Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance: 1920-1940 - Review

African American Review, Summer, 1999 by Cary D. Wintz

James V. Hatch and Leo Hamalian, eds. 1920-1940. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1996. 467 pp. $25.95.

Reviewed by

Cary D. Wintz Texas Southern University

In the past several years a number of scholars have refocused their attention on the Harlem Renaissance. The result has been a reassessment of that movement (often in a more positive light), a number of biographical studies of major participants in the Renaissance, and an effort to place the Renaissance clearly within American and African American social, cultural, and literary history. This renewed interest in the Renaissance has given us excellent biographies, such as Arnold Rampersad's study of Langston Hughes, as well as provocative studies of literary and cultural history, such as Ann Douglas's Terrible Honesty. It has also contributed to the movement of the Harlem Renaissance and African American literature in general toward the cultural mainstream, as evidenced by the publication of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. For the most part these new studies have focused on African American literature, although interesting new work also has been done in the areas of African American art and music during the Harlem Renaissance. It is in this context that James V. Hatch and Leo Hamalian have brought us Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940, a book that promises to open up the much neglected field of Harlem Renaissance drama and theater.

This is, on the whole, a frustrating book. It promises much, and delivers much, but it does not deliver quite so much as it promises. Furthermore, in terms of concept and organization this book is flawed - or perhaps just mislabeled and mis-packaged. The book consists of a short introduction that addresses the historical and intellectual context of the plays that follow. In this introduction, Hatch argues that there are two branches of African American theater history: performance history, which has been explored recently in a number of new books focusing on black minstrel and musical theater traditions, and literary history, the body of literary works that were performed in the African American theater. It is on this latter area that Hatch and Hamalian focus in their effort to bring forth the lost plays of the Harlem Renaissance. This quest is successful, in part. The heart of this volume consists of the full text of sixteen plays by thirteen playwrights (four Langston Hughes plays are included). For the most part these plays are unknown, or known only by experts in the field; for the most part they were written by authors who have passed from public memory. The plays are grouped by playwright, arranged in rough chronological order, and preceded with a brief biographical and literary introduction. The plays range from short skits (such as Joseph Seamon Cotter's On the Fields of Flanders and Langston Hughes's The Em-Fuehrer Jones), or a poetic monologue (Hughes's Scarlet Sister Barry), or a song with dialog (Hughes's Young Black Joe), to full-length three-act plays such as You Mus' Be Bo'n Ag'in by Andrew M. Burris. All in all there are three skits (including the song), one monologue, seven one-act plays, three two-act plays, and two three-act plays. The book concludes with a lengthy appendix that consists of twenty essays or other items related to the African American experience in the 1920s.

The editors do a fine job of assembling little-known plays written by playwrights who, with the exception of Langston Hughes, George Schuyler, and Shirley Graham, are also not well-known. Not surprisingly the plays vary in quality and in subject matter. Some, such as Joseph S. Mitchell's Son Boy, are very political examinations of race and/or racial violence in America; others, like Alvira Hazzard's Mother Liked It, are lightweight comedies with little racial content; still others, like Francis Hall Dixon's Run Little Chillun, explore the religious and folk roots of African American culture. Indeed the only unifying factors of these plays are that each was written by an African American playwright during the period between the two world wars and that none is generally recognized as part of the core of African American literature. Despite the unevenness of the selections, the editors have done a good job of bringing an interesting collection of African American plays back to our attention.

Other aspects of this book are less successful. The introductions that precede each playwright's work are uneven, repetitive at times, and occasionally prone to factual error. The most glaring mistake has Langston Hughes born in St. Louis (rather than Joplin, Missouri) and growing up in Cleveland, ignoring the important childhood years he spent in Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas, and his introduction to the theater and to black music in Kansas City. There are other distracting errors. For example, one of Hughes's plays, The Em-Fuehrer Jones, is mistakenly dated 1920 in the Table of Contents. Finally, there are aspects of this book that simply do not fit together well or contribute to the coherence of the whole. Central to this is the failure of the volume's introduction adequately to link many of the plays and playwrights to the Harlem Renaissance. The mere fact that an African American produced literature between 1920 and 1940 does not connect that person or that literature to the Harlem Renaissance. Fewer than half of the playwrights included in this book had significant ties to Harlem or the Harlem Renaissance; even the plays by Langston Hughes in this volume are more accurately connected to the post-Renaissance phase of his career. In fact, six of the sixteen plays included in this collection were written in 1938 or 1940 - after the Harlem Renaissance had faded. Also the content of the appendix is puzzling. All twenty items were produced during the period 1919-1928, but the first eight have little or no direct relationship to African American drama. Furthermore, there is no clear explanation of the purpose of the appendix or the relation of its contents to the rest of the book.