Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America From The Beginning to Raisin in the Sun by Clifford Mason (review)

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• Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America From The Beginning to Raisin in the Sun by Clifford Mason
• Cheryl Black

MACBETH IN HARLEM: BLACK THEATER IN AMERICA FROM THE BEGINNING TO RAISIN IN THE SUN. By Clifford Mason. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020; pp. 234.

As indicated by its subtitle, Clifford Mason’s Macbeth in Harlem traces the history of Black theatre in the United States from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the appearance of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in 1959. Mason, who once described this book on X as a “fighting history of Black Theatre,” is committed to exposing the obstacles confronting the artists he writes about. It is a story that unfolds against a context of virulent anti-Black racism, enslavement, and de jure and de facto segregation and discrimination. While it is a story that ends before the momentous political achievements of a reinvigorated civil rights movement in the 1960s, Mason’s text still resonates [End Page 116] in the twenty-first-century US, the era in which a new civil rights movement has emerged to persuade the nation and the world that Black Lives Matter and in which a coalition of theatre artists of color issued the “We See You, White American Theater” (WSYWAT) manifesto to demand an end to systemic racism within the industry.

Mason employs two controlling ideas throughout the narrative. Although the Federal Theatre Project’s Black-cast production of Macbeth is discussed, “Macbeth in Harlem” also serves as a metaphor for a kind of inclusion and recognition sought by Black theatre artists within US cultural life. The second recurring theme—evoked in almost every chapter to describe the nature of Black theatre artists’ “progress”—is the myth of Sisyphus, who continually pushes a boulder up a steep hill only to have it roll back down just as he approaches the top. Taking Orson Welles’s exoticized “voodoo Macbeth” as a progressive benchmark may seem problematic, but as a metaphor for wide-ranging inclusivity and increased representation, it is reasonably apt. Mason’s Sisyphean metaphor seems even more apt and in keeping with recent WSYWAT activism to combat systemic racism within the theatre that persists despite increased representation by Black playwrights and performers.

The book is organized chronologically and composed of a brief introduction and six chapters, each surveying a particular timespan. Macbeth in Harlem is narrower in scope than Errol Hill and James Hatch’s comprehensive history of African American theatre published in 2003, though considerably broader than much recent scholarship in the field. For a relatively slim volume, it is remarkably detailed, yet also remarkably succinct in expression, an attribute that makes it particularly suitable for one-semester history undergraduate classes (with the hope that a second semester would then focus on Black theatre from A Raisin in the Sun to the present).

Mason’s concept of Black theatre encompasses any theatrical performance that portrays Black characters or features Black performers in significant roles. This perspective gives considerable attention to white-authored works, from those deemed noteworthy because of their pernicious impact to those Mason credits with progressive and truthful portrayals of Black life and artistry. The former group includes, among others, blackface minstrelsy performances, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), The Octoroon (1859), and The Green Pastures (1930), all infamous for their perpetuation of false, dehumanizing, and degrading “realities,” such as the “demeaned servile,” “the forgiving,” the “unintelligible,” idiotic, and self-denigrating Black characters (57, 59, 63, 66). Mason’s analyses of mid-twentieth-century revivals of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Octoroon are particularly illuminating (and make one long to know what Mason thinks of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s recent riff on the latter).

Progressive exemplars include: the Federal Theatre Project’s Macbeth (1936) and the Mercury Theatre’s Faustus (1937), which revealed Black actors’ mastery of “classic” work; the Theatre Union’s Stevedore (1934), which featured Black laborers’ militant resistance to exploitation; and the Theatre Guild’s They Shall Not Die (1934), which dramatized the trial of the Scottsboro Boys, who were falsely accused of rape. Mason devotes thoughtful attention to Edward Sheldon’s The Nigger (1909...