Culturally we are abloom in a new field, but it is yet decidedly a question as to what we shall reap—a few flowers or a harvest. That depends upon how we cultivate this art of the drama in the next few years. We can have a Gilpin, as we have had an Aldridge—and this time a few more—a spectacular bouquet of talent, fading eventually as all isolated talent must; or we can have a granary of art, stocked and stored for season after season. It is a question of interests, of preferences:—are we reaping the present merely or sowing the future? For the one, the Negro actor will suffice; the other requires the Negro drama and the Negro theatre.
The Negro actor without the Negro drama is a sporadic phenomenon, a chance wayside flower, at mercy of wind and weed. He is precariously planted and still more precariously propagated. We have just recently learned the artistic husbandry of race drama, and have already found that to till the native soil of the race life and the race experience multiplies the dramatic yield both in quality and quantity. Not that we would confine the dramatic talent of the race to the fence-fields and plant-rooms of race drama, but the vehicle of all sound art must be native to the group—our actors need their own soil, at least for sprouting. But there is another step beyond this which must be taken. Our art in this field must not only be rescued from the chance opportunity and the haphazard growth of native talent, the stock must be cultivated beyond the demands and standards of the market-place, or must be safe somewhere from the exploitation and ruthlessness of the commercial theatre and in the protected housing of the art-theatre flower to the utmost perfection of the species. Conditions favorable to this ultimate development, the established Negro Theatre will alone provide.
In the past, and even the present, the Negro actor has waited to be born; in the future he must be made. Up till now, our art has been patronized; for the future it must be endowed. This is, I take it, what we mean by distinguishing between the movement toward race drama and the quite distinguishable movement toward the Negro Theatre. In the idea of its sponsors, the latter includes the former, but goes further and means more; it contemplates an endowed artistic center where all phases vital to the art of the theatre are cultivated and taught—acting, playwriting, scenic design and construction, scenic production and staging. A center with this purpose and function must ultimately be founded. It is only a question of when, how and where. Certainly the time has come; everyone will admit that at this stage of our race development it has become socially and artistically imperative. Sufficient plays and sufficing talent are already available; and the awakened race consciousness awaits what will probably be its best vehicle of expansion and expression in the near future.
Ten years ago it was the theory of the matter that was at issue; now it is only the practicabilities that concern us. Then one had constantly to be justifying the idea, citing the precedents of the Irish and the Yiddish theatres. Now even over diversity of opinion as to ways and means, the project receives the unanimous sanction of our hearts. But as to means and auspices, there are two seriously diverse views; one strenuously favoring professional auspices and a greater metropolitan center like New York or Chicago for the Negro Theatre; another quite as strenuously advocating a university center, amateur auspices and an essentially educational basis. Whoever cares to be doctrinaire on this issue may be: it is a question to be decided by deed and accomplishment—and let us hope a question not of hostility and counter-purpose, but of rivalry and common end.
As intended and established in the work of the Department of the Drama at Howard University, however, the path and fortunes of the latter program have been unequivocally chosen. We believe a university foundation will assure a greater continuity of effort and insure accordingly a greater permanence of result. We believe further that the development of the newer forms of drama has proved most successful where laboratory and experimental conditions have obtained and that the development of race drama is by those very circumstances the opportunity and responsibility of our educational centers. Indeed, to maintain this relation to dramatic interests is now an indispensable item in the program of the progressive American college. Through the pioneer work of Professor Baker, of Harvard, the acting and writing of plays has become the natural and inevitable sequence, in a college community, of the more formal study of the drama. Partly through the same channels, and partly as a result of the pioneer work of Wisconsin, college production has come to the rescue of the art drama, which would otherwise rarely get immediate recognition from the commercial theatre. And finally in its new affiliation with the drama, the American college under the leadership of Professor Koch, formerly of North Dakota, now of the University of North Carolina, has become a vital agency in community drama, and has actively promoted the dramatization of local life and tradition. By a threefold sponsorship, then, race drama becomes peculiarly the ward of our colleges, as new drama, as art-drama, and as folk-drama.
Though concurrent with the best efforts and most significant achievements of the new drama, the movement toward Negro drama has had its own way to make. In addition to the common handicap of commercialism, there has been the singular and insistent depreciation to stereotyped caricature and superficially representative but spiritually misrepresentative force. It has been the struggle of an artistic giant in art-engulfing quicksands; a struggle with its critical period just lately safely passed. Much of this has been desperate effort of the “bootstrap-lifting kind,” from the pioneer advances of Williams, Cole, Cook, and Walker, to the latest achievements of “Shuffle Along.” But the dramatic side has usually sagged, as might be expected, below the art level under the imposed handicap. Then there has been that gradual investment of the legitimate stage through the backdoor of the character rôle; the hard way by which Gilpin came, breaking triumphantly through at last to the major rôle and legitimate stardom. But it is the inauguration of the Negro art drama which is the vital matter, and the honor divides itself between Burghardt Du Bois, with his “Star of Ethiopia,” staged, costumed, and manned by students, and Ridgeley Torrence, with his “Three Plays for a Negro Theatre.” In the interim between the significant first performances and the still more significant attempts to incorporate them in the Horizon Guild and the Mrs. Hapgood’s Players, there was organized in Washington a Drama Committee of the N. A. A. C. P. which sponsored and produced Miss Grimké’s admirable pioneer problem-play, “Rachael,” in 1917. Between the divided elements of this committee, with a questionable paternity of minority radicalism, the idea of the Negro Theatre as distinguished from the idea of race drama was born. If ever the history of the Negro drama is written without the scene of a committee wrangle, with its rhetorical climaxes after midnight—the conservatives with their wraps on protesting the hour; the radicals, more hoarse with emotion than effort, alternately wheedling and threatening—it will not be well-written. The majority wanted a performance; the minority, a program. One play no more makes a theatre than one swallow, a summer.
