Despite the fact that Negro life is somehow felt to be particularly rich in dramatic values, both as folk experience and as a folk temperament, its actual yield, so far as worth-while drama goes, has been very inconsiderable. There are many reasons behind this paradox; foremost of course the fact that drama is the child of social prosperity and of a degree at least of cultural maturity. Negro life has only recently come to the verge of cultural self-expression, and has scarcely reached such a ripening point. Further than this, the quite melodramatic intensity of the Negro’s group experience has defeated its contemporaneous dramatization; when life itself moves dramatically, the vitality of drama is often sapped. But there have been special reasons. Historical controversy and lowering social issues have clouded out the dramatic colors of Negro life into the dull mass contrasts of the Negro problem. Until lately not even good problem drama has been possible, for sentiment has been too partisan for fair dramatic balancing of forces and too serious for either aesthetic interest or artistic detachment. So although intrinsically rich in dramatic episode and substance, Negro life has produced for our stage only a few morally hectic melodramas along with innumerable instances of broad farce and low comedy. Propaganda, pro-Negro as well as anti-Negro, has scotched the dramatic potentialities of the subject. Especially with the few Negro playwrights has the propaganda motive worked havoc. In addition to the handicap of being out of actual touch with the theatre, they have had the dramatic motive deflected at its source. Race drama has appeared to them a matter of race vindication, and pathetically they have pushed forward their moralistic allegories or melodramatic protests as dramatic correctives and antidotes for race prejudice.
A few illuminating plays, beginning with Edward Sheldon’s Nigger and culminating for the present in O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, have already thrown into relief the higher possibilities of the Negro problem-play. Similarly, beginning with Ridgeley Torrence’s Three Plays for a Negro Theatre and culminating in Emperor Jones and The No’ Count Boy, a realistic study of Negro folk-life and character has been begun, and with it the inauguration of the artistic Negro folk play. The outlook for a vital and characteristic expression of Negro life in drama thus becomes immediate enough for a survey and forecast of its prospects and possibilities. Of course, in the broad sense, this development is merely the opening up of a further vein in the contemporary American drama, another step in the path of the dramatic exploration and working out of the native elements of American life. At the same time, especially in the plan and effort of the Negro dramatist, it becomes a program for the development of the Negro drama as such and of a Negro Theatre. Fortunately this special motive in no way conflicts with the sectional trend and local color emphasis of American drama today with its Wisconsin, Hoosier, Carolina and Oklahoma projects. It is this coincidence of two quite separate interests that has focussed the attention of both white and Negro artists upon the same field, and although we should naturally expect the most intimate revelations to come from the race dramatist, the present situation sustains a most desirable collaboration in the development of this new and fertile province. Indeed the pioneer efforts have not always been those of the Negro playwright and in the list of the more noteworthy recent exponents of Negro drama, Sheldon, Torrence, O’Neill, Howard Culbertson, Paul Green, Burghardt Du Bois, Angelina Grimke, and Willis Richardson, only the last three are Negroes.
The development of Negro drama at present owes more to the lure of the general exotic appeal of its material than to the special program of a racial drama. But the motives of race drama are already matured, and just as inevitably as the Irish, Russian and Yiddish drama evolved from the cultural programs of their respective movements, so must the Negro drama emerge from the racial stir and movement of contemporary Negro life. Projects like the Hapgood Players (1917–18), The Horizon Guild (1920), The Howard Players (1921–24), The Ethiopian Art Theatre (1923), The National Ethiopian Art Theatre founded in Harlem last year and The Shadows, a Negro “Little Theatre” just started in Chicago, though short-lived and handicapped for an adequate and competent repertory, are nevertheless unmistakable signs of an emerging Negro drama and the founding of a Negro Theatre.
But the path of this newly awakened impulse is by no means as clear as its goal. Two quite contrary directions compete for the artist’s choice. On the one hand is the more obvious drama of social situation, focussing on the clash of the race life with its opposing background; on the other the apparently less dramatic material of the folk life and behind it the faint panorama of an alluring race history and race tradition. The creative impulse is for the moment caught in this dilemma of choice between the drama of discussion and social analysis and the drama of expression and artistic interpretation. But despite the present lure of the problem play, it ought to be apparent that the real future of Negro drama lies with the development of the folk play. Negro drama must grow in its own soil and cultivate its own intrinsic elements; only in this way can it become truly organic, and cease being a rootless derivative.
