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“Speaking a Mutual Language” the Negro People’S Theatre in Chicago Melissa Barton

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“Speaking a Mutual Language” the Negro People’S Theatre in Chicago Melissa Barton “Speaking a Mutual Language” The Negro People’s Theatre in Chicago Melissa Barton On 5 November 1938, just under a week before Chicago’s Negro People’s Theatre was to open its first production, the theatre’s executive director, Fanny McConnell, wrote two letters. In one she petitioned Claude Lightfoot, the chairman of the Young Communist League of Illinois, to organize a “theatre party” to attend the upcoming show, Langston Hughes’s Don’t You Want to Be Free? “We would be very pleased to have you attend — particularly en masse,” she wrote. “We feel that the play we are doing speaks a mutual language” (Ellison Papers, Box 6). The other let- ter was to Reverend Harold M. Kingsley of the South Side’s Congregationalist Church of the Good Shepherd, whose congregation comprised mainly middle-class and professional South Siders (Drake and Cayton 1945:537, 670; Best 2005:78–79). McConnell thanked Kingsley for the use of Good Shepherd’s basement as a rehearsal space for the show (Ellison Papers, Box 6).1 The two letters illustrate how McConnell positioned Chicago’s Negro People’s Theatre (NPT) between competing interests among its membership and its audience: On the one hand, her request that the Young Communist League attend “en masse” suggests that she hoped the group would — understanding the “mutual language” of the play — participate in its ending, when the audience stands up and joins in a rent-strike-cum-dance-party; on the other hand, McConnell relied equally on the participation and patronage of the South Side’s more center- left, liberal leadership, benefitting from the aid of not only Good Shepherd, but also the Chicago Defender and the Chicago Urban League. Don’t You Want to Be Free? became the toast of the South Side, suggesting, perhaps, that McConnell succeeded in managing these competing interests. At the same time, it seems that the play itself, in spite of its proletarian ideology, managed to avoid striking the same discord as did such commitments offstage. Audience members responded overwhelmingly positively to the play, even volunteering to overlook aspects that offended their sensibilities. As Corinne Lennon wrote so enthusiastically to McConnell on 21 November 1938 after seeing the pro- 1. It is likely that several members of the Negro People’s Theatre were also congregants of Good Shepherd, and the church was viewed as at the center-left of Black Chicago politics. Kingsley strongly advocated a “social and eco- nomic ministry” to address poverty in the neighborhood surrounding Good Shepherd (Negro History Bulletin 1939:12), while also emphasizing a self-help ethos (Best 2005:89). The church organized the Good Shepherd Community Center in 1936, hosting a variety of community outreach programs, many sponsored by the WPA, as well as various theatre groups over the years, including the Center Aisle Players and the Negro People’s Theatre (Best 2005:79–80; Chung 2008). In 1941 Good Shepherd Community Center would come under the direc- torship of Horace Cayton, who changed its name to Parkway Community House. Parkway Community House also played host to a theatre — the Skyloft Players, which premiered Langston Hughes’s play The Sun Do Move in 1942. TDR: The Drama Review 54:3 (T207) Fall 2010. ©2010 54 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00004 by guest on 30 September 2021 Student Essay Contest Winner Melissa Barton is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. Her research considers the theatrical aesthetics and multiply inflected political commitments of the Negro People’s Theatres and their successors. She received the Blair Dissertation Year Fellowship at the University of Chicago and a Billops-Hatch Research Fellowship at Emory University. As a staff member of the Mapping the Stacks archive project, directed by Jacqueline Goldsby, she created archival finding aids and collection guides at several Chicago institutions, including the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection at the Chicago Public Library and the South Side Community Art Center. The Department of English at the University of Chicago has played an important role in the transformation of literary studies over the past half century, and the intellectual horizons of current work continue that effort, creating a rigorous and exciting intellectual environment for students. The department’s contributions to disciplinary and interdisciplinary innovation are strongly grounded in historical scholarship and in theoretical and conceptual inquiry. In addition to departmental strengths, graduate students are also encouraged by the university’s long tradition of interdisciplinary research and teaching. A new