Their Place On The Stage

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Description

This important contribution to African American and women's studies analyzes the dramatic works of America's black women playwrights. The plays of such writers as Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ntozake Shange are examined in light of the tradition from which they emerged. Brown-Guillory begins by tracing the development of African American theatre with its roots in African theatrics, then moves on to discuss women playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance such as Angelina Weld Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, Mary Burrill, Myrtle Smith Livingston, Ruth Gaines-Shelton, Eulalie Spence, and Marita honner.

Though rarely anthologized and infrequently made the subject of critical interpretation, asserts the author, the plays of these early twentieth-century black women offer much to the American theatre in the way of content, tonal and structural form, characterization, as well as dialogue, and were instrumental in paving a way for black playwrights from the 1950s to the present.

Review: ?This is the first book-length study of black American women playwrights. It will be useful to scholars in the fields of black and women's literature and an excellent source of background reading in graduate and undergraduate courses on American women playwrights. The author's training as both a scholar and a playwright is evident in this book.

The study begins with a brief discussion of the African origins of African American theater. It then moves into an analysis of the many women playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance who are rarely mentioned in most literary studies of the era. In the third chapter the focus narrows on the three playwrights who constitute the core of the study: Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, and Ntozake Shange.

In addition to a discussion of each of their major plays, Brown-Guillory analyzes the tonal and structural forms of their plays and the images of blacks each woman creates. The three playwrights are linked in this study by their portrayal of the black struggle in an inhumane society and by their common focus in the spirit of survival' of African Americans.

Several major black women playwrights, such as Adrienne Kennedy, are not included in this discussion, but through her work Brown-Guillory has nonetheless sounded a call for more studies of this topic.?-Choice