Black History Month

To Read: Black Excellence

February 15, 2022

Celebrate Black Classics

This Black History Month, let's do more than read plays.Join us in advocating for an equitable legacy.

Expand the Canon is a vehicle to help theater inform the future & bring a new lens to our past. Through our advocacy, we've championed the works of Alice Childress, whose Wedding Band is coming to Theater for a New Audience, following a celebrated Broadway run of Trouble in Mind. We've staged collaborative readings of Hurston's Spunk & Efua Sutherland's Foriwa in partnership with Classical Theatre of Harlem for our past two festivals. These five Black writers deserve more attention. Many of these authors are already required reading in theater programs at HBCUs – and we're actively advocating for them become standard at arts programs across the country. The Expand the Canon catalogue serves as a resource to locate these plays and allows you to actively participate in the reformation of the canon. Join us!

Angelina Weld Grimké is one of the first African American women to have her play produced in 1916 and published in 1920. She is the descendant of the Grimké sisters, two abolitionists, and the niece of Francis J. Grimké who helped establish the NAACP. Thought of as a predecessor of the Harlem Renaissance, she inspired the likes of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. It is also rumored that she was gay - she wrote many poems focusing on queer love and romance.

Zora Neale Hurston was one of the most influential, inspired, and well-known writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Her writing is characterized by her authentic portraits of contemporary African American and Black culture and communities, lyrical writing style, and roots in folktales and magical realism.

Alice Childress is known to be the only Black woman to have written, produced, and published plays for four decades. She turned to playwriting, after eleven years of acting, to engage more directly with her audience. While only Wedding Band is on our list, her play Trouble in Mind recently premiered on Broadway to great acclaim. Childress dedicated her work to representing the Black experience as honestly as possible.

Efua Sutherland was a beloved playwright, author, and child advocate. After completing her studies in Ghana, she pursued higher education in England, where she was one of the first African women to study at Cambridge. Upon her return, she founded the Ghana Experimental Theatre, which later became the Drama Studio. Based around Ghanaian tradition and storytelling methods, her work helped introduce the study of African performance tradition at a university level.

Lorraine Hansberry was a playwright, author, activist, and visionary. Best known for her work, A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry was the first Black woman playwright produced on Broadway. She won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award at the age of 29, making her the first African-American, the fifth woman, and the youngest writer in history to do so. She was a vocal proponent of the Civil Rights movement, gender equality, and queer liberation. She died in 1965 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34. At her funeral, the priest read a message from James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr., which said, “Her creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.”

Excited about all these titles, but not sure where to start? Interested in including one in a class, scene study, season, or book club? Or just want someone to gush about the play with?

With joy,

The Hedgepigs