The first of six monthly colloquies on the relationship between Afro-American folklore and the musical theatre was presented this past February by Hazel J. Bryant, the Executive Director of the Richard Allen Center for Culture and Art.
Ms. Bryant, also a founding member of the Black Theatre Alliance, set up the series as an emergency measure to stem the tide of exploitation, which has already engulfed black music, from overflowing into the black theatre.
Citing the Tony award winning Ain’t Misbehavin’ as vivid evidence that the folklore of Afro-American people can be translated to the stage with tremendous success, Ms. Bryant bewailed the lack of black entrepreneurs participating in such efforts.
Can folklore be adapted to the stage? This was the subject addressed by panelists Beverly J. Robinson, Dr. John Scott and Dr. Carlton W. Mollette H, the latter two playwrights as well as historians.
Though Ms. Robinson spoke of the famed black dancer Juba, none of the three panelists mentioned the musical about him, produced last season by Elaine Stewart, which won author Lawrence Holder an Audelco nomination. Nor did anyone pay tribute to either Marc Primus’s Audelco-Award-winning High John de Conquer or the late Theodore Browne’s folk opera about John Henry entitled Natural Man.
Twenty-five centuries of drama have proved that far from being merely adaptable to the stage, folklore has functioned as one of its most central motifs.
The most familiar examples of dramatized folklore are, of course, the Greek myths which provided the plots of such esteemed Sth century BC tragedians as Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Indeed, musical theatre itself originated during the Renaissance when members of a 16th century society known as the Camerata, attempted, with sketchy information, to recreate Greek tragedy and created opera instead.
Hebraic stories from the Bible, the commedia dell’arte (Harlequin, one of its leading characters, is black), fairy tales, Norse sagas and the legends of King Arthur have consistently inspired an international array of dramatists. Less readily available but too influential to ignore are the dramatic literatures of India, China and Japan.
In addition to the three tragic poets of Greece, myth and legend have attracted dramatists from Corneille (Medea) to Eugene O’Neill (Mourning Becomes Electra).
The legacy of Greek mythology has also inspired its share of black playwrights. A new version of Antigone has been written by Percy Edward Johnstone; Garland Lee Thompson’s Sisyphus and the Blue-Eyed Cyclops presented a black interpretation of the Cyclops myth; Owen Dodson has become something of a Medea specialist with his plays The Garden of Time and Medea in Africa, a joint venture with Countee Cullen.
The adaptive use of myth, however, does not guarantee high-quality theatre.
Black Medea, a foolish piece by Father Ernest Ferlitta, a non-black priest from New Orleans, is a case in point. Big deal! was the audience’s reaction to learning that the voodoo princess Madeleine (the Medea figure) and her children were being driven from New Orleans. They could always move to Baton Rouge, Biloxi, Brooklyn or any other black community.
Madeleine’s circle of cohorts included a Eunpidean chorus of three women and the nurse Tante Emilie. Thus, instead of a Medea who stood alone in evil, there were five she-wolves prowling the stage.
Worse, the stage presence of Rose-Marie Guiraud, the Ivory Coast actress who played Tante Emilie, was so strikingly superior to anyone else that it was she, rather than Madeleine, who became the center of attention. Under the circumstances, Vinie Burrows did rather well in the role of Madeleine.
The production further confused matters by casting a black actor (Leon Morenzie) as Jason, which left the audience wondering why Creon (Warrington Winters, a white actor) was so eager to have Jason marry his daughter,
Prior to Black Medea, the Jewish Theatre Collective had revived Clifford Odets’s The Flowering Peach. Since this play or, at least, the subsequent Richard Rodgers’s musical based on it, Two by Two seems to be precisely the sort of work that Ms. Bryant and her panelists were seeking, perhaps I should discuss the production in some detail.
By dramatizing the legend of Noah, Odets joined a company of moderns that includes the French playwright Andre Obey, the German sculptor Ernest Barlach and the British poet C. Day Lewis. But while Obey emphasized the biblical and morality-play attributes of the Noah parable, Odets adapted the tale to depict the inner workings of a modern Jewish-American family. In 1954, some of the reviewers imperceptibly complained of the anachronisms. Eric Bentley, however, classed the author with Sean O’Casey and Eduardo Di Filippo, two European poets of the urban masses.
Unlike Black Medea, which lost its dramatic impact in its passage through the time tunnel, Flowering Peach unearthed new truths out of a seemingly barren mine.
