and trampled under foot by the marry white hoard and if he still persevered through the terrible agony and still preserved a sound body and a mind sensitive and sharp to perceive the qualities of life, he might have written a real play about being slapped. I had come to see a tragic farce and I found myself unwillingly the hero of one. He who got slapped was I. As always in the world embracing Anglo-Saxon circus, the intelligence, the sensibilities of the Black clown were slapped without mercy." It's a long quotation. It's a strong quotation.
Doris Abramson: In 1923, W.E.B Du Bois wrote, "We all know what the Negro, for the most part, has meant hither to on the American stage. He has been a lay figure whose business it was usually to be funny and sometimes pathetic. He has never, with very few exceptions, been human or credible. This, of course, cannot last." 1923. And in 1926, again on the subject of theater, Dr. Du Bois wrote, "I do not doubt that the ultimate art coming from Black folk is going to be just as beautiful and beautiful largely in the same ways as the art that comes from white folk or yellow or red, but the point today is that until the art of the Black folk compels recognition, they will not be rated as human. What a strange burden, it occurs to me, to be born by Black artists. To be accepted as men, they must compel the recognition of white audiences. So it was thought in the '20's and for a long time to come."
Doris Abramson: This need for recognition was certainly part of what motivated Garland Anderson, Frank Wilson, Wallace Thurman, Hall Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Hughes Allison, the Black writers who's played reached Broadway in the '20's and '30's. Garland Anderson was indeed an anomaly. Anyone who has read his play Appearances knows that it would never be read except that it's known to be the first play by a Black man to have been produced on Broadway. Just a note on that, while Appearances was the first full length play of Black authorship on Broadway in 1925, it should be noted that Willis Richardson's one act play, The Chip Woman's Fortune, was on a bill of plays presented by The Colored Folk Theater at the Frazee Theater on Broadway in May of 1923. On the same bill with that play were Oscar Wild's Salome and a jazz interpretation of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.
Doris Abramson: Appearances is a courtroom melodrama with comic overtones about a Black man who knows he is innocent of a rape charge and who wins his case, as Anderson puts it, by faith alone. He is believed because he speaks the truth. Garland Anderson's British widow's reminisces, entitled Nigger Lover, published in 1938 suggest that his major influence was a Christian science pamphlet. He had seen Channing Pollock's play The Fool, but we have no idea what else he had read or seen. He was clever enough to send a script to Al Jolson who financed his trip from San Francisco to New York, to invite Governor Al Smith to a reading of the play, to send invitations to names copied from the social register, and to get a then unknown actor, Richard B. Harrison, soon to be [inaudible] himself, to read all the parts.
Doris Abramson: The critical response to the production of the play is interesting because so much is made of so little. Though there were feature stories in The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune and New York Post, before and after the play's opening, about brass buttoned and proud Garland Anderson, the bellhop playwright. My examples are taken from reviews of productions of the play when it was on tour in 1928. William Pickens, reviewing a production of Appearances in San Francisco June 1st, 1928 wrote, "It is not only the most remarkable play ever written by a Negro in the United States, but is also the most remarkable play every produced on the subject of the Negro in freedom. It states the case of the Negro against the mob and the oppressor as no theater has ever dared to state it before." Not only is this extravagant praise, it is an extravagant statement of the play's theme. It is strange to read words like mob and oppressor in connection with this play and it's message of what James Weldon Johnson called, "cheerful uplift."
Doris Abramson: Pickens went on to say that the Negro in Anderson's play is a genuine hero and triumphs. Quote: "Other playwrights have had to apologize, as it were, for showing Negro virtues to the audience by finally sacrificing the Negro as if they dared not make him a hero and then permit him to live in the sight of white Americans. If the Negro is going to be a hero, he must finally be a dead one. Homage paid by truth to prejudice." He cites Eugene O'Neill's All Gods Chillun Got Wings and Emperor Jones and Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom as examples of plays in which the lot of Negroes must be defeat. Langston Hughes was to agree with him in this matter many years later. "Anderson, on the other hand," Pickens wrote, "shows a hero who is a superior souled Negro who does not fail. One is glad to have the criticism leveled against O'Neill and Green, but the superiority of Anderson's hero seems, in the play, to have less to do with his being Black than with Anderson subscribing to Coue." For those of you youngsters, he was the one who popularized such statements as "every day in every way I'm getting better and better" and "you can do what you want to do if you believe you can do it."
