Black theatre: ritual performance in the African diaspora

Product Description


Generating a new understanding of the pastOCoas well as a vision for the futureOCothis path-breaking volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre as it is practiced today.Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the community; in Paul Carter Harrison's words, it reveals the Form of Things Unknown in a way that binds, cleanses, and heals."


From Library Journal


This important and groundbreaking collection of 32 essays is particularly valuable to those who have scant knowledge about African American theater, as the ideas are informing, eyeopening, and challenging. Gathered here are pieces by playwrights such as Ntozake Shange, Femi Euba, Wole Soyinka, Derek Wolcott, and Gus Edwards, while academic writers include Paul K. Bryant-Jackson, William Cook, and Keith Walker. The academic essays are excellent, but this reviewer favored those by theater professionals as they are the people who deliver "the goods" to the audience. Playwright and director George C. Wolfe contributes a superb and thought-provoking essay called "Performance Method," in which he discusses his use of the minstrel show, carnival, mask, and the Japanese theater techniques found in bunraku. For Wolfe, television is about character, film is about story, and theater is about ideas. His essay, which deserves a careful reading, is last in the text but should be read second, after Paul Carter Harrison's introductory "Praise/Word," which sets out the volume's theoretical underpinnings. Recommended for all academic libraries and public libraries with theater and/or African American collections.

Susan L. Peters, Univ. of Texas, Galveston
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.