Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett
• Elizabeth A. Osborne

RADICAL BLACK THEATRE IN THE NEW DEAL. By Kate Dossett. The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020; pp. 338.

Kate Dossett’s Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal joins the work of scholars like Rena Fraden, Glenda Gill, and Adrienne Macki Braconi that delves into the Federal Theatre Project’s (FTP) Negro Units. Widely celebrated by scholars as socially progressive, examinations of the Negro Units frequently appear in articles and book chapters rather than in complete monographs. As such, extant research tends to focus on single units, people, or productions—often Harlem’s behemoth, popularly known as Unit 891, and famous productions like Orson Welles’s “voodoo Macbeth.” In contrast, Dossett’s extensive study offers a scrupulously researched examination of the archival remnants of the 1930s using a multifaceted historiographic approach. Rather than focusing only on staged productions, she traces the lengthy and often fraught process of creation, including work that has never reached the stage. To do so, Dossett centers on what she calls “black performance communities”—a concept based on Richard Barr’s “temporary social organization” of performance, which incorporates the creative team, performers, audience, and the surrounding community as a temporary and fluid group. This approach allows her to consider the many invisibilized influences on a performance text. As Dossett argues, the FTP’s manuscript collection serves as “an archive of black agency, for they not only record how and when white mastery was contested within and beyond the theatre, they also document the scope and ambition of black creativity” (6–7).

Dossett organizes Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal into two primary sections, both of which include multiple chapters. The first two chapters focus on how Black performance communities operated outside of predominantly white theatre institutions. They functioned in ways that enabled these institutions to represent Black life on US stages, whether they were adapting white-authored plays for Negro Unit performances, writing manuscripts that were ultimately left unstaged, or engaging in debates within Black journals or newspapers. The first chapter examines the popular and well-known white-authored play Stevedore (George Sklar and Paul Peters). The second chapter delves into two living newspapers written by Black authors for staging in the Negro Units: Liberty Deferred (Abram Hill and John Silvera) and Stars and Bars (Ward Courtney and the Connecticut Negro Unit). Each chapter uses multiple script iterations to trace the negotiations each play endured within and beyond the theatre, and each shows the different ways in which Black agency and resistance circulated through the texts. I particularly appreciate Dossett’s work on Liberty Deferred and Stars and Bars. As plays that never saw production, these pieces are often omitted from the FTP narrative. Yet, as examples of how Black writers resisted the erasure of Black history and reckoned with the power of white institutions, Dossett’s meticulous analysis of the works and use of cultural and political contexts provide a compelling case for their prominent inclusion. Moreover, these early [End Page 129] chapters extend beyond the Harlem Negro Unit to companies in Seattle (Stevedore) and Hartford (Stars and Bars). Dossett attends to each with care, demonstrating the political, racial, and administrative differences and providing a multiplicity of under-represented perspectives outside New York City.

The second half of the book focuses on the different options available to Black creatives when their plays were produced, and it provides excellent examples of another facet of Dossett’s historiographical approach—“reading forward.” As she argues, many researchers use final published manuscripts to look back on Black theatre history, interpreting events through the lens of the past one hundred years. Reading forward centers Black communities in the cultural moment of creation, and she uses the FTP archives to illuminate community debates around how theatre could be used to mobilize radicalism. In three packed chapters, Dossett explores Natural Man and Go Down Moses (Theodore Browne), Big White Fog (Theodore Ward), and Haiti (William DuBois), with attention to Negro Units in Seattle, Chicago, and New York. Chapter 4 offers an excellent example...