Black Theater, City Life: African American Art Institutions and Urban Cultural Ecologies by Macelle Mahala (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Black Theater, City Life: African American Art Institutions and Urban Cultural Ecologies by Macelle Mahala
• Sandra M. Mayo

BLACK THEATER, CITY LIFE: AFRICAN AMERICAN ART INSTITUTIONS AND URBAN CULTURAL ECOLOGIES. By Macelle Mahala. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022; pp. 270.

Theatre historian and educator Macelle Mahala sharpens our understanding of cultural ecology as she documents the relationship between race, historical moment, and milieu in the perseverance and survival of African American theatres. In Black Theater, City Life: African American Art Institutions and [End Page 127] Urban Cultural Ecologies, Mahala focuses on theatres in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Atlanta, chronicling their missions, development, challenges, and memorable productions. She juxtaposes this overview with an analysis of the interrelationship between these arts organizations and the communities they serve.

Mahala’s work addresses the scarcity of scholarship on regional theatres. African American theatre historical narratives have often concentrated on the New York area (e.g., Loften Mitchell’s Black Drama, 1967), have given only a brief review of theatre in the regions outside of New York in larger narratives (e.g., Errol Hill and James Hatch’s A History of African American Theatre, 2003), or have developed the history through the work of major writers (e.g., Leslie Catherine Sanders’s The Development of Black Theater in America, 1988). In this regional focus, Mahala’s book joins Jonathan Shandell’s The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era (2019), Sandra M. Mayo and Elvin Holt’s Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas (2016), and Harvey Young and Queen Meccasia Zabriskie’s Black Theatre Is Black Life: An Oral History of Chicago Theater and Dance, 1970–2010 (2014). An in-depth study of regional theatres, as achieved by Mahala, complements and broadens our understanding of theatre in America. For example, Hill and Hatch’s laudable study of African American theatre has only a few paragraphs on the arts in the Atlanta area. Mahala addresses this paucity with a chapter that addresses production histories, notable artists, and community partnerships in enlightening detail.

Chapter 1 begins the narrative with Karamu House in Cleveland, founded in 1915 as part of the settlement house program designed to help new immigrants acclimate to the city. This summary of over one hundred years surveys the evolution of the institution from a recreation program to a nationally acclaimed theatre, starting with a children’s theatre initiative. Inspired by actor Charles Gilpin of Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, Karamu organized the Gilpin Players, originally the Dumas Dramatic Club. Throughout the chapter, Mahala documents the theatre’s policy of colorblind and nontraditional casting, arguing that they reflected the diverse community they served. The chapter showcases Karamu’s storied history of producing folk plays (stories of rural life) in the 1920s, nurturing and inspiring Langston Hughes in the 1930s, and serving as a producing unit of the Federal Theatre also in the 1930s. As Mahala narrates, despite a number of early challenges (the Depression, the destruction of their building by fire, and the disruption of World War II), the company nevertheless engaged with the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the Black Power movement of the 1970s, and witnessed the ascent of August Wilson in the 1980s and ’90s.

In chapter 2, Mahala moves on to representative African American theatres in Pittsburgh that benefited from the amazing success of one of their own, August Wilson. The theatres she focuses on include the Black Horizons Theatre (founded in 1868), Kuntu Repertory Theatre (1974), Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company (2003), and the August Wilson African American Cultural Center (2009). This more expansive constellation of organizations allows her to reveal theatres’ engagement through the arts with the Black Power movement, the University of Pittsburgh, street festivals, community uplift programs, youth, and local playwrights.

Chapter 3 takes the reader west, chronicling the Bay Area and focusing first on the Black Repertory Group Theater (founded in 1964). The company was initially housed in and supported by Downs Memorial Methodist Church before relocating in 1987 to a new home in Berkeley, California, funded by the city and other community partners. Mahala continues with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre (1981...