interdisciplinary workshop on Theatre and Performance Studies draws together students and faculty from departments across the university to discuss work in progress, performances in Chicago, and emerging trends in theatre scholarship. duction, “I do not wish to comment on the play because it was too ‘Leftist’ But I liked the per- formance of the group so much! Every character was quite real and sincere. So much so that in rare moments I almost forgot that I was in the theatre! Or forgot that there was no scen- ery” (Ellison Papers, Box 6). Lennon found the play itself distasteful, but she proceeds to offer it the highest compliment that could be paid to any production by a certain type of theatregoer: she forgot she was in the theatre. Lennon may have enjoyed the play in spite of its “Leftism,” but members of the Young Communist League found the play perfectly amenable to their ideolog- ical agenda, writing the following month, on 11 January 1939, “The Negro People’s Theatre has a definite and significant role to play in the life of the Negro people and in the struggle for unity of all progressive forces. More plays with social significance are needed. Thru your acting you can play a leading roll [sic] in the movement for the liberation of the Negro people” ( Jack Kling and John Gray to Negro People’s Theatre, Ellison Papers, Box 6). Thus, some members of the NPT audience went to the theatre to, in a word, “forget,” and others wanted the group to stage “the social problems of the Negro” and be “of educational value to workers” (Ishmael Flory to McConnell, 20 May 1938, Ellison Papers, Box 6). Unexpectedly, though, both groups got what they wanted while watching the same play. The membership of the NPT had debated over the selection of Hughes’s play, as McConnell would recall a short time later in her letter to Howard Cordery on 9 June 1939: Some of us had a terrific time persuading about half of our membership that the play was not communistic. There was the usual confused attitude that realism was radicalism. We did put the play on and it seemed to be the very vehicle to release the pent-up resentment of the public over the many injustices it was enduring. The “Red Scare” still crops up, but among relatively few now. We are constantly trying to explain that since the time of the Greek theatre it has been the function of the stage to point out what was wrong with the Theatre Negro People’s world and that in periods when the stage ceased to do this it fell to rock-bottom. (Ellison Papers, Box 6; emphasis added) As McConnell’s description indicates, the company was divided about equally among peo- ple who favored the play’s radical tinge, and those who feared it. McConnell herself, however, clearly did not believe the play to be “radical.” Indeed, she argued that the play’s “realism” — 55 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00004 by guest on 30 September 2021 its mission to “point out what [is] wrong with the world” and “release pent-up resentment” — was being mistaken for radi- calism. While Don’t You Want to Be Free?, a living newspaper-style ensemble piece featur- ing Hughes’s lyric poems delivered in mono- logue, is hardly realistic theatre, what I want especially to highlight here is McConnell’s insistence that realism could indeed “point out what [is] wrong with the world,” and that doing so would be viewed as “radical.” For, earlier that same decade, most proponents of the “revolutionary” theatre would never have conflated realism and radicalism. To them, the two were opposites. How did “realism” become a satisfactory theatrical form for such disparate groups by the end of the 1930s? And how and why did McConnell find herself negotiating these competing interests? Both of these questions can be answered by examining the role of race in the evolution of the American people’s the- atre movement. While others have noted that the left-wing theatre’s early debates about form eventually yielded to the dominance of realism (Levine 1985:84–123), the role of race in the ascension of realism has received less notice. In fact, the staging of the black person was central to resolving the tension the move- ment faced between agitprop and realism. Viewed as both radical and realistic, the por- trayal of black characters satisfied both radi- cal and bourgeois aesthetic demands alike. At Figure 1. Poster for Chicago’s Negro People’s Theatre production the same time, however, this resolution of an of Don’t You Want to Be Free? by Langston Hughes, directed by aesthetic tension opened new social fissures Fanny McConnell. Abraham Lincoln Center, Chicago, November in the coalitions they produced, and it is pre- 1938. (Courtesy of William McBride Papers, Vivian G. Harsh cisely those fissures that Fanny McConnell Research Collection, Chicago Public Library) attempted to straddle in her management of the Negro People’s Theatre.
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