Doris Abramson: When Appearances played in Chicago, The Defender critic wrote, "You ought to see Appearances. You ought to see the superb acting of Dodo Greene, the only person in the cast who is not white." Notice that. "And the one who knows what real acting can do with a role. He is a character whom all of us have met. We know him. Appearances is the best propaganda play that has been upon the Chicago stage in the last 15 years." As a post script, he adds that the theater where it was showing makes no distinction based on color, unlike other Chicago theaters. It's rather extraordinary in 1928. Lest you think Dodo Greene played the lead, let me hasten to tell you that he played the low comic role of Rufus, complete with dialect jokes and malapropisms. A theater magazine review of the 1929 Broadway revival of Appearances called him a genuine darky and credited him with singing an effective spiritual. The leading role of Carl, the high minded Black man was played by a white actor in Blackface in 1925, and again in 1929 and in England in 1930.
Doris Abramson: The London production, incidentally, had two Negro cast members one of whom was a women who must have played the role of the housekeeper who is going to law school. It's a detail like her going to law school that provides what propaganda there is in the play. It is fascinating to learn that on May 14th, 1930, Garland Anderson gave a lecture at Oxford on the Drama and it's Relation to Life. In his audience were playwrights John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, and George Bernard Shaw. I can find no record of what was said on that occasion. Nine years later, Anderson died in New York at the age of 53. Appearances was his only play, though the New York Times had announced in 1926 that his next play would deal exclusively with white characters. He had backed away from dealing with Black experience. As the Times put it, "this choice is due to the fact, as he frankly admits, the box office angle must be considered." I am reminded of what Claude McKay said on another occasion, "Thoughtless Negroes, like all good Americans, think that the commercially successful standard is the only standard by which Negro artistic achievement may be judged." End quote. Perhaps, that was Broadway's lesson for Garland Anderson.
Doris Abramson: When Frank Wilson's play Meek Mose opened on Broadway on February 6th, 1928, he was already well known in the theater. He was, at that very time, playing the title role in Porgy and he had been writing one act plays for the Lincoln and Lafayette theaters in Harlem since 1914. Meek Mose, a play about a Black preacher who believes that the meek shall inherit the earth, has in common with Appearances that the hero's faith is rewarded. In this case, oil is discovered on his land and Brother Mose and his followers are rich over night. The play provides occasions for lively arguments and for both mournful and joyful singing. The production was widely reviewed. Here is what Brooks Atkinson said in the New York Times. "The Princess Theater, which gave shelter a few weeks last summer to a Negro review bottomland, witnessed last night the opening of what the help of a kind fate and more practically, so it is reported, with a help of Otto H. Kahn is destined to be a Negro repertory theater. The occasion last night drew Mayor Walker, who obliged with a speech, Max Reinhardt, and other representatives of the stage and a play by the side of which bottomland seemed just a rough raw slice of life.
Doris Abramson: This is Meek Mose, the work of Frank Wilson, a sometime Negro postman and now the excellent actor of the title role in another play of Negro life, the Theater Guild's Porgy. With all the good will in the world towards a Negro theater as a necessity both of the drama and of contemporary American life, it is difficult to record Meek Mose as anything better than a childishly naïve endeavor full of sepia tint John Golden and depicting life only in slightly shopworn terms of the theater. It may or may not be axiomatic to say that the Negro in writing about himself sees himself not as he is," notice Brooks Atkinson knows, "but in the vivid reds, blues, and greens of the comic strip. He becomes in brief a caricature and such a caricature as even few whites make him out to be. In Meek Mose, the majority of the characters do not seem to be real people, not as real as those in Porgy or Goat Alley, but exaggerations of real people."
