CUNY - African-American Female Playwrights – Mid-Term Study Guide Topics covered: • 1. terms and definitions (genre, drama, naturalism, realism, theater of the absurd, expressionism, surrealism, plot, theme) multiple choice, essay questions – • characters - funny house, a rat’s mass, for colored girls, wine in the wilderness, fire, before it hits home • essays - race, ethnicity, black feminist thought Terms & Definitions: 1. Realism - characters are believable, everyday types - costumes are authentic - Stanislavski’s system > American realism > method acting > The Group Theatre, The Actors Studio - Stage settings, locations, are indoors, believable > bland, deliberately ordinary - Box Set – three walls, fourth wall facing the audience (Women on the Verge) - Dialogue is not heightened for effect, everyday speech (vernacular) - Drama is psychologically driven > plot is focused o interior motives of characters - Protagonist rises against the odds - Henrik Ibsen > father of realism in the theatre 2. - Naturalism – extreme/heightened version of realism (short-lived) stage time = real time (3 hour play = 3 hours in real life of characters) 3 rules/unities by Greek philosopher Aristotle (time, place, action) NOT ALLOWED – jumps in time or place between scenes/acts Scientific determinism – character in the play are shaped by their circumstances and controlled by external forces such as hereditary or the social and economic environment (victims – helpless products of their environments) Working/lower class – REALISM>middle class Sordid subject matter, previously considered taboo (suicide, poverty, prostitution) 3. Drama - a work of literature - the text of a play or script which presents various actions and dialogues between a group of characters - drama is designed for theatrical presentation to be acted on the stage - modern technology has made it possible to have movie dramas and television dramas 4. Plot - overall structure of the play - all incidents that lead to the climax opposing forces meet head on, or there is some final resolution MOST IMPORTANT – relationship to character 5. Expressionism – developed in Germany immediately preceding and following World War I - attempt to dramatize subjective states through: - distortion - grotesque images - lyric - unrealistic dialogue - revolutionary in content as well as form: portraying institutions of society, particularly the bourgeois family, as grotesque, oppressive and materialistic - dramatic conflict tended to be replaced by the development of themes by means of visual images - 6. Theater of the Absurd 3/26/18 - Before it hits home - Cheryl West Cheryl West - former human services counselor • produced in 1991, DC • “This play is dedicated to those who have to hide and those who refuse to.” • Wendal’s two worlds - before he gets home and after he gets home - are equally important and equally fractured • Douglass and Simone are not social characters and should not be portrayed as such • Simone crosses the stage, talks about helping her Wendal get medical attention and her sexual urges be ignored, (as thought they are thoughts that are running around his head) and then she exits the stage, the crowd is none the wiser • Douglass appears, but seems to actually be a part of the scene characters: Wendal - black male in his early 30s - saxophone player, confident, loves his mama Reba - black woman in her 50s, Wendal’s mother Bailey - black man in his late 50s, Wendal’s father Maybelle - black woman in her 50s, Reba’s best friend Simone - black woman in her early 20s, Wendal’s lover Angel Peterson - black woman in her early 20s, woman in clinic Douglass - black man in his early 40s, Wendal’s lover Junior - black man in his late 20s, Wendal’s brother Dwayne - black boy, 12, Wendal’s son Doctor - white woman in her 40s or 50s Nurse - middle aged Hispanic or Asian woman 3/19/18 - Fires in the Mirror - Deveare Smith 1. Crown Heights Riots - Summer of 1991, Hasidic Jewish man killed 1 black child and injured another in a car crash. (what was the cause of the accident?) Gavin Cato was left to bleed and die in the street because the jewish ambulance wouldn’t pick him up) 2. then a black man stabbed a jewish man to death. 3. Why did she choose to write it in this way? with interviews? 29 voices in search of crown heights (Angela Davis, Al Sharpton, Ntozake Shange) 4. “News and media disregarded Gavin (dead black boy)” “Rosenbaum (slain student) wasn’t depicted either. made it an opportunity for these sides to fight each other” authentic voices get muted - both sides want peace and justice for their own people 5. shows corruption of justice system 6. Play deals a lot with identity and human worth > we are supposed to be this one body (human race), but in reality there is so much judgement and intolerance 7. disunity causes fires in the mirror > 8. Power dynamic 3/19/18 - For Colored Girls - Ntozake Shange 1. Exposed issues that women were dealing with (abuse, acceptance, society) 2. The choreopoem shows seven different women, assigning each to a color of the rainbow. This does two things: 1. Eliminates race as a factor for differentiation and oppression, and 2. Creates a place of hope, refuge, and support for an individual woman in the group of women symbolized by the rainbow. The women also hailed from different cities in the country, attempting to show the diversity and universality of their struggles, simultaneously. 