Willis Richardson, Forgotten Pioneer of African-American Drama PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Willis Richardson, Forgotten Pioneer of African-American Drama PDF full book. Access full book title Willis Richardson, Forgotten Pioneer of African-American Drama by Christine R. Gray. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Christine R. Gray
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313000921
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 156
Get Book Here
Book Description
During the 1920s and 1930s, Willis Richardson (1889-1977) was highly respected as a leading African-American playwright and drama anthologist. His plays were performed by numerous black high school, college, and university drama groups and by theater companies in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., Cleveland, Baltimore, and Atlanta. With the opening of The Chip Woman's Fortune (1923), he became the first African American to have a play produced on Broadway. Several of his 46 plays were published in assorted magazines, and in his essays, he urged black Americans to seek their dramatic material in their own lives and circumstances. In addition, he edited three anthologies of plays by African-Americans. But between 1940 and his death in 1977, Richardson came to realize that his plays were period pieces and that they no longer reflected the problems and situations of African-Americans. In the years before his death, he attempted vigorously yet unsuccessfully to preserve several of his plays through publication, if not production. But the man who has been called the father of African-American drama and who was considered the hope and promise of African-American drama died in obscurity. Richardson has even been neglected by the scholarly community. This critical biography, the first extensive consideration of his life and work, firmly reestablishes his pioneering role in American theater. The book begins with a detailed chronology, followed by a thoughtful biographical essay. The volume then examines the nature of African-American drama in the 1920s, the period during which Richardson was most productive, and it analyzes his approach to drama as a means of educating African-American audiences. It then explores the African-American community as the central theme in Richardson's plays, for Richardson typically looks at the consequences of refusals by blacks to help one another. The work additionally considers Richardson's history plays, his anthologies, his dramas intended for black children, and his essays. A concluding chapter summarizes his lasting influence; the book closes with a listing of his plays and an extensive bibliography.
Author: Christine R. Gray
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313000921
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 156
Get Book Here
Book Description
During the 1920s and 1930s, Willis Richardson (1889-1977) was highly respected as a leading African-American playwright and drama anthologist. His plays were performed by numerous black high school, college, and university drama groups and by theater companies in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., Cleveland, Baltimore, and Atlanta. With the opening of The Chip Woman's Fortune (1923), he became the first African American to have a play produced on Broadway. Several of his 46 plays were published in assorted magazines, and in his essays, he urged black Americans to seek their dramatic material in their own lives and circumstances. In addition, he edited three anthologies of plays by African-Americans. But between 1940 and his death in 1977, Richardson came to realize that his plays were period pieces and that they no longer reflected the problems and situations of African-Americans. In the years before his death, he attempted vigorously yet unsuccessfully to preserve several of his plays through publication, if not production. But the man who has been called the father of African-American drama and who was considered the hope and promise of African-American drama died in obscurity. Richardson has even been neglected by the scholarly community. This critical biography, the first extensive consideration of his life and work, firmly reestablishes his pioneering role in American theater. The book begins with a detailed chronology, followed by a thoughtful biographical essay. The volume then examines the nature of African-American drama in the 1920s, the period during which Richardson was most productive, and it analyzes his approach to drama as a means of educating African-American audiences. It then explores the African-American community as the central theme in Richardson's plays, for Richardson typically looks at the consequences of refusals by blacks to help one another. The work additionally considers Richardson's history plays, his anthologies, his dramas intended for black children, and his essays. A concluding chapter summarizes his lasting influence; the book closes with a listing of his plays and an extensive bibliography.
Author: Willis Richardson
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN: 9781795287630
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 33
Get Book Here
Book Description
In 1922, Willis Richardson wrote The Chip Woman's Fortune. On January 29, 1923, the play was performed by the Ethiopian Art Players in Chicago. In April 1923, the play moved to New York. On May 7, 1923, The Chip Woman's Fortune had a short run at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Eight days later, it became the first play by an African American to reach Broadway. The chip woman, in The Chip Woman's Fortune, is named Aunt Nancy. She contributes to the household where she resides by picking up chips of wood and lumps of coal from the streets. We find her living with Silas and caring for his ill wife, Liza, whom we learn is making a steady recovery under Aunt Nancy's care. Silas learns that the family's greatest treasure, a Victrola record player, is about to be repossessed because of financial strain that has left him unable to make payments on the outstanding debt owed on the machine. After learning that, Aunt Nancy has managed to save some money from street donations she receives, Silas decides that it is time for her to contribute more than the nursing care provided to his wife, and the wood chips and coal lumps she collects for use by the family.
