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oapen-20.500.12657-640402023-07-21T02:45:43Z Racing the Great White Way Johnson, Katie N. Eugene O’Neill, Paul Robeson, American theater, Harlem Renaissance, Emperor Jones, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, African American performance, American film, African American film, Charles Gilpin, Dudley Murphy, Habib Benglia, diasporia, postcolonial performance, breaking color lines, Jules Bledsoe, blackface, Metropolitan Opera, transnational theater bic Book Industry Communication::A The arts::AN Theatre studies bic Book Industry Communication::J Society & social sciences::JF Society & culture: general::JFS Social groups::JFSL Ethnic studies bic Book Industry Communication::A The arts::AN Theatre studies::ANF Theatre direction & production The early drama of Eugene O’Neill, with its emphasis on racial themes and conflicts, opened up extraordinary opportunities for Black performers to challenge racist structures in modern theater and cinema. By adapting O’Neill’s dramatic writing—changing scripts to omit offensive epithets, inserting African American music and dance, or including citations of Black internationalism--theater artists of color have used O’Neill’s texts to raze barriers in American and transatlantic theater. Challenging the widely accepted idea that Broadway was the white-hot creative engine of U.S. theater during the early 20th century, author Katie N. Johnson reveals a far more complex system of exchanges between the Broadway establishment and a vibrant Black theater scene in New York and beyond to chart a new history of American and transnational theater. In spite of their dichotomous (and at times problematic) representation of Blackness, O’Neill’s plays such as The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings make ideal case studies because of the way these works stimulated traffic between Broadway and Harlem—and between white and Black America. These investigations of O’Neill and Broadway productions are enriched by the vibrant transnational exchange found in early to mid-20th century artistic production. Anchored in archival research, Racing the Great White Way recovers not only vital lost performance histories, but also the layered contexts for performing bodies across the Black Atlantic and the Circum-Atlantic. 2023-07-20T12:36:03Z 2023-07-20T12:36:03Z 2023 book 9780472075782 9780472055784 https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/64040 eng Theater: Theory/Text/Performance application/pdf Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International 9780472903603.pdf University of Michigan Press 10.3998/mpub.12340544 10.3998/mpub.12340544 e07ce9b5-7a46-4096-8f0c-bc1920e3d889 0314e571-4102-4526-b014-3ed8f2d6750a 9780472075782 9780472055784 270 National Endowment for the Humanities NEH open access
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The early drama of Eugene O’Neill, with its emphasis on racial themes and conflicts, opened up extraordinary opportunities for Black performers to challenge racist structures in modern theater and cinema. By adapting O’Neill’s dramatic writing—changing scripts to omit offensive epithets, inserting African American music and dance, or including citations of Black internationalism--theater artists of color have used O’Neill’s texts to raze barriers in American and transatlantic theater.
Challenging the widely accepted idea that Broadway was the white-hot creative engine of U.S. theater during the early 20th century, author Katie N. Johnson reveals a far more complex system of exchanges between the Broadway establishment and a vibrant Black theater scene in New York and beyond to chart a new history of American and transnational theater. In spite of their dichotomous (and at times problematic) representation of Blackness, O’Neill’s plays such as The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings make ideal case studies because of the way these works stimulated traffic between Broadway and Harlem—and between white and Black America. These investigations of O’Neill and Broadway productions are enriched by the vibrant transnational exchange found in early to mid-20th century artistic production. Anchored in archival research, Racing the Great White Way recovers not only vital lost performance histories, but also the layered contexts for performing bodies across the Black Atlantic and the Circum-Atlantic.
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