This is Crash Course Theater, and today we're exploring the Harlem Renaissance.

This 19 twenties movement, centered in an uptown Manhattan neighborhood, encouraged a dynamic reawakening and reimagining of art, music and literature.

It was a very necessary corrective toe.

All of those decades of melodramas, minstrel, see, end blackface.

And unlike the other Renaissance, there was no bubonic plague.

We'll take a look at the Harlem Renaissance, Maur Bradley and then explore the playwrights and theater companies at birth.

Lights up.

The Harlem Renaissance roughly spanned the 19 twenties, spreading out from Harlem and across America's Northeast.

Writer James Weldon Johnson wrote about the Harlem of that era not merely a colony or a community or a settlement, but a black city located in the heart of white Manhattan and containing more Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on Earth.

It strikes the uninformed observer as a phenomenon, a miracle first characterized by the writer Alain Locke as the New Negro Movement the Harlem Renaissance was by and four people who had arrived from the South during the Great Migration and others who had arrived in the United States via the Caribbean diaspora.

The movement invited African American artists to practice forms of art that would shatter stereotypes, increased visibility and uplift black Americans.

Much of the work was celebratory, but artists didn't shy away from difficult themes.

Alienation, discrimination and the discomfort of performing black identity in a white world were all explored.

This is an example of the phenomenon that theorist and activist W.

E.

B.

Du Bois described as double consciousness, the feeling of being black and American at the same time of seeing yourself a simultaneously part of and not part of society in terms of form and genre.

Some artists of the period looked back to distinctly African and African American folk forms like fables and spirituals, while others looked to newer forms like the fractured modernism of Jean tumors cane or the jazz echoing rhythms of poems by Langston Hughes and Geraldine Brooks, the Harlem Renaissance was pretty much the moment when the white world, and also a lot of the black world, began to celebrate black artists.

That doesn't mean that black artists were new to America far from it, but many of them hadn't been known or honored outside of their communities in the 19 twenties, theaters in New York were still largely segregated.

Blacks and whites typically sat in different sections, and I'm sad to report that Black Face was still a thing.

In 1903 there had been a Broadway musical comedy in Dahomey, written by and starring African Americans, as well as several other Broadway adjacent musicals by black composers.

Though, like in Dahomey, Thes relied pretty heavily on stereotype in terms of serious non musical plays.

The white playwright, originally Torrents, created a sensation with three plays for a Negro theater, crafting realistic portrayals of black life.

These plays were originally performed by white actors, but in 1917 an all black cast directed by Robert Redmond Jones led the Broadway production.

This was a Broadway first three Negro plays, played by Negroes, was the headline in The New York Times.

The critic said that the interesting and a sympathetic plays were inadequately acted.

In the same year, one of Manhattan's little theaters, the Neighborhood Playhouse, hosted Rachel, a play written by a black playwright, Angelina Grim Key and staged with an all black cast, Rachel is the story of a young African American woman so shaken by the racism she discovers all around her, but she vows to never have Children.

The early 20th century saw an enormous upsurge in black theater companies.

The first important African American theater company of this era was Anita Bushes.

Bush players later called the Lafayette Players.

Founded in 1916.

Most of the Bush players plays were written by white playwrights, but they were performed for mostly black audiences.

Other early Cos.

Included the Ida Anderson players, The Acme Players, which later became the National Ethiopian Art Theater, and the Negro Players, the company that had first performed three plays for a Negro theater in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance.

Do Voice, then editor of the End of a Lacy Peas monthly magazine, The Crisis founded Craig Wow, which is almost an acronym for the Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists.

Craig was sponsored a playwriting contest and encouraged Entrance to write about things as you know them.

You do not have to confine your writings to the portrayal of beggars, scoundrels and prostitutes.

You can write about ordinary, decent colored people if you want.

On the other hand, do not fear the truth, plumb the depths if you want to paint crime and destitution and evil painted.

But be true, be sincere, be thorough and do a beautiful job.

Opportunity.

An African American literary journal, also sponsored a playwriting contest, awarding prizes to Zora Neale Hurston and you Lately, Spence in 1925 2 Boys and Regina Anderson founded the Kringle Players, headquartered in the basement of a public library on 135th Street.

While it only lasted for three seasons before splitting into a number of offshoots, it was probably the most influential African American theater troupe, owing to its insistence that works be performed, written and directed by black artists.

In 1926 2 Boys published an influential manifesto in the crisis, establishing What African American Theater Should Be.

One about us, that is, They must have plots which reveal Negro life as it is to buy us.

That is, they must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continued association just what it means to be a Negro Today.

