HR Theatre

HR THEATRE IN THE AFTERNOON

The 21st century encourages a frantic and unnerving consumption of time.  It was a relief from all that to attend the performance at Dillard University of two one-act plays by Willis Richardson.  The director, my former colleague Ray Vrazel, added the ensemble performance of  two African creation myths ----a Gabonese, Fang story and a Mali, Fulani story.  The four-part aesthetic consumption of time on a Sunday afternoon provided respite, the illusion of returning to a very different time and place.  Ancient Africa provided myth; Richardson, morality.

In his director's notes, Vrazel reminded us of how Richardson sought to reorient American drama in the 1920s.   Instead of writing plays for white audiences, "Richardson believed …that plays written by African Americans should focus on the black community and not on racial tensions and differences.  He sought to utilize drama as a means of educating African American audiences.  Richardson asserted that most of his plays would be drawn from the folk tradition, and that they would center on conflicts within the black community."  When The Chip Woman's Fortune (1923) and The Broken Banjo (1925) were first staged, the myth of the  black community had segregated credibility.  In these two plays, the conflicts within are those of working class, urbanized culture, and they are folk -----let us be clear --- only in the sense that they pertain to the lives and souls of black folk.  Richardson was not educating African American audiences about the "romanticized" agrarian/agricultural realities or folk realities that Jean Toomer dealt with in Cane (1923). So, an audience in 2018 has the pleasure of learning that Richardson indeed dealt with "racial tensions and differences" by not dealing with them.  The paradox of Harlem Renaissance drama is wonderful.  It relieves pressure in a brief period of dramatic time.

I want to say a special "thank you" to Vrazel for casting down his theatrical bucket at Dillard University and pulling up Willis Richardson for reassessment during the University's 83rd theatre season and the rites of remembering that saturate New Orleans during its Tricentennial.   The afternoon of relief enabled me gain the energy needed to deal with the anxieties that were no less complex in the 1920s than they are today.  Whatever lessons Richardson wanted to teach about cooperation and generosity  in The Chip Woman's Fortune and about murder and guilt in The Broken Banjo still need to be taught. The two plays are simple tapes for measuring what can or ought to be done in creating thought-provoking "live"  drama for African Americans who want alternatives to the disengaged emotions offered by the "dead" drama of cinema and Internet steaming.  Staged actions enable us to have richer aesthetic  opportunities for communal  moral purgation.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            March 12, 2018