front cover of The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil RIghts Era
The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil RIghts Era
Jonathan Shandell
University of Iowa Press, 2018

Jonathan Shandell provides the first in-depth study of the historic American Negro Theatre (ANT) and its lasting influence on American popular culture. Founded in 1940 in Harlem, the ANT successfully balanced expressions of African American consciousness with efforts to gain white support for the burgeoning civil rights movement. The theatre company featured innovative productions with emerging artists—Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, and many others—who would become giants of stage, film, and television. In 1944, the ANT made theatrical history by creating the smash hit Anna Lucasta, the most popular play with an African American cast ever to perform on Broadway. Starting from a shoestring budget, the ANT grew into one of the most important companies in the history of African American theatre. Though the group folded in 1949, it continued to shape American popular culture through the creative work of its many talented artists. 

Examining oral histories, playbills, scripts, production stills, and journalistic accounts, Shandell gives us the most complete picture to date of the theatre company by analyzing well-known productions alongside groundbreaking and now-forgotten efforts. Shedding light on this often-overlooked chapter of African American history, which fell between the New Negro Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, Shandell reveals how the ANT became a valued community institution for Harlem—an important platform for African American artists to speak to racial issues—and a trailblazer in promoting integration and interracial artistic collaboration in the U.S. In doing so, Shandell also demonstrates how a small amateur ensemble of the 1940s succeeded in challenging, expanding, and transforming how African Americans were portrayed in the ensuing decades. The result is a fascinating and entertaining examination that will be of interest to scholars and students of African American and American studies and theatre history, as well as popular culture enthusiasts. 

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front cover of Experiments in Democracy
Experiments in Democracy
Interracial and Cross-Cultural Exchange in American Theatre, 1912-1945
Edited by Cheryl Black and Jonathan Shandell
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of American theatres and theatre artists fostered interracial collaboration and socialization on stage, behind the scenes, and among audiences. In an era marked by entrenched racial segregation and inequality, these artists used performance to bridge America’s persistent racial divide and to bring African American, Latino/Latina, Asian American, Native American, and Jewish American communities and traditions into the nation’s broader cultural conversation.
 
In Experiments in Democracy, edited by Cheryl Black and Jonathan Shandell, theatre historians examine a wide range of performances—from Broadway, folk plays and dance productions to scripted political rallies and radio dramas. Contributors look at such diverse groups as the Theatre Union, La Unión Martí-Maceo, and the American Negro Theatre, as well as individual playwrights and their works, including Theodore Browne’s folk opera Natural Man, Josefina Niggli’s Soldadera, and playwright Lynn Riggs’s Cherokee Night and Green Grow the Lilacs (the basis for the musical Oklahoma!). Exploring the ways progressive artists sought to connect isolated racial and cultural groups in pursuit of a more just and democratic society, contributors take into account the blind spots, compromised methods, and unacknowledged biases at play in their practices and strategies. Essays demonstrate how the gap between the ideal of American democracy and its practice—mired in entrenched systems of white privilege, economic inequality, and social prejudice—complicated the work of these artists.
 
Focusing on questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality on the stage in the decades preceding the Civil Rights era, Experiments in Democracy fills an important gap in our understanding of the history of the American stage—and sheds light on these still-relevant questions in contemporary American society. 
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Readying the Revolution
African American Theater and Performance from Post-World War II to the Black Arts Movement
Jonathan Shandell
University of Michigan Press, 2025
Starting in 1966, African American activist Stokely Carmichael and other political leaders adopted the phrase "Black Power!" The slogan captured a militant, revolutionary spirit that was already emerging in the work of playwrights, poets, musicians, and visual artists throughout the Black Arts movement of the mid-1960s. But the story of those theater artists and performers whose work helped bring about the Black Arts revolution has not fully been told. Readying the Revolution: African American Theater and Performance from Post-World War II to the Black Arts Movement explores the dynamic era of Black culture between the end of World War II and the start of the Black Arts Movement (1946-1964) by illuminating how artists and innovators such as Jackie Robinson, Lorraine Hansberry, Ossie Davis, Nina Simone, and others helped radicalize Black culture and Black political thought. In doing so, these artists defied white cultural hegemony in the United States, and built the foundation for the revolutionary movement in Black theater that followed in the mid 1960s.  

Through archival research, close textual reading, and an analysis of visual and aural performance artifacts, author Jonathan Shandell demonstrates how these artists negotiated a space on the public stage of the United States for cultivating radical Black aesthetic exploration and a spirit of courageous antiracist resistance. Readying the Revolution provides new insights into the activism and accomplishments of African American artists whose work helped lay the groundwork for a Black Nationalist cultural revolution, but whose influence has yet to receive its due recognition.
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front cover of Theatre History Studies 2021, Vol 40
Theatre History Studies 2021, Vol 40
Edited by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta
University of Alabama Press, 2021
A peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference

Introduction
—LISA JACKSON-SCHEBETTA, WITH ODAI JOHNSON, CHRYSTYNA DAIL, AND JONATHAN SHANDELL

PART I
STUDIES IN THEATRE HISTORY

Un-Reading Voltaire: The Ghost in the Cupboard of the House of Reason
—ODAI JOHNSON

Caricatured, Marginalized,
and Erased: African American Artists and Philadelphia’s Negro Unit of the FTP, 1936–1939               
—JONATHAN SHANDELL

Stop Your Sobbing: White Fragility, Slippery Empathy, and Historical Consciousness in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate
—SCOTT PROUDFIT

Asia and Alwin Nikolais: Interdisciplinarity, Orientalist Tendencies, and Midcentury American Dance
—ANGELA K. AHLGREN

PART II
WITCH CHARACTERS AND WITCHY PERFORMANCE

Editor’s Introduction to the Special Section
Shifting Shapes: Witch Characters and Witchy Performances
—CHRYSTYNA DAIL

To Wright the Witch: The Case of Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft
—JANE BARNETTE

Nothing Wicked This Way Comes: Shakespeare’s Subversion of Archetypal Witches in The Winter’s Tale
—JESSICA HOLT

Of Women and Witches: Performing the Female Body in Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom
—MAMATA SENGUPTA

(Un)Limited: The Influence of Mentorship and Father-Daughter Relationships on Elphaba’s Heroine Journey in Wicked
—REBECCA K. HAMMONDS

Immersive Witches: New York City under the Spell of Sleep No More and Then She Fell
—DAVID BISAHA

PART III
Essay from the Conference

The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay, MATC 2020
New Conventions for a New Generation: High School Musicals and Broadway in the 2010s
—LINDSEY MANTOAN
 
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