The
first published collection of plays by African-American women did not appear until 1986.1
Its editor, Margaret B. Wilkerson, recognized in 1996 with the
Career Achievement Award for Outstanding Educator by the Association for
Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), introduced 9 Plays by Black Women
with these words: "Black women are a prism through which the
searing rays of race, class and sex are first focused, then refracted. The creative among us transform these rays into a spectrum of
brilliant colors, a rainbow which illuminates the experience of all
humankind" (xiii). This
is as good a definition of womanist drama as any.
It takes up where most feminist drama leaves off, by depicting
the unique range of experiences of women of color negotiating their ways
through a Eurandrocentric society.
Womanist
theatre is constructed around the major precepts of feminist,
Afrocentric, and post-Afrocentric theatre theory, resulting in a
reshaping of dramatic form and narrative.
Like feminist theatre, womanist theatre subverts traditional
Eurocentric dramatic structures to expose patriarchal misrepresentation,
bias, and oppression. Feminist
theatre creates "[p]roductions and scripts characterised [sic] by
consciousness of women as women; dramaturgy in which art is inseparable
from the condition of women as women; performance that deconstucts
sexual difference and thus undermines patriarchal power . . . and
[places] women characters in the 'subject position' " (Keyssar 1).
While these creative goals are sound, white feminists often fail
to consider the role their own privileged status plays in their
conceptualizations of feminist themes.
While white women gain some benefit from their class privilege of
color, the woman of color bears the triple burden of gender, race, and
class oppression (Case, Feminism 97).
She is bound to unique historical and cultural experiences and
perspectives. Womanist
theatre inscribes and incorporates these features, including those
described as Afrocentric: for instance, the view of time as circular
rather than linear; the retention of rhythmic, rhetorical, and musical
traditions from African ritual theatre; and the blurring of the
separation between performer and audience.2
The rebellious and irreverent use of the language of the
colonizer to forge a cultural identity for the colonized, the
re-visioning of Eurocentric and Afrocentric imagery and symbolism,
and the subversion of the Western idea of genre, major precepts of
post-Afrocentric dramatic theory,3 also significantly
are present in womanist drama.
Certainly, these definitions and precepts apply to the theatre
created by Pearl Cleage and Glenda Dickerson, who take two avenues
toward representation of the womanist experience on stage.
While Cleage has chosen to invert the well-made play
structure4 to attack, rather than support, the status quo,
Dickerson has taken the approach of leaving linear dramatic structure
behind in favor of exploration of nonlinear forms. Both
have achieved exciting results.
Though
she is widely known as a poet and essayist, Cleage has been a playwright
since she studied at Howard University with Owen Dodson (1914-83),
Ted Shine, and Paul Carter-Harrison, then earned her B.A. in Drama
at Spelman College in 1971. During
this extremely fermentive period for African-American drama, the
Black Arts Movement years (1964-1975), when there was a passionate
interest in the direction and nature of African-American drama,
one of Cleage's Spelman instructors was Carlton W. Molette II.
With his wife, Barbara, Molette co-authored one of the
first book-length works devoted to African-American theatre
theory, Black Theatre: Premise and Presentation (1986).
Cleage
remains based in Atlanta, but her first major break as a playwright came
through the production of puppetplay, which opened the
seventeenth season of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York City in
1983. Described by Cleage
as "my only avant-garde piece,"5 puppetplay
explores the dynamics and issues of marriage through a woman divided
into two characters: the wife, portrayed by two female actors, and the
husband, represented by a seven-foot marionette.
The marital relationship is defined in terms of alienation and
confusion. The use of the
marionette does not objectify the male, but illustrates how each partner
sees the other as Other. The
second character of the divided woman searches unsuccessfully for
wholeness in this relationship.
Reviews
and audience reaction were mixed. This
response to puppetplay may partially explain Cleage's return to a
more conventional dramatic structure: She says, "Most people are
not enamored of new forms. Using
traditional forms gives me more power in taking the audience's defenses
away." Cleage deeply admires Ntozake Shange for her experimentation
with form, particularly in For Colored Girls Who have Considered
Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (1977), and she was moved by the
dynamic energy of Tony Kushner's Angels in America
(1991-93). Yet her
methodology is to use familiar forms to invoke new ideas.
She cites Langston Hughes (1902-67) as a significant
influence: "He was grounded in his identity, and could write from
that grounding anywhere in the world."
Describing
herself as "a third generation black nationalist and a radical
feminist" (qtd. in Perkins and Uno, 46), Cleage defines her task as
a dramatist as threefold: to
express her emotional response to oppression, "since no revolution
has ever been fueled purely by intellect"; to offer analysis,
establish context, and clarify point of view; and to incite action.
For Cleage, there is no dichotomy between art and politics:
My
work is deeply rooted in, and consciously reflective of,
African-American
history
and culture since I believe that it is by accurately expressing our very
specific
and highly individual realities that we discover our common humanity. .
. .
My response to the oppression I face is to name it, describe it, analyze
it, protest
it,
and propose solutions to it as loud as I possibly can every time I get
the chance.
