In the New York movement, advantage is being taken of the fact that in the center of Harlem there is a branch of the New York Public Library which has in its basement a lecture room. Now and then a church is liberal enough to house a play. There are usually halls that can be used temporarily. The third difficulty, that of a suitable playhouse, is real and must be worked out as circumstances permit. The only trouble comes when effort is made to select the actors from limited groups or exclusively from among social acquaintances or friends. In any group of colored people it is possible to get an unusual number of persons gifted with histrionic ability. The problem of actors is the least of the difficulties presented. There are available today a dozen or more plays of Negro life worth staging and the quantity and quality will increase very rapidly as the demand grows. Already, however, this situation has begun to change on account of the prizes offered by The Crisis magazine and other agencies and for other reasons. Five years ago there were practically no plays that filled the specifications noted. First, there is the problem of the plays. Even this building encounters certain difficulties. Only in this way can a real folk-play movement of American Negroes be built up. The theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people. That is, the theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences and be supported and sustained by their entertainment and approval. That is, they must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continual association just what it means to be a Negro today. That is, they must have plots which reveal Negro life as itis. The plays of a real Negro theatre must be: 1. The movement which has begun this year in Harlem, New York City, lays down four fundamental principles. They play Shakespeare or Synge or reset a successful Broadway play with colored principals. Almost invariably, however, they miss the real path. For instance, some excellent groups of colored amateurs are entertaining colored audiences in Cleveland, in Philadelphia and elsewhere. John Millington Synge was an Irish playwright and poet popular in the early 20th century.įor this reason, a new Negro theatre is demanded and it is slowly coming. This could be evoked only by a Negro audience desiring to see its own life depicted by its own writers and actors. In all this development naturally then the best of the Negro actor and the most poignant Negro drama have not been called for. And here he is still handicapped and put forth with much hesitation, as in the case of “The N⸺”, “Lulu Belle” and “The Emperor Jones”. Only recently has he begun tentatively to emerge as an ordinary human being with everyday reactions. He has been a minstrel, comedian, singer and lay figure of all sorts. The demands and ideals of the white group and their conception of Negroes have set the norm for the black actor. His audience is mainly a white audience, and the Negro actor has, for a long time, been asked to entertain this more or less alien group. The Negro is already in the theatre and has been there for a long time but his presence there is not yet thoroughly normal. But most people do not realize just where the novelty must come in. Today as the renaissance of art comes among American Negroes, the theatre calls for new birth.

These churches frowned upon drama and the play, upon the theatre and the dance and for this reason the American Negro has been hindered in his natural dramatic impulses. The Negro church gave the slave almost his only freedom of spirit and of the churches that came to proselyte among the slaves, only those were permanently successful which were strongly tinged with Puritanism, namely: the Baptist and the Methodist. In America, on the other hand, the road to freedom for the Negro lay through religious organization long before physical emancipation came. The home life of Africans shows this natural dramatic tendency the strides of the native African, the ceremony of home and assembly, the intense interest in music and play, all attest this. And certainly, life as black and brown and yellow folk have known it is big with tragedy and comedy. It is customary to regard Negroes as an essentially dramatic race and it is probably true that tropical and sub-tropical peoples have more vivid imagination, are accustomed to expressing themselves with greater physical and spiritual abandon than most folk. ‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre’ (1926)

Negro little theatre movement