Staging liberation: Race, representation, and forms of American theatre, 1934-1965

This dissertation examines the relationship between the theatrical aesthetics and the multiply inflected political commitments of various theatre companies calling themselves "Negro People's Theatres" from the Great Depression to the Civil Rights Movement. Much of the revisionist scholarship discussing the cultural Left has noted the participation of African Americans in the cultural formations of the U.S. Popular Front. The smaller conversation about African American theatre in the mid-century has documented the many productions and theatre groups of this time, but has not looked closely at the aesthetics of these theatres, or at their political commitments. My project aims, through a narrative of the theatre in this period, to produce a more nuanced analysis of what has been understood as a widespread capitulation to the Cold War liberal consensus on the part of black American artists. Thus, my project positions itself at the crux of two critical conversations--revisionist Left history and African American theatre scholarship--that have oddly found little to say to each other, while also offering caveats to narratives of declension in scholarship on the Left since the 1990s. Examining the theatre of this era demonstrates that the narrative "from socialism to liberalism" oversimplifies the variety of disparate aims embraced by black theatre artists.;Each chapter focuses on a point of tension between conventional and leftist ideology in mid-twentieth-century African American theatre. For these artists, theatricality proved a useful tool for reframing understandings of political participation, from the Chicago Negro People's Theatre's attempts to negotiate between mainstream critical and commercial success and leftist political ambitions, to African American dramatists' adaptation of Brechtian theories and techniques, to Richard Wright and Paul Green's attempt to adapt the leftist and liberal ambiguities of Wright's Native Son to the form of the naturalistic stage. Early plays of the Negro People's Theatre used theatricality to adapt the rhetoric of freedom emerging in the political sphere. I argue that the theatricalization of freedom, while transforming a political category into an aesthetic one, nonetheless accomplished political work, by offering performance communities the opportunity to experience the sensation of freedom, thus altering what Jacques Ranciere has called the "distribution of the sensible." If this focus on freedom proved amenable to the growing consensus around liberalism and "the American Creed," then black artists would, in ensuing years, use theatricality to challenge the concept of freedom, turning the theatre into a trope to retain references to social forces even within an increasing emphasis on individual experience. Thus, I demonstrate that African American theatre during this period should not be seen as capitulating to the rise of liberalism. Rather, I suggest, African American practitioners employed a variety of theatrical methodologies in order to address the tensions between left and liberal ideologies that arose again and again throughout the mid-century.