I purposely people my plays with fast-talking,
quick-thinking black
women
since the theater is, for me, one of the few places where we have a
chance
to
get an uninterrupted word in edgewise. (Perkins and Uno 46)
Cleage
thus sees the theater as a "hollering place" for a dialectic
on the lives of African-American women.
Her most widely produced play, Flyin' West (1992),
perfectly embodies her theatrical philosophy and methodology.
Since
Flyin' West was first commissioned and produced by Kenny Leon at
the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, it has been produced at the Crossroads
Theatre (New Jersey), the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Indiana
Repertory Company, Oakland Ensemble Company, Brooklyn Academy of Music,
Long Wharf Theatre (Connecticut), St. Louis Black Repertory Company,
Kennedy Center, Intiman Theatre (Seattle), San Diego Repertory Company,
and Ensemble Theatre Company (Houston).
Cleage has achieved a rare plateau for an African-American
playwright: consistent professional production.
Cleage
arrived at the setting of Flyin' West, the 1898 black settlement
of Nicodemus, Kansas, through one of its main characters, Miss Leah.
A survivor of slavery, Leah endured seeing ten of her children
sold and lost to her forever, the loss of five more children born free,
but prey to poverty and illness, and the death of her husband: Their
marriage, forced upon them in slavery, had become a true partnership in
Emancipation. When Miss
Leah formed herself as a character in Cleage's consciousness, Cleage
tried to force her into modern Atlanta, but Miss Leah's resistance was
so strong that Cleage recognized that she would have to attempt an
historical drama. Research
led her to Nicodemus and the "exodusters" who sought to
establish a Western haven of autonomy and safety for African Americans.
As Miss Leah explains in a monologue:
So
I buried him next to his children and I closed the door on that little
piece of
house
we had and I started walkin' west.
If I'd had wings, I'd a set out flyin' west.
I
needed to be some place big enough for all my sons and all my ghost grandbabies
to roam around. Big enough for me to think about all that sweetness
they
had stole from me and James and just holler about it as loud as I want
to holler.
(Perkins and Uno 73)
Characters
began to gather around Miss Leah, who became a member of an extended
family including sisters Fannie and Minnie, and their adopted sister,
Sophie. Wil [sic] Parrish
entered the scene as a suitor for Fannie.
The
conflict of the play centers on Minnie's new husband, Frank, a mulatto
(his father is white), who can accept neither his blackness nor his
rejection by his father's family. Though Frank has earned some recognition as a poet, his art
has not turned him from the darkness of his anger: He heaps verbal and
physical abuse upon his wife, even after he learns that she is pregnant.
Though the base issue is domestic violence, Flyin' West
also addresses the issues of what constitutes and defines a family, and
the nationalism vs. integration issue that informs decisions that the
community will make on the future of Nicodemus.
Cleage
wants audiences to understand the origins of Frank's anger, but not to
excuse his behavior, or to consider him just another tragic mulatto
stereotype. Though he views
himself as damaged by his racial status, Frank, empowered by his
position as male and husband, feels that he can act against his wife and
her family with impunity. When
he becomes too great a threat to Minnie and her family, the family
successfully conspires to murder him.
This climactic action invariably invokes controversy: "In a
sudden swerve in the direction of a
take-the-law-into-your-own-hands
solution to a nasty plot turn, [the] second-act climax can leave
one cheering, jeering or just wondering" (Klein 19).
Cleage
stands behind her plot choice: "I'm not nonviolent.
I'd like to be nonviolent, but I don't live in a world where I
feel I can be." Disguised as domestic melodrama, Flyin' West
is a polemic against domestic violence which has touched a responsive
chord wherever it has played, even to the extent that Cleage is often
asked for the recipe for the poisoned pie served to Frank.
The poison pie idea is introduced by Miss Leah, who, as a slave,
was given the secret of the crucial and lethal herbal ingredient by the
plantation's cook, who said the knowledge came from Africa and
"White folks don't need to know." Cleage's use of the poisoned
pie carries two threads of meaning.
The first is connected to the retention of knowledge from the
African motherland, passed through the oral tradition, which fosters
self-preservation, especially if kept concealed from the
oppressor. The second
thread is connected to the folk tradition of victory over oppression
through covert confrontation, "like Aunt Jemima whose jolly
accommodating laugh hides her fat hand as she sprinkles poison into the
tasty stew" (Dickerson, "Cult" 180).
The
family must not only battle Frank to save his wife, they also must
battle him for the land itself, which they own in common.
Because Frank can only understand the concept of family in
material terms, as blood and legal ties and obligations, he cannot
create a family or join the family he has married into, other than in
terms of the white patriarchal roles of male and husband that he has
modeled. Desperate to
renounce his blackness and gain acceptance by the white world, Frank
intends to use his legal position as husband to take possession of his
wife's share of the property and sell it to white speculators.
His self-interest is so strong that he will destroy the
economic and autonomic foundation of the family for personal material
gain. Land and women are merely commodities to be used for his
benefit.
A
weapon that Sophie, the oldest sister, attempts to use in her fight for
the land is speech. Through
Sophie's efforts to compose a speech of resistance to the speculators
which will be delivered before the community, Cleage indicates that the
first step toward individual and collective freedom involves taking the
risk of "talking back," a point similarly defined by womanist
author bell hooks in her eponymously named essay.