Doris Abramson: There are several things to notice here. First, a passing reference to a Negro review as if to say, "here is where we expect to find Negro performers in those shows that Francis Fergusson once called a 'pleasant relief from the commercial theater of the pale faces.'" The mention then of Otto Kahn, famous American banker and patron of the arts, Jimmy Walker, Mayor of New York City, and of all people, Max Rhinehardt, distinguished Austrian theater director and manager. Atkinson missed the famous American sculptor, Jo Davidson, but Percy Hammond saw him. After this list of notables is duly recorded, Atkinson tells us that Frank Wilson has been a postman as well as an actor. That reminds us, of course, of his proper place. And notice words like childishly naïve comic strip caricature. Also, the critic makes it clear that he did not find the characters in the play real. They were exaggerations. Apparently, he preferred the reality of a review.
Doris Abramson: Percy Hammond writing for the New York Herald Tribune echoed many of Atkinson's opinions and had in addition fault to find with the acting. He wrote, "Not often are colored American actors lacking in memetic ability, but the members of Meek Mose's cast seem to be Negro players imitating white players in Negro impersonations." He's telling us then that these Negroes weren't even naturals. How insulting can you get? Alexander Willcutt in the New York World found the play "an awkward and artless contraption for which money would not, he felt, "sure have been raised so readily except for the triumph of Porgy. The redeeming feature of the production," he concluded, "was the fact that when in doubt, Meek Mose burst into the singing of spirituals. The players taking to them with the alacrity born of their knowledge that here was something they could do better than anybody else." End quote. In other words, one can always count on their singing.
Doris Abramson: In Meek Mose, Frank Wilson, a man of the theater, gave audiences songs, dances, gags, even some very forthright speeches. Like Garland Anderson, he preached optimism. Unlike him, he went on to write other plays, the best of them probably being Walk Together Chillun, written for the Federal Theater and produced at Harlem's Lafayette Theater in 1936. Under Federal Theater sponsorship, Meek Mose had already become Brother Mose in 1934. Incidentally, Wilson recorded his impression of critics attitudes in a letter written to Fannin Belcher in 1938. And I quote from the late Fannin Belcher's distinguished dissertation, "Of course, there attitudes toward Negro plays depends a great deal on the play. There have been so few good Negro plays written that many times the critics have had to stretch a point in order not to throw vitreal on a Negro play. I believe that the critics feel that the public is becoming Negro minded in regards to plays. New York critics have been more than fair and unprejudiced in their judgment. Critics, I feel, are interested in Negro plays more as entertainment than anything else." Surely, that last sentence has more than a colonel of truth in it.
Doris Abramson: Wallace Thurman, a Black writer from Utah educated at the University of California, had been in New York for four years before Harlem, the play he coauthored with white writer William J. Rapp, appeared on Broadway. I say coauthored, but there seems little doubt that the story was Thurman's and most of the dialogue, though both men struggled with the plot, making several changes even as the play was in production. Thurman, unlike Anderson or Wilson, was a part of the Harlem Literary Renaissance. A novelist and short story writer before and after his one bid for recognition on Broadway. By the way, he tried five times to by a ticket that would enable him to sit center orchestra to view Harlem, only to be shunted off to a segregated section.
Doris Abramson: When Harlem opened in March of 1929, [Brooks Mantle] found himself embarrassed by the rent party that is central to this play about a transplanted southern Black family in Harlem. "I am ashamed," he wrote in The Daily News, "for both producer and actor and unhappy in the thought of the base uses to which an otherwise decent melodrama has been put." The rent party featured what was commonly known as a hot dance number. After eight weeks, the plays patronage was increased by a police raid and the attendant publicity. None of the reviewers, Black or white, found the play boring. Some were shocked, after all in addition to frenzied dancing, it had an unrepentant hip shaking heroine, cops and robbers, and shootout, and jazz rhythms.
