Contemporary African American Women Playwrights

Reviewed by: Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook Nita N. Kumar (bio) Kolin, Philip C. Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. A striking element of Philip Kolin's Contemporary African American Women Playwrights is its deployment of the term "contemporary" to overview an entire century of work by [End Page 361] African American women playwrights. Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance playwrights Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877?-1976), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) and Marita Bonner (1899-1971), through the middle and later half of the century work of writers such as Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) and Alice Childress (1920-2004), the volume goes on to discuss the work of technically "contemporary" writers including Sonia Sanchez, Pearl Cleage, Glenda Dickerson, Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Lynn Nottage. Some among these such as Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, and Aishah Rahman produced their best work in the decades of the 1960s to 1980s. Why then does Kolin employ the term in the title of his book, or in other words, how is this entire body of work contemporary? A justification one can glean from the essays in the collection is that the writings of all these playwrights remain powerfully contemporary in terms of their take on issues of race, gender, and cultural identity as well as their radical experimentation with the dramatic form. Hidden, however, in this anachronism is perhaps the issue of lack of timely critical attention to African American women's drama. The appearance of this volume at this point in time—a casebook on all the major African American women playwrights of the twentieth century at the beginning of the twenty-first century—is both a proof of this neglect and its redressal. In his introduction, entitled "The struggles and triumphs of staging gender and race in contemporary African American Playwrights," Kolin profiles their work in terms of its late recognition, and its courage and creativity in the face of "an oppressive ideology, whether it be a white patriarchy, an institutionalized theatre culture, or a dominating African American male surety" (2). Black male playwrights, he claims, "have had a commanding voice in American theatre," but African American women playwrights are only now beginning to take "their place as the leaders of the American theatre" (2). The first book-length study devoted to African American women playwrights, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory's Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America, was published in 1990. Only a few other books have appeared since then, such as the Carol P. Marsh-Lockett edited Black Women Playwrights: Visions on the American Stage (1999), but that does not mean a complete absence of critical attention. Playwrights such as Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, and Suzan-Lori Parks have received extensive scholarly analysis. These and other playwrights have also been included in books and collections on categories such as African American writers, American playwrights, and women playwrights. However, Kolin's point holds true: African American women playwrights have not received the kind of focused attention their work deserves as a distinct tradition. The present collection addresses a field that requires nuanced work to reflect and unravel its sophistication, complexity, and its "contemporaneity." The volume contains eleven essays and an interview with Lynn Nottage by Sandra G. Shannon. David Krasner's essay entitled "Something's going on down here that concerns me" deals with Georgia Douglas Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Marita Bonner, and Lorraine Hansberry. Krasner establishes a sense of tradition and strong internal connections among the playwrights which ramify in various directions: Georgia Douglas Johnson as precursor to the work of Dickerson, Cleage, and Nottage; Bonner as paving the way for Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks; and Hansberry's social realist work as a culmination of the work of many Harlem Renaissance playwrights. The essays that follow are each an evaluation of the work of a single playwright. Soyica Diggs, in "Dialectical dialogues: Performing blackness in the drama of Alice Childress," [End Page 362] inserts Childress's plays in the history of the Black Arts movement. In her corpus of eighteen plays, Childress has created many powerful female characters who, Diggs suggests, have not been examined

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