Writes hooks, "Moving from silence into speech is for the
oppressed . . . a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life
and new growth possible. It
is that act of speech, of 'talking back,' that is no mere gesture of
empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to
subject--the liberated voice" (qtd. in Anzaldúa,
211). Sophie
ultimately is successful in convincing the residents of Nicodemus
to retain their autonomy by holding onto the land.
Thus, the women represent communal interest and interdependence,
while Frank stands for destructive individualism.
Wil, who supports the women's efforts and respects their
decisions, also will become a family member.
Frank, who refuses to hear what the women and the community have
to say, will be expunged through any means necessary.
In
her essay, "Rechannelling the Energy," Cleage defines and
explains her belief, developed through an appreciation of American
history, that nationalism, as it pertains to developing and revitalizing
the African-American community, is a more creative ideology than
integrationism:
Being
an African American Urban Nationalist doesn't mean calling for separatism.
It means recognizing that most of us are already separate, by
choice
or
circumstance. . . . If someone says, "All the grocery stores in
this black neighborhood
are terrible. I'm moving my family to the suburbs," you'll know
you're
talking to an African American Urban Integrationist.
If someone says, "All
the grocery stores in this black neighborhood are terrible.
I think I'll open
one
myself and fill it full of fresh vegetables and whole wheat bread and
employees
who live close enough to walk to work," you'll know you're talking
to
an
African American Urban Nationalist. (Deals 116-17)
Flyin'
West is an expression of
Cleage's desire to see the African-American community return to
awareness of social, political, and economic mutual interest.
Her
interest in the Harlem Renaissance (1917-29) led Cleage to explore
a favorite theme--that women must take responsibility for
their destinies into their own hands-- in Blues for an
Alabama Sky. Blues
premiered at the Alliance Theatre in 1995, and was revived in Atlanta
during the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games. It also has been produced by
Hartford (Connecticut) Stage, where Cleage took the opportunity to do
some reworking and fine-tuning.
The focal character, Angel, a former prostitute turned singer,
must survive in Depression-era Harlem.
The year is 1930, and the glory days of the Renaissance are over.
Angel is dependent and careless in her relationships with friends
and lovers, and pays a high price for not taking responsibility for her
life. Through Angel, who
values herself primarily in relation to her perceived value to men, and
through the events surrounding her pregnancy, Cleage gives us a view of
a Harlem embroiled in controversy over the issue of birth control.
Combining historical fact with dramatic myth, she reexamines the
conflict between the feminist Margaret Sanger (1883-1966), who
opened a birth control clinic in Harlem, supported in her efforts there
by the politician and minister Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (1908-72),
and those who agreed with the black nationalist Marcus Garvey
(1887-1940), who viewed Sanger as an agent of racial genocide.
The characters who surround Angel -- an idealistic social worker,
a world weary doctor, a defiantly proud gay best friend, and a suitor
fresh from the deep South -- provide
a kaleidoscopic view of gender relationships and attitudes toward
reproductive rights.
Powell
and other well-known historical figures do not themselves appear
in this, or in any of Cleage's other plays.
She prefers to write about the people who may have lived next
door to the greats, "the people who knew these folks . . . [and]
who made the history even though they didn't make it into the history
books," so that her audience will not be distracted from the issues
by focusing on the accuracy of the impersonation of famous characters.
She hopes that the audience will be encouraged to take action by
seeing drylongso9 people doing so on the stage: "If all
you see of history are 'perfect' people, you won't feel responsible for
being part of the flow of history. . . . Looking back, we have a
tendency to sanitize."
Her
women audience members may be disturbed by the mother in Hospice
(1982) who must face the daughter she left behind in the wake of her
quest for her singular destiny, or they may be shaken in Bourbon at
the Border (1996) by the struggle of a racially mixed daughter to
come to terms with both sides of her family and the violent dènouement
of her parents' marriage. Yet
they will understand Cleage's recurring message to "take
responsibility for ourselves, rise to the occasion, do what has to be
done." She says,
"I'm a feminist in everything I do, so my politics are not separate
from my writing. I'm always
trying to move people to action. Women
should not in any way be punished or confined because of gender."
Cleage believes that no one should be specially privileged or
punished, and that everyone should understand what it means to be a free
person. As a womanist
thinker, Cleage encourages an understanding of difference that
transcends race, class, and gender assumptions and that ultimately
embraces a more comprehensive meaning for the term "universal"
than that which infuses patriarchal, and even some feminist, thinking:
namely, that one voice can speak for all, at all times, under all
circumstances.7
In
1982, Cleage and her husband, writer Zaron W. Burnett, founded Atlanta's
Just Us Theatre Company. Collaboratively and individually, they have written,
produced, and performed theatre pieces, monologues, and poetry. They created a popular evening of cabaret performance, Club
Zebra, which has been incorporated into the biannual National Black Arts
Festival in Atlanta. Cleage's
essay, "Mad at Miles," performed there in 1990, became the
basis for a book of essays, Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman's Guide to
Truth, published by the Cleage Group in 1990.
