Making History as Playwrights

 

Telling the Story

 

History is written by the victors. So claimed Winston Churchill and, to a great extent this is true. The experience of Africans has largely been written out of our white textbooks. They are sometimes given a paragraph or two, amount to: America had slaves and that was not a good thing. Some schools in the South didn’t even go that far. They taught that the slaves were happy and well-cared for. In fact, they were better off than they would have been in the countries they were torn from.

 

Three African American playwrights are reclaiming their share of history.

 

The Recent Past

 

Adrienne Pender is an accomplished playwright and recipient of a Eugene O’Neill fellowship. During this fellowship, she put the finishing touches on a new play. Her distant cousin is Charles Gilpin, whose rise to fame occured in the Eugene O’Neill play, Emperor Jones.

 

The first African American actor allowed to appear on Broadway. To his credit, O’Neill fought for that right. However, the script is riddled with the use of the N-word. Gilpin rebelled. During the national tour of the play, he began to limit the use of the word in his dialogue.

 

O’Neill was livid. How dare an actor change the words he had written. When Gilpin returned from the American tour, Gilpin and O’Neill combusted. The result? O’Neill, never one to back down, replaced Gilpin for the London tour with another little-known actor. Paul Robeson.

 

The compelling drama reveals much about the hurdles faced by talented African Americans throughout this country’s history and the challenge of being talented and bright in a world that sees one through a different prism.

 

The Past

 

 

Valetta Anderson, a talented and prolific Atlanta playwright, brings us another lens – a Black family in post-Civil War America. “She’ll Find Her Way Home” is a fictionalized account of the courtship of Martha and Isaiah Montgomery, the historical founders of the African-American town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

 

“Like August Wilson’s scenes of blacks at home and at leisure, these moments have the natural, artless flow of life itself. And below the easygoing horseplay, the historical context creates an undertow of suspense, for these are the lonely advance scouts on a perilous journey from slavery into an alien white world.” (1991. )

Dan Hulbert, Theater Critic, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, February 6, 1991.

 

 

For all that, She’ll Find Her Way Home portrays the intimacy, the family bonds, and the gentle humor that makes one glad to have visited with the inhabitants of Mound Bayou.

 

The Present

 

Erika Renee Land has made a name for herself as a Spoken Word Poet. She has also honored her country by her service in the United States Army. As a combat veteran, she brings the truth of combat fatigue and anguish to the stage in PTSD and Me.

 

For years, combat veterans have held their pain of battle close to their vests. Brave in war, they have been reluctant to reveal the anguish this defense of country has brought to them. Land was brought to the edge of suicide seven times.

 

Words paved her way in the direction of healing. With PTSD and Me, she opens up the wounds of more than war. She has been on the outside looking into the society she defended for many years: as an African-American, as a woman, and as a Lesbian. And she tells the story on stage in her one-person show, irresistibly lined with head-bopping rhythms and palpable poetry.

 

 

Available at Blue Moon Plays –

N by Adrienne Pender

She’ll Find Her Way Home by Valetta Anderson

PTSD and Me by Erika Land

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