1 - The Black Experience School of Drama

Summary

By the earnest solicitation of some in whose judgment I have the greatest confidence, I now present [my play] in a printed form to the public. As I never aspired to be a dramatist, I ask no favor for it, and have little or no solicitude for its fate. If it is not readable, no word of mine can make it so; if it is, to ask favor for it would be needless.

William Wells Brown

THE goal of philosopher Alain Locke's active interest in African American theatre was conversion of a smattering of protest race plays and an overabundance of musical comedies into endowed theatre-training centers. He knew that he would have to overcome objections from the William E. B. DuBois Protest theatre, which would be quite difficult. Locke underestimated, however, how attached the spectators themselves had become to Manuel Noah's “nigra” images. People loved the revues and things of the Early Musicals Period of Art-Theatre (1898–1923), the first of five stages in the development of the Black Experience School. The quintessential question concerning this period is Why did Locke – and even DuBois – have such a difficult time persuading African Americans to repudiate the clown images in the musicals? One answer might be that Locke overlooked how thoroughly Noah had studied African American life in order to originate, develop, and popularize the original Negro stage types. Close readings of Noah's reviews of the African Grove Tea-Garden and the African Grove Theatre show that Noah extracted the images he parodied from carefully selected aspects of real African American life.