"Mad at Miles" and other essays from this book were
incorporated into a subsequent essay collection, Deals With the Devil
and Other Reasons to Riot (1993).
"Mad
at Miles" provides key insight into Cleage's perspective on the
complex ethical relationships among the artist, the art created, and the
public receiving that art. In the essay, Cleage recounts her response to reading Miles
Davis's (1926-91) autobiography, in which he boasts of his
physical battery of Cicely Tyson, who loyally endured his
self-destructive, abusive behavior for years.
Insight into Davis's character forever spoiled Cleage's ability
to tolerate his music, a music she once treasured.
According
to Cleage, Davis's art, whether intended to be overtly political or not,
is tainted by his inability to take moral and ethical responsibility for
his actions. His talent
does not absolve him, as it does not absolve Frank, the poet in Flyin'
West, or Angel, the singer in Blues for an Alabama Sky.
Cleage recommends that Davis’s records, tapes, and CD's be
destroyed until he "acknowledges and apologizes and rethinks his
position on The Woman Question": She writes, "That sounds
terrible, doesn't it? Breaking
Miles Davis records? Because
of a few mistakes in his personal life?
Next thing you know, I'll be fussing about 2 Live Crew just
because they don't know the difference between rape and
reciprocity" ("Mad at Miles" 36).
She goes on to muse over whether black people would buy Kenny G
records if he said that he liked to slap black men around every now and
then. She continually
reinforces the idea that the art and the artist must be an ethical whole
in order to be embraced by the community. Cleage views the theatre as an important arena for ideas,
though she is not overly optimistic about its future: "One of the
things that theatre does is give us a chance to have a communal
experience, something we don't do much of anymore.
We are encouraged to be separate from each other and afraid of
each other. . . . If we
make that form [theatre] relevant to people's lives, they'll find it
[but] I don't have a very hopeful outlook."
After
two decades in the theatre, Cleage is amused at finding herself hailed
as an overnight success. She attributes this ironic recognition to the fact that the
mainstream media maintains a studied ignorance when it comes to
African-American theatres. Now
that her plays are widely performed by regional theatres, she is
approached by agents and by the mainstream press.
One of her concerns is that because mainstream theatres are
practicing "diversity" in selecting their seasons,
African-American theatres will suffer even more as funding is
further diverted. It will
be even more difficult for new playwrights and experimental pieces to
gain exposure, and when the demand for diversity dies down, there may be
even fewer culture-specific theatres left to keep their art forms
alive. Another byproduct of the current attempts to bring cultural
pluralism to mainstream theatres is that "the white audience is
still amazed by the fact that they can like a black play.
They are not used to making that leap . . . as we are."
While
Pearl Cleage plants mines under the well-made play, Glenda
Dickerson tosses Molotov cocktails at Western dramatic structure in an
effort to create touchstones to connect us viscerally to our ancestors
and bring us to grips with who we are, what that means, and how
important it is. In her
current position as Chair and Professor of Drama and Dance at Spelman
College, she strives to inflame a new generation of performing artists
with her passion and commitment:
Thirty
pounds heavier and a hundred cypress swamps deeper in thought, I emerge
out of a labyrinth of rooms to drag my foot into the 21st century.
I'm
staring
50 down with a loaded gun and a string of invectives.
If you want trouble,
I
can offer you a wide variety. I
step out of a caul of invisibility to pick up my load,
to get on down the road. White
men sail the world planting flags, gathering
slaves
and spreading syphilis; then they retire to walk golf courses,
comfortable
in
the belief that it is their sacred prerogative to order the world.
White men feel
entitled
to space. Sitting with
their legs wide open. . . . Saying no with laughing
ease.
Pretenders to the throne of rejection.
Black women see the world from their own Black reality, but the
world we
inhabit
doesn't recognize that reality. . . . Today, Black women are walking
down
the
sidewalks, sick of getting out of the way; ruminating over rituals of preparation
for battle. Cosmic collisions will soon occur. ("Festivities"
1-2)
In
her theatre pieces, Dickerson concerns herself with giving the Black
woman space to tell her story her way.
The means of doing so may involve representation, also
storytelling in the manner of the griot, the living repository of the
community's history and culture in African traditional societies, plus:
1) the juxtaposition of past and present; 2) nonlinearity; 3) fearless
plunges into the metaphysical; 4) poetry, song, movement, and dance; 5)
paralanguage created by the performers; and any methods that drive the
audience past cognition into recognition.
The
incorporation of these means into African-American theatrical
presentation is described by the term methexis, which connotes a
methodology that differs from the Eurocentric idea of mimesis.
Methexis connotes a theatre of community, where performer
and audience collaborate in the creative act, often joining together or
even trading places in celebration or commemoration of a significant
event. Spontaneity and
improvisation are incorporated so that the performance serves the
practical purpose of uniting the community.
Mimesis, on the other hand, describes the act of
imitation, of making a credible copy of an action, of a performance
being created for an audience. The
audience is involved as spectator rather than participant, and is just
allowed space to indicate approval or disapproval of the event.
The goals of methexis and mimesis may be similar,
to evoke communal feeling, but, generally, mimesis involves the
community in a collective illusion to see how effective the carefully
scripted simulation can be.
