"This thing called playwrighting": an interview with Sonia Sanchez on the art of her drama

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Jacqueline Wood

Introduction

Critical and popular emphasis on the poetry of Sonia Sanchez, while clearly merited, has often overshadowed her work in drama and her role in the development of an African American female dramatic voice in America. Yet, as this interview illustrates, Sanchez has always acknowledged and continues to recognize the potency of drama. She uses it as a venue for the artistic expression of social protest and the condemnation of injustice, as well as to explore personal anguish and spiritual transcendence. This brief discussion of some of Sanchez's plays introduces the dramatic work discussed in the interview that follows.

To date, Sanchez has created five plays that have been produced and published: The Bronx Is Next (1968); Sister Son/ji (1969); Dirty Hearts (1971); Malcolm Man Don't Live Here No Mo! (1972); and Uh Huh, But How Do It Free Us (1974). Sanchez's latest completed play, I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't, was produced once over 20 years ago in 1982, by Jomandi Productions in Atlanta, Georgia, and again in a much abbreviated form as a thesis project by Karen Turner Ward at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1985. The play is currently being prepared for publication. While she still feels the need to write plays, Sanchez has observed that her poetry has taken precedence over her drama for a number of years. Since March 2003, her dramatic writing has included a play concerning mature black women's retrospective looks at the 1960's militant movement, which is as yet unfinished.

Each of the plays she has written, however, has impacted the genre in its own way, particularly in terms of race and feminist politics. Large and loud in its celebration of life, her drama reflects themes also evident in her poetry: anger against racism and bigotry, as expressed in poems like "Malcolm" (I've Been a Woman, 1978) and "Morning Song and Evening Walk" (Shake Loose My Skin, 1999). Sanchez particularly recognizes the complexities of African American women's struggles against sexism, as in "Song No. 2" (Under a Soprano Sky, 1987). She has written plays about black militant revolution, plays that explore the role of ritual and form in African American drama, plays that engage questions about the dual oppression of African American women. As a result, rather than remaining exclusively recognized for her contributions to African American poetry, Sanchez also merits acclaim as an important influence on black drama, a politically courageous, and artistically innovative playwright.

Sanchez's fiery dramatic voice, which both glorified and chastised the black militant movement, first burst forth in the 1960s. During the Black Power Movement, African American drama developed an aesthetic of black consciousness through Black Revolutionary Theater. This theater's main premise, according to its most famous proponent Leroi Jones/ Amiri Baraka, was to exist as "a theater that actually functions to liberate Black people ... that will commit Black people ... instruct them about what they should do ... [and] involve them emotionally" (Coleman 84). These strategies were developed through strong language and volatile situations, ritual structure, and stereotypical or symbolic characters that addressed, and at times encouraged, often-violent confrontation between black and white cultures. (1) Some of the best-known names of this militant period in African American theater were Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Larry Neal, Loften Mitchell, and Ben Caldwell. (2) Few women are even mentioned as militant playwrights of the period, except for Sonia Sanchez. Already known as a feisty, irreverent, gadfly figure of a poet, Sanchez, as she points out in this interview, was actually invited to join in the development of black consciousness theater. She became one of the few consistently visible female playwrights active in the development of black revolutionary dramatic aesthetic, although it is evident that she was not recognized at the level she deserved, primarily because she was a female in a male-dominated movement. Ironically, her insistence on a self-conscious critique of the Black Power Movement raised numerous issues concerning the black militant community, particularly black sexism, issues never seriously addressed by those men who welcomed her participation in the development of black revolutionary literary aesthetics.

Sanchez's first play, The Bronx Is Next, a provoking commentary on interracial racism and intraracial sexism, was commissioned by Ed Bullins for the 1969 edition of New Plays from the Black Theater; it had premiered in The Drama Review in 1968. (3) In this play, Charles, Roland, and Jimmy are three Black Revolutionaries forcing tenants into the streets as part of their organization's protest plan to burn out the horrible tenements of Harlem. The play typifies Sanchez's bold spirit as it illustrates her early capacity to celebrate the Black Power Movement and, at the same time, to critique it. The play's emphasis on the role of black neighborhood organizations and grassroots activists with their openness to violent revolution (even to the point of completely burning down several New York boroughs) shocked many and emboldened the militant community. This young black female playwright's emphasis on the merits and difficulties of black activism in the face of racism in The Bronx Is Next characterized for many African Americans the rallying impact of revolution upon the varied facets of the black community. Yet, at the same time the play presents male characters who dominate scenes by disrespecting both young and old female members of the community. The black male characters, for example, in a frightening decision to avoid a delay in their political program, manipulate a weak old black woman back into a building that they know will be burned. This action and their belligerent treatment of a young black mother demonstrate a callous and dominating paternalism found in many of the militant plays of the Black Arts period. These violent characters reflect the actuality of sexual politics as Sanchez witnessed them in the movement itself. The patriarchal oppression of women within the Black Power Movement is thus central to the play's impact both in the '60s and now.