Author: Cary D. Wintz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135455368
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 708
Get Book Here
Book Description
From the music of Louis Armstrong to the portraits by Beauford Delaney, the writings of Langston Hughes to the debut of the musical Show Boat, the Harlem Renaissance is one of the most significant developments in African-American history in the twentieth century. The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, in two-volumes and over 635 entries, is the first comprehensive compilation of information on all aspects of this creative, dynamic period. For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Encyclopedi a of Harlem Renaissance website.
Author: Henry D. Miller
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786460148
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Get Book Here
Book Description
The rich history of African-American theatre has often been overlooked, both in theoretical discourse and in practice. This volume seeks a critical engagement with black theatre artists and theorists of the twentieth century. It reveals a comprehensive view of the Art or Propaganda debate that dominated twentieth century African-American dramatic theory. Among others, this text addresses the writings of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, Sidney Poitier, and August Wilson. Of particular note is the manner in which black theory collides or intersects with canonical theorists, including Aristotle, Keats, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Shaw, and O'Neill.
Author: Thomas J. Davis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440855579
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book explores the transformative energy and excitement that African Americans expressed in aesthetic and civic currents that percolated during the opening of the 20th century and proved to be a force in the modernization of America. This engaging reference text represents the voices of the era in poetry and prose, in full or excerpted from anecdotes, editorials, essays, manifestoes, orations, and reminiscences, with appearances by major figures and often overlooked contributors to the Harlem Renaissance. Organized topically and, within topics, chronologically, the volume reaches beyond the typical representation of the spirit and substance of the movement, examinations of which are typically confined to the New York City community and from U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 to the depths of the Great Depression in 1935. It carries readers from the opening of the Harlem Renaissance, which began at the top of the 20th century, to its heights in the 1920s and '30s and through to its artistic and literary echoes in the shadows of World War II (1939–1945).
Author: Koritha Mitchell
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252093526
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Get Book Here
Book Description
Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynching victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of households being torn from model domestic units by white violence. In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens. The Left of Black interview with author Koritha Mitchell begins at 14:00. An interview with Koritha Mitchell at The Ohio Channel.
Author: George Hutchinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139827723
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Harlem Renaissance (1918–1937) was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. Its key figures include W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes. The movement laid the groundwork for all later African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. With chapters by a wide range of well-known scholars, this 2007 Companion is an authoritative and engaging guide to the movement. It first discusses the historical contexts of the Harlem Renaissance, both national and international; then presents original discussions of a wide array of authors and texts; and finally treats the reputation of the movement in later years. Giving full play to the disagreements and differences that energized the renaissance, this Companion presents a set of new readings encouraging further exploration of this dynamic field.
Author: James Fisher
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0810868849
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 618
Get Book Here
Book Description
"The period of 1880 to 1929 is the richest theater era in American history, certainly in the number of plays produced and significant artists, as well as in the centrality of theater in the lives of Americans. As the impact of European modernism gradually seeped into American theater during the 1880s and 1890s, more traditional forms of theater gave way to futurism, symbolism, surrealism, and expressionism. Such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, George Kelly, Elmer Rice, Philip Barry, and George S. Kaufman ushered in the golden age of American drama." "The A to Z of American Theater: Modernism focuses on legitimate drama, both as influenced by modernism in Europe and by the popular entertainment that also enlivened the era. This is accomplished through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced entries on plays, music, playwrights, performers, producers, critics, architects, designers, and costumes." --Book Jacket.
Author: Cary D. Wintz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9781579584580
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 708
Get Book Here
Book Description
An interdisciplinary look at the Harlem Renaissance, it includes essays on the principal participants, those who defined the political, intellectual and cultural milieu in which the Renaissance existed; on important events and places.
Author: Adrienne Macki Braconi
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810132265
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 406
Get Book Here
Book Description
Honorable Mention, 2016 Errol Hill Book Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theater, Drama and/or Performance Based on a vast amount of archival research, Adrienne Macki Braconi’s illuminating study of three important community-based theaters in Harlem shows how their work was essential to the formation of a public identity for African Americans and the articulation of their goals, laying the groundwork for the emergence of the Civil Rights movement. Macki Braconi uses textual analysis, performance reconstruction, and audience reception to examine the complex dynamics of productions by the Krigwa Players, the Harlem Experimental Theatre, and the Negro Theatre of the Federal Theatre Project. Even as these theaters demonstrated the extraordinary power of activist art, they also revealed its limits. The stage was a site in which ideological and class differences played out, theater being both a force for change and a collision of contradictory agendas. Macki Braconi’s book alters our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, the roots of the Civil Rights movement, and the history of community theater in America.