In
a landmark essay, "Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female
Parts," feminist theatre critic Sue Ellen Case explains how this
concept of mimesis in the theatre of classical Greece, created
and performed solely by men, laid a foundation for the continuing
misappropriation of female roles, and for a dramatic structure based on
the male-centered concept of the individualistic hero pitting
himself against a larger foe. Case
argues that feminist drama must seek forms more reflective of the
realities and psychologies of women.
Dickerson became one of the first to publish essays on how these
ideas applied to the making of womanist drama.
Like
Cleage, Dickerson's study of theatre began at Howard University, and was
influenced by Owen Dodson (1914-83).
Dickerson completed her B.F.A. at Howard, earned an M.A. at
Adelphi University, then returned to Washington, D.C., to become the
first Drama Department Head at Duke Ellington High School.
She has chaired the Department of Theatre Arts and Television at
the Rutgers University Campus at Newark, and has taught in the theatre
departments at SUNY--Stony Brook, Fordham University, and Howard.
Combining
her academic career with her career as a professional director, she has
mounted every conceivable manner of play, from Thornton Wilder's 1938
classic Our Town (1987) to Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery
(1988), by Georgia womanist playwright Shay Youngblood.
She has studied theatre arts in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe,
and Japan. Along the way
she was inducted into the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.
She won Audience Development Committe (AUDELCO8)
awards for her staging of Magic and Lions (1980), a production
which combined poetry, original music and dance, Dogon and Egyptian
mythology, and a "language of the gods" created by the actors,
as well as for her founding and direction of the Owen Dodson Lyric
Theatre (1982). Her
direction of a televised production of Alice Childress's (1916-94) Wine in the Wilderness (1969) gained her an Emmy nomination
(1971), and she garnered a Peabody Award for her direction of another
television production, "For My People" (1972).
In
recent years, Dickerson has been focusing on synthesizing her broad base
of experience into her own artistic vision.
The present phase of her theatrical work began while she was at
SUNY--Stony Brook, which is located in the far reaches of Long Island,
New York. One of the
communities there, Setauket, was home to an early nineteenth-century
free black settlement. Dickerson
gathered stories from community elders, and collected artifacts for an
exhibit. Then she developed
a theatre piece for performance within the exhibit, through which
professional actors (joined by community members) and the audience would
interact in absorbing the community's rich history.
She took the title of the presentation, Eel Catching in
Setauket, from an 1845 painting by William Sidney Mount
(1807-68), Eel Spearing at Setauket, in which a foremother
of one of the storytellers, Rachel Holland Hart,9 is
depicted. Dickerson altered
her title to reflect a less violent image, that of capturing the
substance of a community, rather than hunting and conquering.
Two
years of preparation culminated in public performances in 1988.
The community, the university, and professional theatre
practitioners were enmeshed in an interactive theatre event which
carried enormous emotional power.
Descendants of community founders lent testimony to their own
stories, performed by professional and student actors as the audience
moved through the community's displayed treasures.
Re-envisioning a term used in western theatre, Dickerson calls
this method of performance a "miracle play."10
She says, "I define a miracle play as a tapestry for the
stage. It is at the other
end of the spectrum from realism. It
is, at once, more ancient and more futuristic than the traditional
miracle play. It is rooted
in and based upon myth, but it is not an enactment of a myth. . . . My
miracle plays embody history, culture, literature, symbols, dreams, and
inspiration. . . . They
explore archetypes as they are revealed through the lives of drylongso
people" ("Cult" 180).
Dickerson's
next miracle play was inspired by her concern that "[t]he image of
the African-American woman has been sullied on the world
stage" ("Cult" 180), and by her need to give voice to
"ghosts hovering about graves over which america [sic] plays at
festivities and jubilations" ("Festivities" 3).
The spur was Dickerson's 1991 visit to Jekyll Island, Georgia,
site of Ibo Landing, a cultural icon treated reverentially in Julie
Dash's film, Daughters of the Dust, which premiered that same
year. At the time,
Dickerson had not seen the film, but she well knew the story of how
African captives disembarked a slave ship there, turned resolutely
toward home, and walked into the ocean, never to return to enslavement.
When
she made her way to the site, she forcefully was turned away by its
white owners. On the island she witnessed golf balls whizzing past
hallowed burial grounds and momentous histories relegated to small
plaques. She met an
African-American woman there, Ana Bel Lee, who had become an
artist after her retirement as a social worker; her art work evoked the
life and history of the island. Dickerson
discovered that, serendipitously, Lee's work would be shown at Spelman
College. She then brought the Drama and Art Departments together, hired
a guest artist to portray Lee, and developed a performance piece, Ana
Bel's Brush: A Live Oak Drama, presented in 1992.
The
performance environment was created from Lee's canvasses and artifacts,
including her brushes, photographs of her, and other items from her
studio, plus pine cones, sand, and moss from Jekyll Island.
Her paintings were hung in a nearby gallery.
The story of her life was dramatized from her own oral history,
recorded by Dickerson in taped interviews.