Doris Abramson: For our purposes, it's instructive to look at a review by Theophilus Lewis, a Black critic reviewing Harlem in the April 1929 issue of Opportunity, and one by George G. Nathan, in Judge Magazine the following October. Lewis made his review the occasion for a rather serious discussion of dramatic types and though this is a fairly long quotation by Theophilus Lewis, I want to share it with you because I think these are very important words that haven't been seen by enough people. "The basis of every play is the struggle of some determined man or woman to remove the barriers that stand between him or her and happiness. This is the fundamental principle of drama and it presumes strength and aggressiveness of character. Weak and passive people do not struggle to overcome circumstances, they submit to them. It follows that character is the vital element of drama and in the appraisal of any specific play, the logical starting point is a study of the spiritual types involved in its action. Before the production of Harlem, all the so-called Negro plays, except the Emperor Jones and Lulu Bell," and you see he includes plays by white playwrights, "show that they're authors went to exceptional pains to discover unusual and quaint types for dramatic presentation.
Doris Abramson: Their quest has not been for authentic Negro characters, but for colorful types. Dramatic types are for more vivid than human types. The world knows Hamlet, as Georg Brandes pointed out, better than it knows any actual Dane that ever lived. If the picturesque vagabond is continually presented on the stage, the world will quickly gain the impression and the later conviction that he represents normal Negro character, which being capricious and irresponsible should be tolerated or even pampered, but never invested with a position of importance or authority. The dramatized rogue exerts and even more pernicious influence on Negro playwrights. Young artists, expect those possessing actual genius, inevitably choose established artists as their models. Already Paul Green, an obvious third rater, is the patron saint of a cult of young Negro writers who's plays of frustration, submission, and sorrow team with happy go lucky banjo players and conjure women.
Doris Abramson: The danger is that these eccentric forms of character may be established as traditions and when the original Negro artists appears, he will have to spend in breaking down these traditions the energy he ought to use in creative work." I'm underling the last part of that and I think you know why. "Theophilus Lewis found the atmosphere and background of Harlem genuine and expressed his delight in, what seemed to him, recognizable people, as well as vivid stage types." George Jean Nation also enjoyed Harlem. He found it full of life and refreshing, but notice the difference in his approach to the play. His use of words, the very tone of his critique. "We will read, of course, various scholarly reviews of it that will tell us that it is crudely composed, crudely acted, and just a little naïve. It is all of that, but with all it's holes, it gets under the skin of it's characters and their lives and it has all the actuality of an untouched up photograph. Here you will see a dozen and one vivid hints of niggerdom at it's realist. With it's lingo, emotions, anatomical socialism, ambitions, dejections, odors. Not niggerdom as it is portrayed by colored gentlemen with college degrees, creased pants, a superior disdain for gin, jazz, and hip rolling and other such evidences of couture, but the lowdown, natural, authentic niggerdom up in the 130s where no one has ever heard of colored literary movement, save those of Josephine Baker."
Doris Abramson: Later in this snide review, he takes note of quote, "the odds and ends of coondom in all their pathetic humor." End quote. These are the words of a man who in his time was called the Dean of American Drama Critics. About the acting in Harlem, Brooks Atkinson said that "most of the actors were merely impersonating themselves. The lack of self-consciousness in their acting is not so much skill as innocence about the stage." Arthur Pollock in the Brooklyn Eagle said that "Harlem put a racy and occasionally rancid bit of Harlem's Black belt on the stage revealing the dark New Yorker, childlike as the southern Negro still, but his orgies accompanied not by deep rooted folk tunes, but by the jagged rhythms of jazz and the goofy result not of religion, but of gin." There were between 50 and 60 Black performers in Harlem, plus one white policeman. The next time that, that many Black performers were to be seen on Broadway was the following season when they were in Green Pastures, more on the side of religion than of gin.
Doris Abramson: As Langston Hughes once said of Green Pastures, "this was a Negro folk fable dramatized, directed, and produced by whites to be performed by Negroes." It gave employment, but it took away what Theophilus Lewis had hoped was in the wings, plays true to Black experience. And what did the Black playwrights right for Broadway in the '30's? Hall Johnson wrote Run Little Chillun, Langston Hughes wrote Mulatto, and Hughes Allison wrote The Trial of Doctor Beck. There subjects? Religion, miscegenation, and intra-racial discrimination. I do not wish to suggest that these subjects reflect what Black playwrights were concerned with in other places, in Harlem and Chicago and some Federal Theater units and burgeoning Black theater groups in union halls and churches. These are the plays that made it to Broadway during the Depression.
