There could be no more convincing indication of the vital place of the drama of Negro life in contemporary American drama than the impressive succession in the last twenty years of plays like The Emperor Jones, Roseanne, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, In Abraham’s Bosom, Porgy, Run, Little Chillun, The Green Pastures, Stevedore, Porgy and Bess, Mulatto, Mamba’s Daughters, and in 1941—Cabin in the Sky and Native Son. These highlights of the Broadway record are a substantial contribution to our best native drama, and, as such, they stand to Broadway’s everlasting credit. But along with a consideration of what Broadway has done must go some critical consideration of what has not, as yet, been done.
Close scrutiny of the panorama of the last two decades reveals, along with precedent-making advances, serious gaps and unexpected shadows. On the quantitative side, after all, the tally of significant Negro plays does not total a distinctive play a season. Qualitatively, the survey is still more disquieting. These peak successes are too isolated and disconnected: Broadway has not built up as yet what is most essential for Negro drama—a plateau of sustained use and support of those Negro materials, human and dramatic, which, from time to time, it has so significantly revealed and so successfully exploited. Sporadic support and intermittent interest have thus wrought havoc with many of the best possibilities. Good, even great actors have gone to seed, and forward-looking precedents have closed in again as timorous lapses have followed some of the boldest innovations. With the courage of its own successes, Broadway could have extended at least a half dozen of the above plays into a sustained tradition of original and typically American drama.
This failure is due in part to general faults of the commercial theatre. But for a newly developing field of drama, with its inevitable novelties of theme and talents, orthodox and conventional notions are the least profitable of all possible procedures, and the results are bound to be meagre. Many if not most of these Negro successes, though technically to Broadway’s credit, were not due to Broadway’s own initiative, perspicacity or courage. They were taken over from the more flexible experimentalism and hardier social courage of the tributary theatre. Particularly, as with The Emperor Jones, Porgy, Native Son, they were the product of unorthodox direction. Indeed, Broadway would do well to look still more closely, if only for hints and cues, at the materials available in the Negro Little Theatre repertory and its acting groups. The rarer possibilities of Negro drama will never be revealed by the “big producer’s” searchlight hunting in the fixed direction of his past successes or in the arbitrary focus of what he thinks the public wants. Nor will his production methods ever unfold the characteristic talents of the Negro singer, dancer or actor; indeed in too many cases already has this routine treatment taken the spontaneity, vitality and true folkiness out of our Negro artists and left a bizarre hybrid in its place. Sound future development will require instead the patient lantern, carefully exploring the full field, especially the dark corners. There, as often before, will be found the truly fresh novelties which theatrical concoction can never duplicate.
This is not said in carping criticism, but with full appreciation of the progress that has been made, and with the realization that the past Broadway season has given us in Cabin in the Sky one of the most genuine expressions of Negro comedy, and in Native Son what is in contestably one of the deepest and most unconventional of Negro tragedies. All the more reason, then, to be critical of whatever barriers yet stand between us and the fullest possible development of Negro drama and Negro acting.
As to the Negro actor, there still remains a double handicap: on the one hand, wet-blanketing direction toning down the spontaneous, improvising character of true Negro acting; the same direction exaggerating, on the other hand, the superficially theatrical and supposedly “typical.” In private, Negro actors complain of this unceasingly, but are too docile—largely because of precarious employment—in accepting before the public the yoke of the Broadway stereotypes. One could name a score of expensive failures due mainly to this short-sighted insistence on acting stereotypes and dramatic clichés. One instructive example may be allowed for illustration—the recent failure of John Henry, a sterile hybrid of successes like Porgy, Green Pastures and Show Boat. Its obvious theatrical tricks not only proved a smothering blanket for the magnetic talents of Paul Robeson, but even more tragically placed in temporary stalemate a dramatic theme destined eventually to produce one of the most characteristic of all Negro-American dramas. It is some consolation to learn of a more genuine folk treatment of the John Henry saga, Natural Man by Theodore Browne, a Negro dramatist, promisingly tried out by Harlem amateurs—The American Negro Theatre.
In this matter of Negro acting, managerial Broadway has barely learned the true secret of its effective appeal. Often slyly insinuated between the lines of pat, imposed routines, it is without doubt the subtle and spontaneous interpolations—the equivalents in acting of the rhythmic spontaneity and vitality so familiar now in Negro music—which, we should recall, was similarly stifled by imposed formulas before it broke itself loose. What has been responsible for the recent triumphs of Negro acting has been the partial release of such latent dramatic power by sympathetic and non-routine direction, such as that of James Light, Jasper Deeter, Rouben Mamoulian, Marc Connelly, John Houseman, Orson Welles—to mention the outstanding few. Oddly, but encouragingly enough, the artistic successes have also been the box-office successes. On this point, one need only contrast the reverent, magnetic, completely absorbed impersonation of ‘De Lawd’ by Richard Harrison, a triumph against the grain of previous Broadway tradition, with the tinsel fustian and superficial theatricality of the movie version of The Green Pastures, which followed strictly the most orthodox Broadway-Hollywood tradition. Lest the travesty of the latter be put down too much to the limitations of Rex Ingram’s talents rather than to stereotyped direction, let us cite the same actor’s effective role of “Lucifer, Jr.,” under better and freer direction, in Cabin in the Sky. Putting aside, once for all, the dangerous myth that the Negro is a ‘natural born actor,’ we may conclude that the Negro actor certainly needs direction, and before that training, but both along lines of his own instinctive patterns and idioms of expression.
One of these acting fortes, any close observer can verify, is an unusual mastery of body pantomime, too often crowded out nowadays on both the vaudeville and the legitimate stage by the concern for lines and routine cues. It is significant that stellar actors like Ethel Waters, Dooley Wilson, Georgette Harvey and Canada Lee are veterans of vaudeville, where in a humble but effective way they have.