Black Plays
The first blog about black theater history this month was about black theaters in America. The second was about black theater producers and how we should increase their numbers.
This week’s blog is about plays, those written by black playwrights and those with black characters.
Where are the Black Playwrights?
Plays cost quite a bit to produce. If your goal is a New York production, the costs can be in the millions. Even a staged reading can run into the thousands.
Since producers are by nature cautious people, with this much money at stake they tend to work with people they know or whose work they know about. In practice, this means that since most producers are white, they work with white playwrights.
You can see how this has played out over the years by looking at the seasons of almost every mainstage theater company.
Rhymes Over Beats Searches for Black Plays
It has been one of the founding goals of Rhymes Over Beats to counter this by searching for black playwrights.
Since this is black history month, we have partnered with CreateTheatre.com to present weekly zoom readings of new plays by black playwrights. Our second play was ON THE THIRD DAY by Atlanta playwright Amina S. McIntyre, which premiered on the CreateTheater YouTube page on Monday, February 15. We hope you will watch it here until it is taken down on Sunday, February 21, 2021.
We intend to continue our efforts going forward.
Black Actors
Othello by William Shakespeare was probably written in 1603. The title character was a black general. It was first played by a black actor, Ira Aldridge, in 1825 – over two hundred years after it was written. Until then it was played by white actors in blackface.
It seems to be the belief even today, two hundred years after a black man played Othello onstage, that the primarily white theater audience will only go see plays about white characters. We are staking our success that this belief is wrong.
We have a producing preference for plays that have black characters, and where race is unspecified in the text, we will cast black actors.
We are a champion of an art form, hip hop, and its inclusion in theater. It is an art form created and dominated by black artists.
We can do no less. Help us produce black plays by donating here.