Doris Abramson: There subjects, not surprisingly, were treated in a way not to rock the American boat. Feeling the affects of the Depression, only half of Broadway's theaters were in use during the theater season 1932-33. It became, according to Burns Mantle, a season of experiments of revivals. Almost a third as many old plays were revived as there were new plays produced. Among the really old ones revived was Uncle Tom's Cabin. This time around, with Otis Skinner as Uncle Tom and Fay Bainter as Topsy. In his best plays of 1932-33, Burns Mantle wrote this about Hall Johnson's Run Little Chillun, "Hall Johnson, who's colored choirs are vocally gifted above any others it is easy to call to mind, you will remember that of the Green Pastures, staged a strange colored drama called Run Little Chillun. It had to do with the Black mans worship of voodoo rights in the past and his finding salvation in the camp meetings of the present. And it was rather exciting." That's sounds like a tempered dismissal of the play. Nor does he say much more when later on confronted by the plays having packed houses for 126 performances, he epitomizes the plot as follows, "In a southern town there is a contest in soul saving between the new day pilgrims encamped on one side of the river and observing Pagan rights and the Hope Baptists who are holding the fort for the Christian God."
Doris Abramson: So we learn, Run Little Chillun is a play about Pagan versus Christian worship. A folk play with contrasting rituals and effective music. When the play opened in March of 1933, Carl Carmer, and to the best of my knowledge he was a white critic, reviewing it for opportunity found an unfortunate discrepancy between the portrayal of Baptists and the pilgrims of the new day. He wrote, "It is to be regretted that Run Little Chillun was not all as factual as true to the lives of Negroes in the deep south as that part of it devoted to depicting the little church community of Baptists. No finer, more sincere transition to the stage of characteristics, ways, manners, customs and events has been made than that showing the enthusiastic flock in action. And the author could have made the rest of his play as honest, as simply poignant had he chosen to portray the conflict between this group and one of its existent enemies, the fight that the good people of the little Negro churches wage every day against the encroachments of another and familiar sect, say the Holy Rollers. Or against the Devil himself in the dance halls and the barrel houses. Instead, Mr. Johnson preferred to conjure up a newly invented, intellectualized Pagan sect as the instigator of conflict and thereby sacrificed that most valuable quality of good drama, conviction."
Doris Abramson: The dances accompanying the ritualistic meeting of the Pagan sect seemed to Carmer to show the influence of Doris Humphrey. Of the scene in the Baptist church, however, he wrote that, "Hall Johnson has transplanted a revival meeting without losing a note or a gesture from the Black belt church to a Broadway stage." He went so far as to predict that Hall Johnson's synthesis of music, direction, rhythm, and dramatic content announces the approach of American grand opera. Critics generally were enthusiastic. Most of them were carried away by the music. Some of them ground their axes. For example. Arthur H. Quinn wrote that, "Run Little Chillun points clearly to the future of the Negro play because Johnson, instead of repeating the theme of conflict between whites and Negroes, which Negro novelists and playwrights have been dwelling upon too long, dealt like Paul Green with a conflict within the race itself." Quinn is the historian critic who liked Green Pastures because the Negro was shown in his wistful, exulted, and emotional phases.
Doris Abramson: [Joseph Woodcruch] said of the acting in Run Little Chillun that "there is not an actor on the stage, only Black folk being carried away." Chappy Gardner of the Chicago Defender called Run Little Chillun "authentic history of a great people in the raw, brought to glorious heights of refined appreciation and entertainment by an intelligent man who knows his people. I like it better than Porgy or the Green Pastures." End quote. The Amsterdam News critic compared Run Little Chillun with another play, Louisiana, also by a Black writer, Jay Augustus Smith, and on Broadway for only eight performances. Just a note on that, Louisiana opened two days before Run Little Chillun. I've never been able to find a manuscript. It would be very interesting to see it.
