How to Do Things with Stage Directions: Lessons from Contemporary African American Drama

Abstract

The history of African American drama no doubt includes myriad texts that bear out this claim—from William Wells Brown’s The Escape; Or, a Leap for Freedom (1858), the first play published by an African American, to Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog (2001), the first play by an African American woman to garner the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, to both McCraney’s and Jacobs-Jenkins’s still-growing bodies of work.Take as an example the 1966 one-page, one-act drama The Theme Is Blackness written by noted African American playwright, theorist, and former minister of culture for the Black Panther Party for Self Defense Ed Bullins.Notably, even while they offer up myriad examples from a range of plays to help illustrate points about the various uses of stage directions, it is often the case that most of the works cited by scholars writing on the topic are generally unfamiliar to students in my introductory courses who do not have an extensive background in dramatic literature or theatre history.[...]to augment their understanding of the multiple ways that Carlson’s typology or Suchy’s theories manifest in practice, I always select a text for my students and I to read and interrogate together, specifically one that I think will generate fresh and compelling revelations about the significance of stage directions.With a growing list of challenging and provocative plays that include Neighbors (2010), An Octoroon (2014), and Everybody (2017), Jacobs-Jenkins has, in a short time, distinguished himself as, what Elam and Jones (following Ralph Ellison) might call “a virtuoso of the appropriation game,” exploiting and subverting the theatrical traditions of, among other things, blackface minstrelsy, nineteenth-century melodrama, and fifteenth-century morality plays in his dramaturgy to activate debate about a number of pressing contemporary topics and themes (ix).2 Appropriate sees the playwright refigure formal elements from the popular realistic family dramas that helped make luminaries like Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, and more recently August Wilson and Tracy Letts favorites among American theatregoers to explore the ways that the nation’s racial and racist past very much continues to endure in and have an impact on its present.