As
a manifesto for the "miracle play" phase of her work,
Dickerson composed a landmark essay, "The Cult of True Womanhood:
Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre,"
which she performed at the ATHE Conference in 1987.
The essay describes Dickerson's process for arriving at a "womanist
attitude" toward theatre. She
begins her discussion with a description of the Cult of True Womanhood,
a late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century movement, aimed at white,
middle class women, which urged religious piety, sexual purity,
domesticity, and obedient submission to the male prerogative as the only
acceptable hallmarks of femininity.
Dickerson deconstructs and inverts these ideas and restructures
the term as a paradigm for resistance against rather than submission to
white patriarchy. Dickerson claims for the Cult of True Womanhood the
descendants of women who were "exploited by racism, denied equality
by their own husbands, yet determined to educate themselves and their
children, take pride in themselves and their history and to 'lift up the
race' " ("Cult" 182).
The drama of nommo, of the spirit-force-- expressed through the word, ritual, rhythm, music, and
dance--is used as the basis for the creation of a theatre
language that speaks from, as well as about, the womanist experience.
As the editors of Theatre Journal noted, the rhetorical
style in which Dickerson delivers her womanist ideas offers "an
alternative discourse, central to the development of a
woman-identified, ethnic language and outside of the white,
upper-middle-class, gender marked language of traditional
scholarship" ("Cult" 178).
In
1992 Dickerson collaborated with her longtime friend, writer Breena
Clarke, on a performance piece with music, RE/MEMBERING AUNT JEMIMA:
A Menstrual Show. As
Clarke explains, "We decided that the bravest thing we could do
would be to take on the stereotype of Aunt Jemima, tear it apart,
examine it, and put her back together as the archetype she originally
was" (Perkins and Uno 34). Dickerson
and Clarke sought to reclaim Aunt Jemima as the Santería figure La
Madama, guardian orisha11 of the domestic sphere.
This desire to contemplate, reexamine and transform the imagery
of Aunt Jemima is shared by a number of other contemporary
African-American literary, visual, and theatre artists.
Alice Walker re-forms her through Celie in The Color
Purple (1982). Joe Overstreet's painting, The New Jemima (1964),
shows her wielding an automatic rifle, her syrup bottle turned into a
grenade. Murray DePillars' Aunt
Jemima (1968) depicts her bursting through her pancake box, menacing
the viewer with her spatula: Her portrait in the box's corner sports an
afro rather than a kerchief. Bettye
Saar's mixed media work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972),
shows several levels of imagery, including one in which she poses with a
broom in one hand and a rifle in the other (Lippard 234-35).
Current theatrical explorations of the image can be found in
George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum (1988), and The Death of
the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990) by
Suzan-Lori Parks. Dickerson and Clarke expand Aunt Jemima's iconography by
connecting her all the way to Africa through a deity in a New World
religion.
In
order to do so, they invert and reinvent the minstrel show format,
expanding the deconstruction to include traditional and modern
stereotypes of the African-American woman. This strategy of confronting and reappropriating minstrel
stereotypes from an offensive position is another post-Afrocentric
theatrical strategy, shared with playwrights such as Parks and Wolfe, as
well as with Ntozake Shange, as exemplified in spell #7: a geechee
jibara quick magic trance manual for technologically stressed third
world people: A Theater Piece (1979), which begins with the company
performing in minstrel masks beneath a giant, grinning black mask which
hovers over stage. Along with other womanist performing collectives and
performance artists, Thoughtmusic also has built theatrical pieces
around the deconstruction of the minstrel show.
Confrontation of the minstrel show is particularly significant to
the theatre, since this form (in which whites conterfeited black
behavior, then forced black performers to do the same) has embedded its
images of African Americans into world consciousness since its inception
during the 1840s.
The
minstrel device of the "stump speech," the mangling of
language meant to demean the African American's intelligence, is one of
the primary means through which Dickerson and Clarke re-align language
into images descriptive of the power of African-American women's
experiences and ideas. Layers
of misrepresentation and manufactured shame are peeled away to expose
the archetypal black woman who helped make possible blacks' collective
survival. The minstrels
become "menstruals," of quintessential female identity, who
bend time and space to enact a mythic history of Aunt Jemima, from her
travails as a slave through her sufferings in the present.
Raucous humor infuses the action as Aunt Jemima gives birth to
thirteen daughters, who are cultural icons ranging from Morrison's
tragic Pecola, an evocation of Peola, the troubled daughter in Fannie
Hurst's Imitation of Life (1933),12
to Sapphire, to Anita, whose fate mirrors that of Anita Hill.
In a stunning turn from comedy to tragedy, Aunt Jemima --
elderly, sick, forgotten, trapped in her pancake box -- is shotgunned to
death by police who arrive to evict her, a direct reference to the case
of Eleanor Bumpurs.13 Aunt
Jemima's last words echo Sojourner Truth's declaration (mythologized by
the suffragist writer Frances Dana Goge): "Ain't I a woman?"
They recall the legendary incident in which Truth bared her
breasts to silence skeptics who sought to discredit her entitlement to
speak about women's rights. Also,
they serve as a reminder that the white feminist cannot always be
counted upon to empathize with the black woman's struggle for a just
society.