Doris Abramson: Fannin Belcher wrote that he found it difficult to understand why these two plays developing the same theme were allowed to compete with each other. The Amsterdam News critic gave Hall Johnson his writing and his music credit for the much longer run of Run Little Chillun. "Both dramas," he wrote, "deal with the religious [Gethsemanes] of certain Negro communities, which are forced to choose between their ancient rituals, voodooism in Louisiana, and new day pilgrims in Run Little Children and Christianity. Kenneth Burke writing for the Saturday Review of Literature observed that in contrast to the gentle lulling Green Pastures, Hall Johnson's play brought out the power side of the Negro. "In Run Little Chillun one sees a Negro genius," Burke wrote, "an attractive, positive ability exemplified with a conviction, a liquidness, a sense of aesthetic blossoming, and a gift of spontaneous organization." He might indeed have agreed with Carl Carmer who ended his Opportunity review with a statement that "Hall Johnson's first excursion into the drama proves him a playwright of promise, who needs but the discipline of experience to make him a serious contender for honors on the American stage."
Doris Abramson: Run Little Chillun was, however, Hall Johnson's only play. A note, as a Federal Theater production of the Los Angeles unit, Run Little Chillun was directed by Clarence Muse. Johnson himself did not participate in the Federal Theater Project. It ran for almost a year from July 1938 to June 1939, but when it was revived on Broadway in 1943, it ran for only 15 performances. There is a sense in which one is sorry to have Langston Hughes represented on Broadway by his play Mulatto. Successful as it was, it ran for a year at the Vanderbilt and Ambassador theaters on Broadway and then went on an eight month tour across the United States. It's subject, miscegenation, does not seem a worthy one for Hughes to be writing about in 1935. He acknowledged that the problem of mixed blood in America is a minor problem, but a very dramatic one.
Doris Abramson: The subject had titillated audiences before and has done so since. The plays success also had something to do with the fact that Hughes' producer Martin Jones, without his consent, added a rape scene, thereby changing what Hughes had intended as a poetic tragedy into a melodrama with more emphasis on sex. The irony is, of course, that poetic drama might have closed in a week. Martin Jones knew how to appeal to Broadway audiences. James A. Emanuel in his biography of Langston Hughes records this telling paragraph about Mulatto. "Band in Philadelphia, Mulatto dramatized a fatal conflict between a college educated mulatto youth and his white father in Georgia. It established a record among plays written by Negroes for the number of performances in America. Publicized in New York by a picturesque souther colonel striding down Broadway baring a sign call the play a lewd and licentious lie and an insult to the southern aristocracy, Mulatto was widely reviewed. Most critics called it artless, interesting or sincere. Phrases like several intensely dramatic scenes, amazing impartiality, not yet a capable playwright, merely another special plea, and suffers from bad direction also indicate the diversity of the critics responses.
Doris Abramson: In a Broadway season that also featured Dead End, Night of January 16th, The Children's Hour, Three Men on a Horse, Tobacco Road, and Winter Set, Mulatto held it's own. But largely, I suspect, because of the extraordinary performance of Rose McClendon as Cora Lewis, Colonel Norwood's concubine." Brooks Atkinson, who found Hughes lacking in the dramatic strength of mind that makes it possible for a writer to tell a coherent driving story in the theater, had this to say about Rose McClendon. "As for Cora Lewis, she has the honor to be played by Rose McClendon who is an artist with a sensitive personality and a bell like voice. Plays are not very numerous for Miss. McClendon but it always a privilege to see her adding fineness of perception to the parts she takes." And he expressed his gratitude for the play, "which in spite of its fatal weaknesses as a drama, offers the combination of Rose McClendon and a playwright flaming with sincerity." End quote.
Doris Abramson: My guess would be that the Langston Hughes who truly flamed with sincerity would have been represented in 1935 on Broadway, but it would have had to been a very different place from any Broadway we've ever known, by his play Scottsboro Limited, the play in verse about the Scottsboro trial. There was a play for the '30's. An answer to County Cullins plea, Scottsboro too is worth a song. Broadway did produce They Shall Not Die by a white playwright John Wexley, 62 performances in 1934, and Legal Murder by Dennis Donahue, 7 performances the same year, on the subject of the Scottsboro trial. Langston Hughes was astute enough not even to suggest for Broadway his play, which had this poem for an introduction.