The pariah of the committee by the accident of its parentage became the foundling and subsequently the ward of Howard University. In its orphan days, it struggled up on the crumbs of the University Dramatic Club. One recalls the lean and patient years it took to pass from faculty advice to faculty supervision and finally to faculty control; from rented costumes and hired properties to self-designed and self-executed settings; from hackneyed “stage successes” to modern and finally original plays; and hardest of all progressions, strange to relate, that from distant and alien themes to the intimate, native and racial. The organization, under the directorship of Professor Montgomery Gregory of a Department of Dramatics, with academic credit for its courses, the practical as well as the theoretical, and the fullest administrative recognition and backing of the work have marked in the last two years the eventual vindication of the idea. But from an intimacy of association second only to that of the director, and with better grace than he, may I be permitted to record what we consider to be the movement’s real coming of age? It was when simultaneously with the production of two original plays on race themes written in course by students, staged, costumed, and manned by students, in the case of one play with the authoress in rôle, there was launched the campaign for an endowed theatre, the successful completion of which would not only give the Howard Players a home, but the Negro Theatre its first tangible realization.
As will already have been surmised from the story, the movement has, of course, had its critics and detractors. Happily, most of them are covered by that forgiveness which goes out spontaneously to the opposition of the short-sighted. Not they, but their eyes, so to speak, are to blame. Rather it has been amazing, on the other hand, the proportion of responsiveness and help that has come, especially from the most prominent proponents of the art drama in this country; names too numerous to mention, but representing every possible section of opinion—academic, non-academic; northern, southern, western; conservative, ultra-modern; professional, amateur; technical, literary; from within the university, from the community of Washington; white, black. Of especial mention because of special service, Gilpin, O’Neil, Torrence, Percy Mackaye, Du Bois, Weldon Johnson, and the administrative officers of the University; and most especially the valuable technical assistance for three years of Clem Throckmorton, technical director of the Provincetown Players, and for an equal time the constant and often self-sacrificing services of Miss Marie Forrest in stage training and directing, services recently fitly rewarded by appointment to a professorship in the department. But despite the catholic appeal, interest and cooperation it is essentially as a race representative and race-supported movement that we must think of it and that it must ultimately become, the best possible self-expression in an art where we have a peculiar natural endowment, undertaken as an integral part of our higher education and pursuit of culture.
The program and repertoire of the Howard Players, therefore, scarcely represent the full achievement of the movement; it is the workshop and the eventual theatre and the ever-increasing supply of plays and players that must hatch out of the idea. The record of the last two years shows in performances:
1920–21—
“Tents of the Arabs”—Lord Dansany.
“Simon the Cyrenean”—Ridgeley Torrence.
“The Emperor Jones”—Guest performance with Charles Gilpin at the Belasco; student performance at the Belasco.
Commencement Play, 1921–22—
“The Canterbury Pilgrims”—Percy Mackaye. Repetition of first bill in compliment of the delegates to the Washington conference on Limitation of Armaments.
“Strong as the Hills” (a Persian play)—Matalee Lake.
Original Student Plays—
“Genefrede,”—a play of the Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture—Helen Webb.
“The Yellow Tree”—DeReath Irene Busey.
“Aria de Capo”—Edna St. Vincent Millay.
“The Danse Calinda”—a Creole Pantomime Ms. performance—Ridgeley Torrence.
A movement of this kind and magnitude is, can be, the monopoly of no one group, no one institution, no paltry decade. But within a significant span, this is the record. The immediately important steps must be the production of original plays as rapidly as is consistent with good workmanship and adequate production, and the speedy endowment of the theatre, which fortunately, with the amateur talent of the university, means only funds for building and equipment. I am writing this article at Stratford-on-Avon. I know that when stripped to the last desperate defense of himself, the Englishman with warrant will boast of Shakespeare, and that this modest Memorial Theatre is at one and the same time a Gibraltar of national pride and self-respect and a Mecca of human civilization and culture. Music in which we have so trusted may sing itself around the world, but it does not carry ideas, the vehicle of human understanding and respect; it may pierce the heart, but does not penetrate the mind. But here in the glass of this incomparable art there is, for ourselves and for the world, that which shall reveal us beyond all propaganda on the one side, and libel on the other, more subtly and deeply than self-praise and to the confusion of subsidized self-caricature and ridicule. “I saw Othello’s visage in his mind,” says Desdemona explaining her love and respect; so might, so must the world of Othello’s mind be put artistically to speech and action.
Stratford-on-Avon, August 5, 1922.