Three for us, that is, the theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences and to be supported and sustained by their entertainment and approval.

Four Near us, the theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood near the Mass of ordinary Negro people.

While a lot of the innovation was happening in the little theaters, African American works were making it to Broadway, too.

In 1921 the team of Noble Cecil and Eubie Blake introduced Shuffle Along Ah, wildly successful jazz musical that featured Josephine Baker and Paul Robison and small roles.

Langston Hughes called it Ah, honey of a show.

Swift, bright, funny, rollicking and gay with a dozen danceable singable tunes.

Everybody was in the audience, including May.

Shuffle Along set off a minor craze for African American shows, and Nine Maur made it to Broadway in the next three years.

In 1923 Willis Richardson, who had won the Kreeger playwriting contest several times, had a one act slice of life play.

The Chip Woman's Fortune, which was produced on Broadway and earned pretty good reviews in 1925 Garland Anderson's appearances, a melodrama about a black bellhop falsely accused of rape, became the first full length straight play by an African American author Toe Open on Broadway.

But most Broadway plays about black life were still the work of white playwrights who sometimes even one Pulitzer Prizes.

For them.

Let's look at two key figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

Hurston, a folklorist and novelist, was an early winter of the opportunity playwriting contest.

Color Struck, an Opportunity winner, is about colorism among a group of black Floridians.

The play makes use of Southern Black Speech, which Hearst in a trained anthropologist, carefully studied.

Hurston later channeled in interest in African and African American folk tales into several reviews.

The Great Day from Sun to Sun and Singing Steal.

Better known as a poet, Hughes had a Broadway hit in 1935 with Moolah Dough Ah, poetic play about a mixed race child in his desire to be acknowledged as his father's heir, Hughes, subtitled to Play a Tragedy.

But when it was produced on Broadway, changes were made that brought it closer to melodrama, making it more palatable to a white audience.

Hughes was not thrilled.

He once told James Baldwin, If you want to die, be maladjusted, neurotic and psychotic, disappointed and disjointed, just right place.

Go ahead.

Still, he established three theater companies, the Suitcase Theater in Harlem, the Negro Art Theatre in Los Angeles and the Sky Loft players in Chicago and continued to write plays and lyrics throughout his life, including Little Ham, Ah, folk comedy celebrating Harlem in the twenties.

Together, Hurston and Hughes collaborated on the 1930 play Mule Bone, based on a Florida folk tale.

It's a comedy about two men come to blows over a woman.

But Hurston and Hughes working relationship soured, and the play was never finished for a closer look at the theater of the Harlem Renaissance.

Let's explore, Don't you want to be free?

A play?

Hughes wrote in 1937 for the Suitcase Theater.

When the play begins, the stage is bare, except for a lynching rope and an auction block.

Ah, young man steps out and explains the set.

We haven't got any scenery or painted curtains because we haven't got any money to buy them.

But we've got something you can't buy with money.

Anyway, we've got faith in ourselves and in you, so we're gonna put on a show.

The show, he says, is about what it means to be black in America.

Cymbals Crash and Tom Toms thump as a young woman begins to dance an African dance while reciting some of Hughes's poetry.

She's joined by a young man who describes the capture of slaves and their arrival at Jamestown in 16 19.

Several characters are sold as slaves, but one young man resists while he's being whipped.

Other characters begin to sing his protest song, Go Down, Moses.

The Civil War Arrives, then Sharecropping and Jim Crow.

Then the Great Migration.

The Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, the first stirrings of the civil rights movement.

In every scene, characters chant poems and the chorus sings hymns and spirituals.

For the end of the pageant, the residents of Harlem begin to resist the landlords and small business owners who discriminate against them.

This movie culminates in the 1935 Harlem riots.

The play then directly asks the audience toe organize, join unions and tenants leagues and get together with members of the white working class.

Is one character says, When black and white really get together?

What power in the world can stop us from getting what we want?

The show ends with the entire cast linking hands with the audience and singing, Oh, who wants to come and join hands with me, who wants to make one great unity.

Who wants to say no more black or white?

Then let's get together, folks and fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight!

Wow!

Thanks.

This'll Pageant is modern, fragmentary, almost Brecht in.

We're gonna get to that adjective soon.

It uses theater to make some clear political points, but in its reliance on poetry, music and dance, Don't you Wanna Be?

Free also argues that African American performance is inextricable from African American history and that it will accompany people of color as they push for greater equality.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time when we move from little theaters to a really, really, really big one, the W.

P.

A s Federal theater project, and hang on to your Siegel's everybody.

Because Stanislavski and realistic acting are coming to America, courtesy of the group Theatre Group Hug York.

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