African American Theatre Essay Example

them.With this new form of communication, African Americans found a new method of endurance, and acting was the fundamental technique. Even though the African American actors and actresses were forced to take the road of continued existence in the theater to gain self contentment, it was, as an understatement, not unproblematic. For the longest moments in time, African American actors and actresses were not permitted to step foot on stage.

However, black actors were instead ridiculed by Caucasian actors in what they called "black face. Black face was a performance where white actors and actresses would literally conceal their faces with black paint and makeup, so as to imitate an African American actor. From this falsification of the hopeful actors, derogatory names such as Tom, Mulatto, Mammy, Coon, and Buck resulted. Similar to Black Face, there was what is called Minstrel Shows.

Minstrel shows, which consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, ridiculed and made fun of African Americans in the most disapproving ways.According to these shows, black people were looked upon as ignorant, lazy, and unreasonable, but also cheerful and melodious. Broadway, which is the heart of theater for Americans, had been closed to blacks for more than a decade. However, this was only until the African American musical “Shuffle Along” turned out to be a runaway success, which some historians believe was the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. The first African American play to be produced on Broadway was "The Chip Woman's Fortune" in 1923, written by Willis Richardson.

In the year of 1959, Lorraine Hansberry, a famous playwright, became the first African American woman to have her play produced and performed

on Broadway. Hansberry’s play, titled "A Raisin in the Sun," became an outlet for a continual assembly of plays by African American playwrights who often brought their own individual occurrences in the great effort in opposition to racial discrimination to the theater plays that they produced. . By the revolving of this period, the minstrel show enjoyed but a shadow of its former popularity, having been replaced for the most part by vaudeville.It survived as professional entertainment until about 1910; amateur performances continued until the 1960s in high schools, fraternities, and local theaters. As blacks began to score legal and social victories against racism and to successfully assert political power, minstrelsy lost popularity.

The typical minstrel performance followed a three-act structure. The troupe first danced onto stage then exchanged wisecracks and sang songs. The second part featured a variety of entertainments, including the pun-filled stump speech.The final act consisted of a slapstick musical plantation skit or a send-up of a popular play. Minstrel songs and sketches featured several stock characters, most popularly the slave and the dandy. These were further divided into sub-archetypes such as the mammy, her counterpart the old darky, the provocative mulatto wench, and the black soldier.

Minstrels claimed that their songs and dances were authentically black, although the extent of the black influence remains debated.Spirituals (known as jubilees) entered the epertoire in the 1870s, marking the first undeniably black music to be used in minstrelsy. Blackface minstrelsy was the first distinctly American theatrical form. In the 1830s and 1840s, it was at the core of the rise of an American music industry, and for several decades it provided the lens through

which white America saw black America. On the one hand, it had strong racist aspects; on the other, it afforded white Americans a singular and broad awareness of significant aspects of African American culture.