Puttin' on a show: Rituals and traditions in African-American theater: Deconstructing the hidden transcript in public discourse

The immediate setting for this fieldwork is Philadelphia's Freedom Theater. This ethnography focuses on the pre-production, production, and post-production of plays during the 2000/2001 season, with special emphasis on Ntozoke Shange's world premiere of Sparkle: The Musical, an adaptation of Joel Schumacher's 1976 hit screenplay of the same title.;Productions of AAT point to the real and concrete ways that classism, sexism and oppression affect and influence contemporary constructions of black identity, life and culture and what can be done to countermand them. Freedom Theatre is a renowned and internationally acclaimed African American theater (AAT) and since 1966, this Philadelphia theater has serviced an estimated 350,000 audience members and nearly 10,000 other students in its Performance Arts Training Program. However, Freedom Theatre's current financial crisis is evidence of the precariousness of the political economy of African American arts production.;This is the first anthropological dissertation on the political economy of African American theater and its use in contesting power and oppression through the deployment of various "hidden" scripts embedded in rituals, rhetorical strategies, and theatrical conventions, (including dialogue, stagecraft, lighting, color, design and spectacle).