Enacting difference: Marita Bonner's 'Purple Flower' and the ambiguities of race

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Allison Berg, Merideth Taylor

This excerpt from the stage directions for Marita Bonner's experimental drama The Purple Flower provides some clues as to why the play, which won the 1927 Crisis prize for "Literary Art and Expression," was never produced. Bonner's description of characters, as ambiguous and intriguing as her set description, indicates two sets of players: Sundry White Devils, whose "horns glow red all the time," and Us's, who may be "white as the White Devils" or "brown as the earth" but should "look as if they were something or nothing" (Bonner 191). The challenge of realizing such directions on stage is certainly one reason that The Purple Flower - unlike Georgia Douglas Johnson's Plumes, which won the Opportunity prize for drama in the same year - remained unperformed during Bonner's lifetime. Perhaps the more important reason is the play's revolutionary message, particularly the final warning the "Us's" issue to the "White Devils": "You have taken blood. You must give blood. . . . there can be no other way" (198-99). Because The Purple Flower's form and message are more in keeping with the revolutionary black theater of the 1960s and '70s than with the "folk" or "propaganda" plays typical of the Harlem Renaissance, the play has only recently been acknowledged as a singular contribution to African American theater.(1)

Since its 1974 reprinting in James V. Hatch and Ted Shine's Black Theater U.S.A. and its subsequent inclusion in Kathy A. Perkins's Black Female Playwrights (1989), The Purple Flower has been described variously as allegorical, surrealistic, expressionistic, or simply abstract, but critics have concurred that the play was most likely meant to be read rather than performed.(2) Yet our experience directing a staged reading of The Purple Flower in the context of an undergraduate literature course suggests that Bonner's play is best understood by considering the problems it poses for would-be performers, for the interpretive questions raised by the play text become, in rehearsal and performance, an opportunity to reflect critically on how racial difference is constructed and maintained. What is most striking and most challenging about Bonner's play from a performance perspective is not its prediction of racial revolution, but its paradoxical suggestion that race is both an illusion and a primary determinant of social identities in the United States.

Confronting this paradox in performance raises practical questions (such as how to cast the play) as well as philosophical and political questions - about racial identity, social conflict, and the relative primacy of race and class oppression - that are not immediately apparent in the text of the play. These issues are often difficult to discuss candidly in predominantly white classroom settings, where white students and students of color can be equally reluctant to pursue such "charged" topics. Yet our African American and white students' collaboration in preparing to perform The Purple Flower demonstrates the play's ability to bring to consciousness, and bring into dialogue, competing assumptions about race. By reporting our students' process of enacting the play - a process that highlighted the provocative ambiguities of Bonner's text - we hope to attract wider attention to The Purple Flower, whose unusual form and indeterminate message give it historical significance as well as current potential to foster interracial discussions in the classroom or theater.

In what follows we consider how Bonner's play differs from those of her contemporaries, looking in particular at moments of the play that undercut essentialized and dualistic concepts of race; discuss our students' attempts to negotiate the play's meaning through performance; and reflect on the implications of studying and performing black plays in predominantly white settings.

Literary Contexts

Clearly, The Purple Flower conforms to neither of the two dominant philosophies guiding African American theater in the 1920s. While the revolutionary message of The Purple Flower is in keeping with the goals of propaganda plays endorsed by W. E. B. Du Bois, its emphatic non-realism violates Du Bois's dictum that "plays of a real Negro theater" must "reveal Negro life as it is" (296). The Purple Flower's surrealism distinguishes it as well from the "folk" (or "inner-life") plays promoted by Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory at Howard University. For while Locke and Gregory disagreed with Du Bois's famous injunction that "all Art is propaganda and ever must be," they shared his approval of formal realism, arguing that "the only avenue of genuine achievement in American drama for the Negro lies in the development of the rich veins of folk-tradition of the past and in the portrayal of the authentic life of the Negro masses of today" (Gregory 159-60).

In spite of their disagreements about the specific function of black drama, all three likely concurred with James Weldon Johnson's statement of the larger problem facing black writers of the period. In "The Dilemma of the Negro Author" (1928) Johnson argued that