ExiledOne Commentary Cultural Perspectives #2

Howard Theater, built in 1910 in Washington DC: the plays, music and films of the 20th century often did not reflect reality for most African people.
I can count the theatre plays I have been to on one hand. My life has had it’s share of drama, comedy, tragedy and all that goes into what a live theatre presentation is. It is also true that going to a play was not a financial option for me for many years.
Personally, my theatre experience began in the late ‘60s when I went to see No Place To Be Somebody by Charles Gordone. We were a few busloads of ‘culturally disadvantaged’ children and teens leaving from our corner of the impoverished city. A temporary exit from the housing projects of South Philadelphia was called a field trip. Before that I had only looked at the slim Playbill programs of plays that my parents had attended, such as Purlie.

An modern day actress portrays freedom fighter Harriet Tubman
As a university student, I read many more plays. I read the plays of playwrights Ed Bullins, Leroy Jones (known today as Amiri Baraka), Lorraine Hansberry, Ron Milner, Langston Hughes, Woodie King and others. The definite impact of theatre was plain to me. It was an outlet for our people to have something to say about the realities we faced. Much of the work that was conceived of and produced during my childhood and early adulthood reflected the idea that we must tell our own stories. Many of these plays I could relate to. Though I could appreciate works about the US South, that was a window to see what my older relatives experienced. More urgently, I read of the US North, the urban streets that I saw crumbling around me, the human lives here today gone tomorrow without anyone caring. To those readers around the world who assume that African people in America have long been able to voice their lives in public, or counter the racist degradation as African so called Americans, this may be strange. But it must be remembered that even through music, most authentic voices have been controlled, monitored and are a stump of what the artists often wanted to convey. Only in the 1960s, along with the demand for better housing, food, decent employment, voting rights, health care and Human Rights generally did what is called Black Theatre come about. Those in the lower class and not necessarily writing with American government funding (for staging, promoting and paying salary to the administration and actors) began to have something to say about society. Issues of assimilation into White America, revolution, gender, class, cultural identity, centuries of psychological pain, money, drug addiction, the ghetto, marriage and intimacy with nonAfrican people all reflected shifts in America but through newer prisms of theatre. Being the writers and directors, people could say what was otherwise censored.


Actor James Earl Jones b. 1931- Most African so called American actors born in the first half of the twentieth century learned their craft in America’s racially segregated theatre world, long before there were a few picked for hollywood.
The most recent theatre visits that I can recall were in 1990, 2003 and 2004. During the late 1980s, Philadelphia had a few theatres that put on stage productions about the people’s lives. We certainly did not get this on television as a rule. Two places that I remember were Freedom Theatre and Bushfire Theatre. Long ago, I had seen plays at Freedom Theatre on north Broad street, which sat across the street from the Progress Plaza shopping area. Bushfire, on 52nd street on the west side was a building being renovated step by step in the 80s. As a vendor, I stood across the street and sold items for African Cultural Arts Forum during those days. I saw that the theatre was open for business and it was there that I attended a play with a woman I was getting to know. I have long forgotten the family drama, other than it seemed to me to be a soap opera I could have seen on television. Since I was avoiding corporate movies and tv, which to me was almost never true in depicting the situation of African people in America, I wasn’t satisfied and told my date so.
I saw Call Mr Robeson in 2003 during Black History Month, which is October in England. In Liverpool, England’s northwestern port, my wife Aisha was on the same bill with an actor, Tayo Aluko, who brilliantly portrayed Paul Robeson in rich baritone song and thundering speech. It was just the man, spotlights and here and there, a couple of backup musicians. Call Mr Robeson was gripping and to his credit, Tayo expressed the principled political side of Paul Robeson and the cost to his career when the Americans opposed him. It was a very good transition when Aisha came on stage and delivered her dedication to Paul Robeson and began her set at the grand piano.

Lemn Sissay-authentic voice of dissent
In Glasgow, Scotland in the city center venue CCA, I was present for Lemn Sissay’s Something Dark, about his growing up in England. This was in 2004. The one man show was enlightening to me. There was the fact that he had lived his script: an African manchild who never knew his father until later in life, being raised as the only African in a small nearly all White town. Though I had traveled and lived across England, Scotland and Wales for several years, and met African people born there or who migrated, I got extra insight. Lemn Sissay is a dynamic poet, actor and was compelling. He spoke to his reality, using humor, sarcasm and this was raw and no doubt explains his success.
In it’s essence, theatre is an expression of life. For most African cultures, this is marked by not only contact with the harshness of captivity, colonialism and it’s centuries long after effects. Music and comedy are almost always present to pass along a message. There is the celebration of the life and love, the laughter in the face of what seems unending aggression. Theatre reflects truths, lies and scolds and cautions.
Theatre should, in this writer’s opinion, stir us into action and also remind us of our capacity to dominate that which holds us back.
10 December 2009
From Exile,
Bankole
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http://exiledun.livejournal.com/72227.html
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http://exiledun.livejournal.com/77516.html