Doris Abramson: "Eight Black boys in a southern jail, world turn pale. Eight Black boys and one white lie. Is it much to die? Is it much to die when immortal feet march with you down Times Street when beyond steel bars sound the deathless drums like a mighty heartbeat as they come. Who comes? Christ, who fought alone. John Brown, that mad mob that tore the Bastille down stone by stone, Moses, [Jeanne d'Arc], Dessaline, Nat Turner, fighters for the free. Lenin with the flag blood red, not dead, not dead. None of those is dead. Gandhi, Sandino, Evangelista too. To walk with you. Eight Black boys in a souther jail, world turn pale."
Doris Abramson: With all the admiration that I have for Langston Hughes' professionalism and his ability to write truly moving speeches, I think of Cora Lewis' speeches when she's alone at the end of Mulatto, I'm sorry to have his play Mulatto the one that had such notoriety and universal success. Hughes once commented on how many Broadway curtains have gone down on Negro characters completely done in one way or another. In fact, often killed stone cold dead as the play ends. Along with Othello, Bigger Thomas, and [Joshuatane] he lists Burt Lewis, the half cast who wants to use the front door of his white fathers house and kills himself as the mob surrounds him. "It was not until Leroy Jones came along," Hughes states, that a leading Negro character on stage took a gun and shot a white man down. At last, the theatrical tables had turned." That was 30 years after Mulatto.
Doris Abramson: Hughes Allison, the last of the early playwrights that I'd like to discuss have proved, for me at any rate, to be a very elusive man. He has left a trail of programs and clippings at various theater collections, but I've never seen a script of The Trial of Doctor Beck. What I know about it is mostly from reviews and you have begun to be somewhat suspicious of what gets recorded in them. Since his the only Federal Theater production to be picked up and moved to Broadway, Hall Johnson's and Frank Wilson's plays went in the opposite direction, we cannot ignore him. After all, J.J. Shubert himself wrote to Halle Flanagan, director of the Federal Theater, to say that The Trial of Doctor Beck was the best play he had seen anywhere in the Federal Theater. That's really all it took for that good, if idealistic business woman to see to it that the production was moved to Broadway where it ran for four weeks and the Maxine Elliott Theater. It had a cast of 20 Black and 14 white performers. A note, the cast commuted daily from Newark because of a WPA regulation.
Doris Abramson: Alain Locke described Hughes Allison a few months after his play closed as a promising newcomer. And added that his talent was "more mature in dramatic technique and depth of characterization than any Negro playwright to date." End quote. The play, apparently, was a courtroom drama described variously as a "living tragedy Negro-Americano with sociological implications." That's from Federal Theater promotion. "Something between frank melodrama and a somber study of some of the problems and prejudices that beset the Negro race," New York Post. And "a courtroom melodrama droning out a tale of high powered passion and murder among Harlem's upper or moneyed classes." That's the New York Harold Tribune. WPA promotion for the production prepared audiences for a play that "deals forcefully and vividly with the peculiar color prejudices found within modern American Negro life."
Doris Abramson: Reviewers mentioned the plays authenticity, after all, the Herald Tribune reviewer wrote, "Hughes Allison should know whereof he writes. His works smacks of authenticity and an easy acquaintance with the problems of his race." To give you a sense of what those problems were as perceived by two of the reviewers, let me quote first from Richard Manson of The New York Post and then from our old friend Brooks Atkinson. "Mr. Allison got off on the right foot in his career as a dramatist by devoting himself to a subject thoroughly familiar to him. An intra-racial theme concerning the relations between the light and dark members of his race. Dr. John Beck, a prominent Harlem physician is accused of the murder of his wife, a rich anti-kink manufacturer and the DA bases his case on," this is in The New York Post, "and the DA bases his case on the doctor's antipathy to Black skins.
Doris Abramson: The testimony proves interesting, informative, and a little sad. The parade to the witness stand involves many excellent characterizations, but woefully weak comedy. Crooning would give the production more dignity. That is a load of earthy language and the real murderer is revealed only in the final moments with the curtain going down on a blasphemous cry that brings the drama to its serious problem. The principal character, Dr. Beck, has exactly two lines and spends the rest of the three acts in the thankless business of looking distressed. Poor actor. Mr. Allison dug his boots into rich soil in The Trial of Dr. Beck and managed to keep the golden nuggets of his theme above the weedy mechanics of a plays development."