As
she is eulogized, and the feats and exploits of her daughters described,
Aunt Jemima springs back to life: "Ah can catch bullets with my
ass-perity [sic]. Sometimes
Ah send them back with interest and sometimes Ah transform them into
balls of cotton." Aunt Jemima is vulnerable to attack, yet too
resilient to destroy. She
is capable of just retaliation and able to create a positive, productive
outcome from a negative New World experience which began with slavery.
As one menstrual explains, "She is with us always and
asserts herself in our daily lives and offers us a strategy"
(Perkins and Uno 45).
Dickerson
has experimented with incorporating mythic cultural icons and literary
figures in Zora and Lorraine and Their Signifyin' Tongues (1995).
After steeping herself in the works of novelist and
anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) and playwright
Lorraine Hansberry (1930-65), she reconstructs their writing into
a cosmic argument. She
says, "In this work, Zora and Lorraine speak in their own voices as
handed down to us. They
storm onto the stage--Marie Laveau vs. the Womanish
Warrior--and spy a lacuna.
A due(l)t [sic] follows in which they strain, through their
disparate and common realities, to signify speakerly symbols.
The siren song of their signifying tongues populates the space in
a magic swirl of spirit people, folklore, song and dance" (Program
Notes). Naming Hurston the "Grand Signifyer" and Hansberry
the "Cool-tongued Rebel," Dickerson pits their methods
of interpreting the African-American experience, and even the
fictional characters they have created, against each other in a contest
of ideas that becomes a celebration of their lives and works.
Dickerson celebrates both as warrior women and she attempts to
give them their due. "As
artists," she states, "we must be on a mission to introduce
our students to their culture. There
is not the concern for the race that there used to be.
We are not the race people we used to be."14
Dickerson
makes it clear that claiming voice and claiming space mean purveying
truth rather than denigrating men: "If a woman is speaking her
truth, whatever her truth is, it really doesn't have anything to do with
men in the sense that it is not for or against men, it is about her. . .
. But we want everything to be about men. . . . We want the woman to
define her life through the men as opposed to defining her life through
her life." Some
feminists have given the impression that much of the feminist movement
is fixated on the victimization of women; womanism resists that notion. The big picture is the pursuit of liberty and justice for
all. Black nationalism and
black feminism need not be antagonistic terms: Black people are black
men and black women. The goal of freeing society from racism, classism,
and sexism is mutually inclusive, or at least it should be (Cleage, Deals
180-83).
The
current phase of Dickerson's work also involves combining the miracle
play with street theatre, bringing methexis to a performance
methodology as old as the European medieval cycle dramas, which were
often performed at stations about which the audience circulated.
For two days during the Centennial Olympic Games, she executed a
site-specific performance event.
Folksay: A Living Exhibit brought to life the history of
Atlanta's seminal African-American community, the Auburn Avenue
District. Using the Wheat
Street Baptist Church and the Baldwin Burroughs Theatre at Spelman
College as anchors, Dickerson and her actors traversed outdoor sites
throughout the neighborhood, recreating historic events which took place
there. Many of their tableaux, which evolved into scenes, were based
on turn-of-the-century photographs by Thomas Askew,
Atlanta's first African-American professional photographer.
In front of the Odd Fellows Hall, Mamie Smith (1883-1946)
and Her Jazz Hounds recalled the era of the blues.
In front of the Herndon Building, Alonzo (c.1858-1927) and
Adrienne Herndon (1869-1910) told the story of how he founded the
Atlanta Life Insurance Company and how she designed their historic home
only to die just as it was completed.
On the street, Mary Combs (18??-19??) described how, as the first
person of color to purchase real estate in antebellum Atlanta, she
waited for it to appreciate in value, then sold it to buy her husband's
freedom. Some audience
members knew of the performance ahead of time: Many did not, and joined
along the way. Auburn
Avenue's past and present came together to celebrate each other,
culminating in a musical celebration in the church.
Cleage
and Dickerson offer two viable paradigms for womanist drama and theatre.
They have taken it upon themselves to challenge a white
patriarchal institution, American theatre, and to take space for
themselves as artists, as well as for the subjects they represent
through their creations. They have battled for these spaces for years, yet still
cannot rest secure in the knowledge that the generation following them
is either willing or able to carry on.
The stakes are high.
Notes
1.
The theatre and publishing industries share the white patriarchal
bias of other American institutions, traditionally marginalizing
African-American contributions. When
recognition is conferred, priority is often given to the
African-American male. Some
selected anthologies may provide examples: The first anthology of solely
African-American authored plays, Plays and Pageants from the
Life of the Negro (1930), edited by Willis Richardson, includes nine
playwrights, six of whom are women.
As time passes, representation decreases.
New Plays from the Black Theatre (1969), edited by Ed
Bullins, includes two women among its eleven playwrights.
New Black Playwrights (1970), edited by William Couch,
Jr., includes one female playwright among the five included, while Black
Drama in America (1971), edited by Darwin S. Turner, includes nine
plays, none authored by women.
Contemporary
anthologies may or may not reflect improvement in the representation of
female playwrights. Classic
Plays from the Negro Ensemble Company (1995), edited by Paul Carter
Harrison and Gus Edwards, includes one woman among its ten playwrights.