3. Critics said she was bashing men, but really she was showing how to love oneself. 4. Night of graduation, the protagonist is seemingly destined to lose her virginity, yet she isn’t allowed any agency in this process. 5. born Pauletta Williams For Colored Girls (1976 Broadway) - Ntozake Shange 1. Second African-American Female play to play on Broadway (1st was Lorraine Hansberry - Raisin in the Sun, 1959) 17 years later 2. voice, representation, identification, 3. Each woman of the rainbow had a city. Symbolic of great migration northward, urban centers, seeking a place to raise a family. 4. Each color associated with a feeling? red=anger, green=jealousy 5. p. 46 “Sing a black girl’s song, bring her out, to know herself, to know you.” (pleading) 6. p. 46 “Don’t tell nobody, don’t tell a soul.” (the voice of the oppressor, women are to be seen, not heard) 7. p. 66 “Sechita” - “her thighs, they were aiming coins tween her thighs”beauty, dignity of sex worker, creativity, goddess Nefertiti can put a spell on you, anything I do here is not the whole me, it’s just me exerting power over you 8. p. 74 Lady in Red “fulla the same malice/filled with the livid indifference from supporting a would be horn player or sitting by the window waiting/& they knew/& left in a hurry” 9. p. 81 “three of us, laugh music flowered shawl” 10. Wine in the Wilderness (1969)- Alice Childress Gold Through The Trees (1952)- Alice Childress (first play to be produced in the US by a black female playwright) Presentation 1) Occurs during a riot Bill Jameson - painter • privileged: his diction and vocabulary indicate he is privileged and superior • “Vocabulary is a tool of the oppressor” Painting a “triptych” of three paintings: 1. Young black girl - innocence 2. Regal black woman - wholesome african queen, lifegiver=Congo river, 3. Downtrodden woman - society’s product Topic: Black Feminism/Womanism Alice Walker: womanism is feminism that advocates for pro humankind. Focus on race and class, specifically for advancement of black women, specifically Feminism vs. Black Feminism • Sufragettes and feminist movement: didn’t acknowledge the intersectional oppression that black women experience racially on top of being women. Didn’t represent their difficulties. Tommy=protagonist • always schooling Bill • lead women lead • Tommy takes off her wig and reveals her authentic natural beauty • Cynthia and Tommy’s relationship = Cynthia is woke and tries to educate Tommy on how to rise up, patronizing and condescending • Walks into the room when Bill is talking to OldTimer about the painting that casted her as a degenerate, downtrodden woman • Cynthia - faithful, supporter of her black man • only superficially woke/evolved/etc. >>> her afro • otherwise, she is subservient to her man • Bill=antagonist • talks about the idyllic woman until Tommy becomes one • is supposedly non-misogynistic because he’s a black man (who experiences oppression, too) but he’s not contradiction>>>we shouldn’t police women for changing their hair BUT the only way for the woman to realize her potential is to take her wig off Presentation 2) • Masculinity - it was culturally acceptable to execute the deal for the painting “broodish” • “I’m privileged. I didn’t choose to be, it’s just how it is.” • Use of the N-word can be used to distance oneself and say “I’m not that. I’m above that.” Funnyhouse of a Negro – Adrienne Kennedy (surrealistic, expressionistic, absurdist) - Sarah’s exploration and unease about where she belongs Funnyhouse represents how society torments and toys with the black psyche Relates specifically to Kennedy’s own life experiences, but is expanded to be relevant to society overall Readers shouldn’t attempt to make literal sense of the characters or dialogue Settings: Sarah’s room, staircase of the boarding house, Raymond’s room, the jungle = all in Sarah’s mind Sarah’s father, a black man, is depicted as a vile beast, even a rapist (knocking at the door) Both characters (Queen Victoria Regina and Dutchess of Hapsburg) both made up to appear as if they are black women trying to look white Hair falling out – metaphor for losing blackness, losing identity, losing selfassurance? Conflict between the white world and people that surrounded her during her upbringing and the realization that she is black and is different from them 4 characters: Duchess, Queen, Jesus Christ, Patrice Lumumba = each character seeks to thwart the others’ mission or destroy them repetition of dialogue – Sarah and Lumumba’s opening lines are very similar repetition of image – bludgeoning, lynching/hanging A Rat’s Mass – Adrienne Kennedy (1969) - Brother Rat - Blake (human body, rat head) - - Sister Rat - Kay (Human head, rat belly) Rosemary – Italian Catholic, wears communion dress, worms in her hair (medusa-like) has a world in which she belongs, a religious heritage, a historic ancestry (Black and Kay love her and revere her beauty) Rosemary urges Brother Rat to commit incest with her on a playground slide, to prove his love for Rosemary Blake and Kay recall their innocent days of childhood, before their home was invaded by screaming worms and gnawing rats in the attic Blake - In his opening speech, Brother Rat mentions a “dying baby, Nazis, screaming girls and cursing boys, empty swings, a dark sun.” Brother and Sister Rat join in a chant about the Nazis and the rats that have invaded their home. They lament that “every sister bleeds and every brother has made her bleed.”