Doris Abramson: Atkinson wrote, "Someone has murdered the Black wife of sepia Dr. Beck, and eminent Harlem physician. And for some considerable time it looks as though he were the culprit. He is known to have a fondness for colored gals with light complexions. In a scientific book not yet published, he has advised his brethren to marry the lightest complexions they can discover, hoping eventually to eliminate the Ace of Spades from the Negro race." And he puts in parens, "the viewpoint expressed in Federal Theater productions is not necessarily that of the WPA or any other agency of the government. Some pungent and racy testimony on these and homelier topics is heard in Mr. Allison's play until it develops that the late Mrs. Beck was murdered by someone you never suspected. The murder was committed out of frenzied love. Quite a scandal. The play includes one skillfully written and beautiful meditated speech on the mischievousness of race prejudice in a murder trial."
Doris Abramson: A review in The World Telegram refers to the "wise and wherefores of discrimination among Negroes and the rankling obsessions, which supposedly affect that race, in an attempt to state the subject of The Trial of Dr. Beck. Quote possibly Hughes Allison started out to deal with a subject of intra-racial prejudices, but he seems to have ended up writing a traditional courtroom melodrama." I suspect that the issue of the affect in our society of lighter or darker pigmentation was no more than a peg on which to hang a generally innocuous play and yet, I hesitate to say much more with only reviews in hand. What troubles me particularly, is that the Federal Theater, which still has a good reputation among American intellectuals, took The Trial of Dr. Beck to Broadway in 1937. Except for the fact that Black actors were playing Black roles, no real advance seems to have been made over Garland Anderson's 1925 courtroom melodrama.
Doris Abramson: I noticed too that when the Federal Theater moved it's production of a Negro musical comedy named Swing It from the Lafayette to Broadways Adelphi Theater in July of 1937, a month before the opening of Trial of Dr. Beck, it was called "the most agile and brilliant of the colored tune shows." The reviewer of The New York Sun spoke of the high stepping and loud shouting of the all Negro cast of 55. The Federal Theater flier referred to "a new musical comedy in the modern manner set against a background of speedy tempos out of Harlem blended with soft harmony reminiscent of the old south." Some of the musical numbers listed on the program for Swing It included a spiritual for an opener, songs called Ain't We Got Love and By the Sweat of Your Brow, sung by plantation workers, A Jungle Episode, and a grand finale called Swing Wedding. The Federal Theater Project did provide employment for Black writers and performers, sad to say they perpetuated minstrel stereotypes in the process.
Doris Abramson: Charles E. Dexter reviewing Swing It for The Daily Worker wrote, "It is a hodge podge of all the old and alleged jokes and traditional vaudeville banalities about the Negro. He is represented as lazy, shiftless, stupid, and deceitful. A joyful child happy because even if he hasn't any money, ain't I got love, as the song puts it. This attitude reaches it's climax in a pseudo spiritual in which Negro cotton pickers are asked to be happy because they earn their living the sweat of your brow." This, in 1937, not 1887 or 1897, but 1937 sponsored by the Federal Theater Project. Dexter goes on to ask for a picture on the American stage of the Negro as he really is quote, "vital, aspiring, clamoring for the opportunity so frequently denied him." End quote.
Doris Abramson: Broadway denied Claude McKay, what a critic we missed that time. And Rose McClendon and writers who might have served the American theater well, except for the strange demands that were put upon them. All these years later, in a very different time, it is painful to look back on the reviews I've shared with you today. One can only conclude that racism was not only a determining factor in what was presented on Broadway, but also in the critical responses to plays about what was then called Negro experience. In closing, I'd like the paraphrase Medger Evers, who 10 years ago said "In the racial picture, things will never be as they once were. History has reached a turning point here and all over the world. The theater has reached a turning point here and all over the world. Even Broadway begins to feel the rumble of change."