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James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, eds. Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans. New York: Free P, 1996. 916 pp. $60.00 cloth/$40.00 paper.
I n 1974, Black Theater USA: Forty-Five Plays by Black Americans, 1847-1974, edited by James V. Hatch with Ted Shine, was published by The Free Press. It included the work of forty-two authors and represented a major leap forward in the quantity of literature available to readers and scholars with an interest in African American theater. Recently revised and expanded, Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans is a two-volume work. Volume One covers The Early Period, 18471938, and Volume Two includes plays from The Recent Period, 1935-Today.
The newly revised and expanded Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans is an important addition to the body of anthologies about the Black theatre. It includes plays representative of the last twenty years and introduces the reader to major African American playwrights of earlier periods. Those educators who teach courses providing an overview of Black theatre will find that the two volumes, which represent the largest collections of plays by African American authors in a single work, allow for thematic and chronological approaches to the material.
The number of uses for African American theatre anthologies has increased. Theater programs include increasing numbers of African American students seeking plays by African American authors for acting and directing texts. Scripts are important to students and scholars seeking historical and theatrical resource materials. And with the contemporary focus on multi-cultural theatre, the number of venues that may be interested in producing plays by African American authors has increased. These new volumes provide a valuable assortment of plays that are unavailable in any other single source.
Among the plays added to the newly revised and expanded edition of Black Theatre USA are W. E. B. Du Bois's Star of Ethiopia, Paul Laurence Dunbar & Jesse A. Shipp's In Dahomey, Liberty Deferred by John D. Silvera & Abram Hill, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men by Lonne Elder III, Ben Caldwell's Prayer Meeting, George C. Wolfe's The...