Big White Fog

Big White Fog PDF Author: Theodore Ward
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
A poignant family drama set in Chicago against a backdrop of the Great Depression and the inescapable racism of the times. Chicago's South Side in the 1920s. Struggling to keep his dreams alive and his family together, Victor Mason is an educated black man reduced to working on building sites. His loyalty to Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement clashes with his family's pursuit of the American Dream despite the twin evils of the Depression and of ubiquitous racism. Never seen outside America until 2007, Theodore Ward's landmark family drama, Big White Fog, remains as poignant today as it was when it burst upon the Chicago stage in 1937 - and on to New York, where it was produced by the Negro Playwrights' Company, of which Ward was a co-founder with, among others, Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes. This volume also contains extensive introductory material by writers, thinkers and activists such as Marcus Garvey, Richard Wright and James Baldwin.

Big White Fog

Big White Fog PDF Author: Theodore Ward
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Get Book Here

Book Description
A poignant family drama set in Chicago against a backdrop of the Great Depression and the inescapable racism of the times. Chicago's South Side in the 1920s. Struggling to keep his dreams alive and his family together, Victor Mason is an educated black man reduced to working on building sites. His loyalty to Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement clashes with his family's pursuit of the American Dream despite the twin evils of the Depression and of ubiquitous racism. Never seen outside America until 2007, Theodore Ward's landmark family drama, Big White Fog, remains as poignant today as it was when it burst upon the Chicago stage in 1937 - and on to New York, where it was produced by the Negro Playwrights' Company, of which Ward was a co-founder with, among others, Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes. This volume also contains extensive introductory material by writers, thinkers and activists such as Marcus Garvey, Richard Wright and James Baldwin.

Black Theatre USA Revised and Expanded Edition, Vol. 1

Black Theatre USA Revised and Expanded Edition, Vol. 1 PDF Author: James V. Hatch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 068482308X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
A collection of 51 plays that features previously unpublished works, contemporary plays by women, and the modern classics.

Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre

Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre PDF Author: Rena Fraden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521565608
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
In the 1930s, the Work Progress Administration funded a massive Federal Theatre Project in America's major urban centres, presenting hundreds of productions, some of the most popular and memorable of which were produced in the highly controversial and avant garde 'Negro Units'. This experiment in government-supported culture brought to the forefront one of the central problems in American democratic culture - the representation of racial difference. Those in the profession quickly discovered inescapable ideological responsibilities attending any sort of show, whether apparently entertaining or political in nature. Exploring the liberal idealism of the thirties and the critical debates in black journals over the role of an African American theatre, Fraden also looks at the obstacles facing black playwrights, audiences, and actors in a changing milieu.

A History of African American Theatre

A History of African American Theatre PDF Author: Errol G. Hill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521624435
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Book Description
Table of contents

A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: Volume 1, 1900-1940

A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: Volume 1, 1900-1940 PDF Author: C. W. E. Bigsby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521271165
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Eugene O'Neill - Clifford Odets - Left-wing theatre - Black drama - Thornton Wilder - Lillian Hellman - Luigi Pirandello - Arthur Miller.

No Surrender! No Retreat!

No Surrender! No Retreat! PDF Author: NA NA
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137053615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
No Surrender! No Retreat! examines the careers of fifteen pioneer performers and their triumphs over herculean obstacles. It is a look back over the 20th century and documents personal histories of staggering achievement in spite of institutional racism, gender oppression, and classism. Twenty-four years in the making, No Surrender! No Retreat! is an indispensable work on African Americans in the performing arts, examining well-known performers, such as James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman, and Pearl Bailey. Rare archival material and a number of personal interviews enrich this tome. Glenda E. Gill s work is a moving and sometimes tragic account of the lives and careers of some of America s most outstanding African American pioneers in theater.

Theorizing Black Theatre

Theorizing Black Theatre PDF Author: Henry D. Miller
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786460148
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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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.

The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939–1966

The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939–1966 PDF Author: Julie Burrell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030121887
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
This book argues that African American theatre in the twentieth century represented a cultural front of the civil rights movement. Highlighting the frequently ignored decades of the 1940s and 1950s, Burrell documents a radical cohort of theatre artists who became critical players in the fight for civil rights both onstage and offstage, between the Popular Front and the Black Arts Movement periods. The Civil Rights Theatre Movement recovers knowledge of little-known groups like the Negro Playwrights Company and reconsiders Broadway hits including Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, showing how theatre artists staged radically innovative performances that protested Jim Crow and U.S. imperialism amidst a repressive Cold War atmosphere. By conceiving of class and gender as intertwining aspects of racism, this book reveals how civil rights theatre artists challenged audiences to reimagine the fundamental character of American democracy.

Harlem's Theaters

Harlem's Theaters PDF Author: Adrienne Macki Braconi
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810132265
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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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.

Makeshift Chicago Stages

Makeshift Chicago Stages PDF Author: Megan E. Geigner
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810143836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Since Chicago’s founding, theater has blossomed in the city’s makeshift spaces, from taverns to parks, living rooms to storefronts. Makeshift Chicago Stages brings together leading historians to share the history of theater and performance in the Second City. The essays collected here theorize a regional theater history and aesthetic that are inherently improvisational, rough-and-tumble, and marginal, reflecting the realities of a hypersegregated city and its neighborhoods. Space and place have contributed to Chicago’s reputation for gritty, ensemble-led work, part of a makeshift ethos that exposes the policies of the city and the transgressive possibilities of performance. This book examines the rise and proliferation of Chicago’s performance spaces, which have rooted the city’s dynamic, thriving theater community. Chapters cover well‐known, groundbreaking, and understudied theatrical sites, ensembles, and artists, including the 1893 Columbian Exposition Midway Plaisance, the 57th Street Artist Colony, the Fine Arts Building, the Goodman Theatre, the Federal Theatre Project, the Kingston Mines and Body Politic Theaters, ImprovOlympics (later iO), Teatro Vista, Theaster Gates, and the Chicago Home Theater Festival. By putting space at the center of the city’s theater history, the authors in Makeshift Chicago Stages spotlight the roles of neighborhoods, racial dynamics, atypical venues, and borders as integral to understanding the work and aesthetics of Chicago’s artists, ensembles, and repertoires, which have influenced theater practices worldwide. Featuring rich archival work and oral histories, this anthology will prove a valuable resource for theater historians, as well as anyone interested in Chicago’s cultural heritage.