The National Black Drama Anthology (1995), edited by
Woodie King, Jr., contains ten plays, five authored by women.
The most comprehensive anthology of its kind, Black Theatre
U.S.A.: Plays by African-Americans, 1847-Today (1996),
edited by James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, in its expanded edition,
includes fifty-one plays and play excerpts.
Two sections on early and contemporary plays by women are
included, and plays by women are interspersed through other sections,
for a total of eighteen plays.
Of
the general anthologies of African-American drama available, only
one has been edited by a woman: Center Stage: An Anthology of 21
Contemporary Plays (1981), edited by Eileen Ostrow.
The volume includes ten female playwrights.
2.
See Molette and Molette.
3.
See Olaniyan.
4.
Of the wide variety of dramatic forms, the well-made play
has remained the most popular Western form since its inception in the
mid-nineteenth century. The
plot is linear, beginning with the establishment of a conflict (usually
between a hero and a villain), continuing with complications that build
to a climactic moment, and ending with a resolution that ties up all
loose ends and provides a sense of completion. The style of performance
is representational: That is, the goal is to create the illusion of
reality, to encourage the audience to make believe that the events being
depicted are unfolding through time before their eyes.
(The stylistic opposite to representation is presentation, which
embraces anti-illusionistic forms that emphasize the theatricality
of performance.) The
well-made play form has become strongly identified with
Eurocentric, male-centered representations of reality.
5.
Unless otherwise specified, all quotations by Cleage in this
essay reference my interview.
6.
Ordinary people: "I wish you could read something or see a
movie that would show the people just, well, as my grandmother would
say, drylongso. You know,
like most of us really are most of the time--together
enough to do what we have to do to be decent people" (Gwaltney xix).
7.
See McCaskill and Phillips.
8.
Cleage and her play, Hospice, also have been honored by
AUDELCO, an African-American theatre organization founded in New York in
1973 for the purpose of supporting and promoting African-American
drama and theatre. Through
the yearly presentation of achievement awards, this singular
organization lives up to its slogan: "AUDELCO applauds what others
ignore."
9.
Mount's painting was based on a childhood memory in which a black
man taught him to spear fish in Long Island Sound.
Fearful of placing a black male in the intimate and powerful
position of teacher, Mount substituted a female figure who could be
interpreted as the nurturing mammy (McElroy xiii).
10.
In medieval times, such plays dramatized miracles performed by
Biblical figures and saints.
11.
The Yoruba orishas, "personifications of ashe
[divine spirit force] that can be put at the disposal of human beings
who honor them" (Murphy 11), live in the New World in the religious
practices of Santería (Cuba, the Caribbean), Candomblé (Brazil), and
Vodun (Haiti). Christian
imagery has been added to their identities.
Murphy and Thompson provide two sources of information on the
influence of the Yoruba religion in the Americas, including the United
States.
12.
Two recent discussions of Peola are found in Giles and
Covington-Whitmore.
13.
In October 1984, six Special Unit police officers in full riot
gear were called to evict sixty-six-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs from
her Bronx housing project apartment: She had fallen behind in her rent. The police claim Bumpurs, who had a history of mental
illness, menaced them with a knife.
Two blasts from a shotgun were fired.
The first blew off her right hand.
The second shattered her chest.
A police officer was indicted for second-degree murder, but the
indictment was dismissed by a New York State Supreme Court judge.
14.
Unless otherwise specified, all quotations by Dickerson in this
essay reference my interview.
References
Anzaldúa,
Gloria, ed. Making Face,
Making Soul= Haciendo Caras: Creative and
Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color.
San Francisco: Aunt
Lute, 1990.
Bullins,
Ed, ed. New Plays from the Black Theatre.
New York: Bantam, 1969.
Case,
Sue Ellen. "Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts."
Theatre Journal 37.3 (1985):
317-27.
---.
Feminism and Theatre.
New York: Routledge, 1988.
Cleage,
Pearl. Deals With the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot.
New York:
Ballantine, 1993.
---.
Personal interview. 15
May 1996.
Couch,
William, Jr., ed. New
Black Playwrights. New
York: Avon, 1970.
Covington-Whitmore,
Katrina. "Queen,
The Miniseries: Variations on an Old Theme."
The
Womanist: A Newsletter for Afrocentric Feminist Researchers
1.2 (1995):
13-15.
Daughters
of the Dust.
Dir. Julie Dash.
Kino International, 1991.
Dickerson,
Glenda. "The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist
Attitude in African-American Theatre."
Theatre Journal 40.2 (1988): 178-87.
---.
"Festivities and Jubilations on the Graves of the
Dead."
Author's
manuscript. (This essay has
been published in Performance and
Cultural Politics, ed. Elin
Diamond. New York: Routledge, 1995. 108-127.)
---.
Personal interview. 27
Jan. 1996.
---.
Program notes, Zora and Lorraine and Their Signifyin(g)
Tongues. October 27-29 and
November 3-5, 1995, Spelman
College,
Atlanta, Georgia. Glenda Dickerson, director.