ALH Online Review, Series XIX 1 Jonathan Shandell, the American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era (Iowa City: Universi

ALH Online Review, Series XIX 1

Jonathan Shandell, The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 213 pp.

Reviewed by Ilka Saal, University of Erfurt, Germany

Jonathan Shandell’s book offers an invaluable contribution to the mapping of American and African American theater history. It sketches out with admirable erudition and great care the nearly decade-long work, from 1940 to 1949, of “Harlem’s preeminent theatrical organization,” the American Negro Theatre, or the ANT (1). Few scholars have undertaken a sustained critical investigation of this company’s influential work; groundbreaking in this regard was a 1975 dissertation by Ethel Louise Pitts Walker, “The American Negro Theatre, 1940-49, on whose trail-blazing work Shandell builds. On the basis of original documents, like the ensemble’s constitution, bylaws, program notes, financial records as well as correspondences and tape recordings, he reconstructs the history of the company, tracing its genesis and evolution, philosophy, and organizational structure. He also analyzes the politics and aesthetics of several of its plays and considers the company’s afterlife in the work of artists and ensembles during the subsequent decades—up to the present.

In this manner, Shandell contributes significantly to filling one of the prominent gaps in theater historiography, a period that has frequently been neglected in light of the greater attention paid, on the one hand, to the Negro Little Theatre movement and the performance culture of the Harlem Renaissance (1910s through 1920s) as well as the Federal Theatre Project (1930s) and, on the other hand, to the plays by Lorraine Hansberry and Alice Childress of the 1950s and 60s, along with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s. Shandell’s book firmly establishes its subject not only as playing an important role in American theater history but also as enabling a crucial transitional moment by extending “the ethos and energies of the Negro Little Theatre movement—particularly its philosophy of African American theatrical autonomy— through the 1940s” and, I would add, up through the Black Power movement and beyond (4).

Founded in 1940 by playwright Abram Hill and actor Frederick O’Neal, with 28 other thespians in the basement theater of the Harlem Library (today the Schomburg Center)—and hence, also known to locals as the Harlem Library Little Theatre—the ANT purposefully took up the credo of its famous predecessor, the Krigwa Players Little Negro Theater, founded by W.E.B. DuBois in 1925 in the very same location. Following in the footsteps of DuBois’s well-known manifesto, the ANT understood itself decidedly as a theater of African Americans, for African Americans, and about African Americans. Or more specifically, as stated in the unpublished preamble to the “Constitution of the American Negro Theater,” the ensemble strove to produce plays “which furnish commentary, interpretation, illumination and criticism of our common lives during contemporary times, located in the Harlem section of New York

City” (qtd. 5). Yet insofar as Harlem was never an exclusively black community nor an isolated cultural space, as Shandell underlines, but part of a vivid cosmopolitan culture in constant exchange with the rest of the city, with the US and the world, this ethnocentrist agenda collided again and again with other demands of its time and place: demands for a more integrationist approach in aesthetics and politics as well as, with growing renown, the pressures of professionalism and commercialism.

Critics allege that as the ANT began to open its doors to white playwrights, actors, audiences, and theatrical traditions, it also reneged on its founding credo of a black community theater. Shandell, however, makes clear that he sees the history of the ANT as far more complex than the simplistic narrative of selling out for the sake of commercial success. While ANT’s work was, from the start, impacted by claims from uptown and downtown, amateurism and professionalism, as well as the rival ideologies of ethnocentrism and integrationism, it labored throughout its history “to carve out sustainable positions amidst these competing influences” (3). It is precisely here, in the ANT’s persistent attempt to negotiate this tuck and pull of different ideological, aesthetic, and economic forces, to bring competing claims into a constructive dialogue (rather than a binary standstill), that Shandell sees its unique contribution to what he calls, following Nikhil Pal Singh, “the long civil rights era” (13). Shandell especially shares Singh’s emphasis on the depth and heterogeneity of the African American struggle for citizenship. Responding to the tensions of its time, the activities of the ANT were “at times integrationist by clear design. At other times, the theatre collectively and its members individually sought direct expressions of racial identity. Most often its work stood as some provocative combination of these perspectives” (13).

In his astute readings of several of the company’s productions, Shandell teases out precisely these “provocative combinations” of competing perspectives. A case in point is the ensemble’s 1944 production of Anna Lucasta. The play was a collaborative adaptation of Philip Yordan’s unknown, naturalist play Anna Lukasca about a Polish immigrant family in rural Pennsylvania. With the consent of Yordan, ANT playwright Abram Hill, together with British-born director Harry Wagstaff Gribble and the entire cast of the production, completely overhauled the original script: Anna Lucasta was now set in Alabama, with a good portion of its misanthropic overtones erased. Significantly, even as it was adapted for an all-black cast, the play purposefully refrained from any references to the characters’ racial identity. The dramatis personae were presented as ordinary, working-class Americans, their economic and moral struggles rendered as universally applicable. Indeed, the task of providing realistic portraits of the diversity of African American life had been at the heart of ANT’s artistic and political agenda from the start, but with Anna Lucasta it could begin asserting this agenda to a broader audience. Long before Hansberry’s influential A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the ANT successfully tackled and dislodged enduring racial stereotypes of black inferiority from the theater stages of the Great White Way.

Upon opening in June 1944 in the Harlem library theater, “[c]ritics raved, and audiences packed the library basement for weeks” (32). So the show was soon transferred to the Mansfield Theatre downtown, where it ran from August 1944 till November 1946 for a total of 947 performances, “a two-year run that still stands as the longest on Broadway for a nonmusical play with an African American cast” (13). Several national tours, a London production, and two feature films followed. Yet, as ANT founder and Lucasta-cast member Frederick O’Neal asserts, “Our greatest success was the cause of our greatest failure” (71). Ironically, what followed in the wake of Anna Lucasta was a “period of sustained crisis” (13). With the new publicity came higher expectations; with additional income, a rising budget; and with fame, “a divisive sense of careerism” among cast members (33).

While the ANT School of Drama—which had been established along with the theater as a major venue for training African American actors, directors, designers, managers, and critics—saw a major increase in student enrollment following the success of Anna Lucasta, school and ensemble began to feel the strain of continually losing talent to Broadway. In light of such circumstances, sustaining the identity of ANT as a community theater became increasingly more difficult. The theater still produced a substantial number of plays, including some addressing questions of racial identity, but it now no longer sought to develop original work by African American playwrights. This was a major focus of its artistic agenda during its initial years, and Shandell includes an entire section on the plays by Hill, Theodore Brown, and Owen Dodson that the ANT developed from 1940-45. While the precise reasons for such drastic change in direction remain unclear, Shandell concludes that in considering ANT’s work from 1945-49, “[a]ll evidence creates the impression of a theatre that had lost its way ideologically and artistically” (40).

After the ANT folded in 1949, its legacy continued to live on in the work of the playwrights, designers, and, above all, a host of actors trained and nurtured by the company, including Alice Childress, Ruby Dee, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier, among many others. Shandell highlights in particular how Childress in her playwriting, Poitier in his acting and directing, and O’Neal in his acting and leadership went on to impact mainstream theater and film culture in the decades to come precisely by continuing ANT’s creative and heterogeneous approach to negotiating the racial politics of the long civil rights era (91). As Shandell concludes, “The ANT’s historic achievement was in reflecting and examining, from a distinctly African American point of view, both the real pitfalls and the new possibilities presented by integration in the United States, in a way that no other group of artists had done previously” (41). In sum, then, The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era presents a nuanced, carefully researched, and compellingly narrated historiography of an important period in this long struggle for equal rights and full citizenship.