Roland Sanchez, a black actor, sympathetically portrayed Ham as the kind of hardworking son—not a success like Shem or an intellectual like Japheth— whom parents tend to under appreciate. He tells Rachel that he had married her only to get in good with his father — a statement that tells us as much about Noah as it does about Ham.
Moreover, the statement displays Odets’s dexterity at adapting myth to present day family conflicts. Odets’s modern social consciousness was further reflected in the character of Shem the profiteer, who was played by Robert Zuckerman with a veneer of upward mobility.
Similarly, black theatre has effectively extracted social relevance out of myth and biblical parable. Owen Dodson’s The Confession Stone, a dramatic biography of Christ, presented overtones of the rural black experience analogous to that of the urban Jews of the Odets play.
Though statelier and more subdued in manner, Professor Dodson’s piece was in the tradition of the gospel plays of Langston Hughes. Whether this is a tradition that young black writers wish to continue is, in 1979, questionable. Ten years ago, writing in Black Theatre of Hughes’s Black Nativity, Oyamo lamented that the poet had captured our emotions but squandered them on a Western tale of some long-dead, poor cracker family.
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the legends of the black cowboys. Besides Neil Harris’s play about Isom Dart that had a reading at the Frank Silvera Writers’ Workshop, there have been three productions dramatizing this material.
The Harlem Opera presented Hodges and Company. And both Isom Dart and Ben Hodges were characters in W.B. Burdine, Jr.’s Deadwood Dick, which the Black Spectrum Theatre Company offered. Fred Hudson’s The Legend of Deadwood Dick, a children’s play, sugarcoated the pills of didacticism and uplifted the material with cowboy heroics and elements of fancy, Texas-born Curtis Price was gentle and appealing as Mr. Hudson’s titular hero, in appropriate contrast to the stunning razzle-dazzle of Kim Sullivan in Mr. Burdine’s piece, which has a fair chance of becoming the next Ain’t Misbehavin’.
Back in the summer of 1967, Larry. Neal (in his essay The Black Arts Movement) submitted that the black aesthetic encompassed most of the useable elements of Third World culture. His play The Glorious Monster in the Bell of the Horn reaffirms the oft-repeated concept that jazz should be a model for the form of black plays.
However, the idea of the transposition of the arts is neither new or particularly black. The 19th century French poet Theophile Gautier, one of the best-known practitioners of this theory, was a painter before he became a man of letters. Consequently, more of his transpositions are of the plastic arts than of music. More recently, Jean Tardieu has experimented with this form in his witty Conversation Sinfonietta. Perhaps the word witty is the key to Tardieu’s success; he expects human characters to behave as if they were instruments to amuse the audience. When Mr. Neal’s heroine, Rose, holds a conversation with a saxophone player during which she speaks and he plays, the intended effect fails because only her concrete and realistic share of the dialogue is informative. An epigraph in the program quotes from Andre Malraux that art must eschew logic, but except for the deviations from chronological order, the writing and structure of The Glorious Monster… do not come through as surrealistic. The result is the obscurity of surrealism without its compensating dreamlike quality.
Also related to the aims of the colloquies are the two African plays by Obotunde Ijimere that the Negro Ensemble Company presented, both of which dramatized folk material. Somewhat disturbingly, Everyman, an Africanization of a European morality-play, turned out to be superior to The Imprisonment of Obatala, which treated Nigerian myths. The outcome of these transformations (along with Shango de Ima and Yoruba, in which orisha figures of African mythology also appear) raises the question whether or not the folklore of Africa may be inherently less well-suited to theatrical presentation than the European myths cited above.
The indictment is less serious than it may seem to be on the surface. The justification of folklore does not reside, after all, in the type of plays it inspires. A realistic vision of day-to-day living may, nevertheless, get in the way of the kind of romantic behavior we have come to expect of a hero. For instance, in Shango de Ima, Shango fails to defeat his adversary by either strength or trickery and ends by fleeing for his life. In trying to reconstruct the plot of Antigone, one of the lost plays of Euripides, Professor William Nickerson Bates rules out an unhappy ending because it is inconceivable to him that Heracles could intervene without succeeding.
In the case of Ijimere’s Everyman, the evaluation process was complicated by the fact that the actors of NEC performed in much the same realistic style that they use for the black-family plays in which they usually appear. The possibility also remains that, to date, it has been the European playwrights rather than the potential of their material that have been superior. If so, then the future may hold dramatizations of African and Afro-American folklore comparable to the best of those inspired by other cultures.
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