Of course the possibilities of Negro problem drama are great and immediately appealing. The scheme of color is undoubtedly one of the dominant patterns of society and the entanglement of its skeins in American life one of its most dramatic features. For a long while strong social conventions prevented frank and penetrating analysis, but now that the genius of O’Neill has broken through what has been aptly called “the last taboo,” the field stands open. But for the Negro it is futile to expect fine problem drama as an initial stage before the natural development in due course of the capacity for self-criticism. The Negro dramatist’s advantage of psychological intimacy is for the present more than offset by the disadvantage of the temptation to counter partisan and propagandist attitudes. The white dramatist can achieve objectivity with relatively greater ease, though as yet he seldom does, and has temporarily an advantage in the handling of this material as drama of social situation. Proper development of these social problem themes will require the objectivity of great art. Even when the crassest conventions are waived at present, character stereotypes and deceptive formulae still linger; only genius of the first order can hope to penetrate to the materials of high tragedy—and, for that matter, high comedy also—that undoubtedly are there. For with the difference that modern society decrees its own fatalisms, the situations of race hold tragedies and ironies as deep and keen as those of the ancient classics. Eventually the Negro dramatist must achieve mastery of a detached, artistic point of view, and reveal the inner stresses and dilemmas of these situations as from the psychological point of view he alone can. The race drama of the future will utilize satire for the necessary psychological distance and perspective, and rely upon irony as a natural corrective for the sentimentalisms of propaganda. The objective attack and style of younger contemporary writers like Jean Toomer, who in Kabnis has written a cryptic but powerful monologue, promise this not too distantly.
The folk play, on the other hand, whether of the realistic or the imaginative type, has no such conditioned values. It is the drama of free self-expression and imaginative release, and has no objective but to express beautifully and colorfully the folk life of the race. At present, too, influenced perhaps by the social drama, it finds tentative expression in the realistic genre plays of Paul Green, Willis Richardson and others. Later no doubt, after it learns to beautify the native idioms of our folk life and recovers the ancestral folk tradition, it will express itself in a poetic and symbolic style of drama that will remind us of Synge and the Irish Folk Theatre or Ansky and the Yiddish Theatre. There are many analogies, both of temperament, social condition and cultural reactions, which suggest this. The life which this peasant drama imperfectly reflects is shot page through with emotion and potential poetry; and the soggy, somewhat sordid realism of the plays that now portray it does not develop its full possibilities. The drabness of plays like Culbertson’s Jackey and Goat Alley and of Granny Boling and White Dresses is in great part due to the laborious effort of first acquaintance. They are too studied, too expository. Even in such a whimsical and poetically conceived folk comedy as Paul Green’s No ’Count Boy, with which the Dallas Little Theatre group won a recent amateur dramatic contest in New York, there is this same defect of an over-studied situation lacking spontaneity and exuberant vitality. It seems logical to think that the requisite touch must come in large measure from the Negro dramatists. It is not a question of race, though, but of intimacy of understanding. Paul Green, for example, is a close student of, almost a specialist in, Negro folk life, with unimpeachable artistic motives, and a dozen or more Negro plays to his credit. But the plays of Willis Richardson, the colored play-wright, whose Chip Woman’s Fortune was the first offering of the Chicago Ethiopian Art Theatre under Raymond O’Neill, are very much in the same vein. Though the dialogue is a bit closer to Negro idiom of thought and speech, compensating somewhat for his greater amateurishness of technique and structure, there still comes the impression that the drama of Negro life has not yet become as racy, as gaily unconscious, as saturated with folk ways and the folk spirit as it could be, as it eventually will be. Decidedly it needs more of that poetic strain whose counterpart makes the Irish folk drama so captivating and irresistible, more of the joy of life even when life flows tragically, and even should one phase of it remain realistic peasant drama, more of the emotional depth of pity and terror. This clarification will surely come as the Negro drama shifts more and more to the purely aesthetic attitudes. With life becoming less a problem and more a vital process for the younger Negro, we shall leave more and more to the dramatist not born to it the dramatization of the race problem and concern ourselves more vitally with expression and interpretation. Others may anatomize and dissect; we must paint and create. And while one of the main reactions of Negro drama must and will be the breaking down of those false stereotypes in terms of which the world still sees us, it is more vital that drama should stimulate the group life culturally and give it the spiritual quickening of a native art.
The finest function, then, of race drama would be to supply an imaginative channel of escape and spiritual release, and by some process of emotional reenforcement to cover life with the illusion of happiness and spiritual freedom. Because of the lack of any tradition or art to which to attach itself, this reaction has never functioned in the life of the American Negro except at the level of the explosive and abortive release of buffoonery and low comedy. Held down by social tyranny to the jester’s footstool, the dramatic instincts of the race have had to fawn, crouch and be amusingly vulgar. The fine African tradition of primitive ritual broken, with the inhibitions of Puritanism snuffing out even the spirit of a strong dramatic and mimetic heritage, there has been little prospect for the development of strong native dramatic traits. But the traces linger to flare up spectacularly when the touch of a serious dramatic motive once again touches them. No set purpose can create this, only the spontaneous play of the race spirit over its own heritage and traditions. But the deliberate turning back for dramatic material to the ancestral sources of African life and tradition is a very significant symptom. At present just in the experimental stage, with historical curiosity the dominating motive, it heralds very shortly a definite attempt to poetize the race origins and supply a fine imaginative background for a fresh cultural expression. No one with a sense for dramatic values will underestimate the rich resources of African material in these respects. Not through a literal transposing, but in some adaptations of its folk lore, art-idioms and symbols, African material seems as likely to influence the art of drama as much as or more than it has already influenced some of its sister arts. Certainly the logic of the development of a thoroughly racial drama points independently to its use just as soon as the Negro drama rises to the courage of distinctiveness and achieves creative independence.