Theater Schools Cast in Key Role
August Wilson has achieved the success most playwrights only dream
about. His award-winning plays – which include “Fences”, “Joe Turner’s
Come and Gone,” and “The Piano Lesson” – have rendered sensitive and
probing portrayals of African American life. Staged in venues ranging
from regional theaters to Broadway, Wilson’s plays have earned two
Pulitzer Prizes and lavish praise from critics.
So it came as something of a shock to the theatrical world last year
when Wilson chose to castigate the nonprofit theater establishment for
its alleged part in undermining African American theater. The Charge
was made at Princeton University during his keynote address to a
gathering of the Theatre Communications Group, a leading nonprofit
theater organization.
“… Black Theater in America is alive … it is vital … it just
isn’t funded,” Wilson said. “Black theatre doesn’t share in the
economics that would allow it to support its artists and supply them
with meaningful avenues to develop their talent and broadcast and
disseminate ideas crucial to its growth. The economics are reserved as
privilege to the overwhelming abundance of institutions that preserve,
promote, and perpetuate White culture.”
Wilson criticized funding organizations for rewarding majority-White
regional theaters for programming plays about minorities while failing
to support Black theater organizations. He declared that
White-controlled theater companies were attempting to diversify their
programming at the expense of the Black theater establishment.
Wilson’s comments brought new attention to the cause of independent
Black theater in America. A number of Black theater professionals say
he voiced a widely-felt frustration with the nonprofit theater
establishment. But they also point out that continued survival of Black
theater will require considerable innovation to strengthen links to the
communities in which theater companies reside, and to institutions,
such as historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
In recent years, the works of contemporary Black playwrights, such
as Wilson, have found a receptive environment at HBCUs. Dr. Mikell
Pinkney, assistant professor of theater at the University of Florida,
undergraduate drama programs at HBCUs have remained highly competitive
in attracting African American students even while better funded
programs at traditionally White institutions (TWIs) have welcomed Black
students. Pinkney is president of the Black Theatre Network, a
nonprofit organization of African American theater faculty and theater
professionals.
