| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Susan Curtis. The First Black Actors on the Great White Way. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 1998. Pp. xix, 277. $29.95.

Three Plays for a Negro Theatre (1917) by the white poet Ridgely Torrence is the centerpiece for a racial/cultural study of professional American theater in the 1910s. As cultural history, much about this book is to be recommended; as theater history; however, the problems are myriad and unfortunately mar what should have been an important addition to scholarship of race relations in theater practice. 1

The 1917 production of Torrence's one-act plays was the first to feature an all-African-American cast in a non-musical play on Broadway. Many others followed in the 1920s. This book by Susan Curtis, however, focuses exclusively on the first production and its cultural context. After laying out the appropriate cultural theory, the author proceeds to examine aesthetic elements of the production and its practitioners and outlines a few previous presentations of black characters written and performed by white playwrights and actors. All is done with frequent forays into varied cultural issues to contextualize the artistry. In chapter five, Curtis effectively takes various theater critics of 1917 to task for their racism or racial assumptions in analyzing Three Plays and its actors. She is particularly concerned with critical "amnesia," which appeared only months after the positively assessed premiere. In chapter six, the author compels us to reconsider the usual explanation of the production's early closing as simply a casualty of the U.S. Congressional declaration of war. . . .

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