Read more
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.
ChoiceThis 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 theater 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 Bonner. 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 theater 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.
List of contents
Foreword by Margaret Walker Alexander
Black Theater Tradition and Women Playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance
Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange: Carving a Place for Themselves on the American Stage
Tonal Form: Symbols as Shapers of "Theater of Struggle"
Structural Form: African American Initiation and Survival Rituals
Mirroring the Dark and Beautiful Warriors: Images of Blacks
The African Continuum: The Progeny in the New World
Afterword by Gloria T. Hull
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
ELIZABETH BROWN-GUILLORY is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston. Both playwright and literary critic, she is the author of two plays, Bayou Relics and Snapshots of Broken Dolls, the latter produced at Lincoln Center in 1986, and the critical book, Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America (Greenwood Press, 1988). She has published a host of articles and book reviews in Phylon, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, Xavier Review, The Griot, Masterplots, Cyclopedia of Literary Characters, and American Literature. Currently she is working on a critical book on playwright and novelist Alice Childress.
