Content area
Full text
Setting: The stage is divided horizontally into two sections, upper and lower, by a thin board. The main action takes place on the upper stage. The light is never quite clear on the lower stage; but it is bright enough for you to perceive that sometimes the action that takes place on the upper stage is duplicated on the lower. Sometimes the actors on the upper stage get too vociferous-too violentand they crack through the boards and they lie twisted and curled in mounds. There are any number of mounds there, all twisted and broken. You look at them and you are not quite sure whether you see something or nothing; but you see by a curve that there might lie a human body. There is thrust out a white hand-a yellow one-one brown-a black. The Skin-of-Civilization must be very thin. A thought can drop you through it. (Bonner 191-92)
This excerpt from the stage directions for Marita Bonner's experimental drama The Purple Flower provides some clues as to why the play, which won the 1927 Crisis prize for "Literary Art and Expression," was never produced. Bonner's description of characters, as ambiguous and intriguing as her set description, indicates two sets of players: Sundry White Devils, whose "horns glow red all the time," and Us's, who may be "white as the White Devils" or "brown as the earth" but should "look as if they were something or nothing" (Bonner 191). The challenge of realizing such directions on stage is certainly one reason that The Purple Flower-unlike Georgia Douglas Johnson's Plumes, which won the Opportunity prize for drama in the same year- remained unperformed during Bonner's lifetime. Perhaps the more important reason is the play's revolutionary message, particularly the final warning the "Us's" issue to the "White Devils": "You have taken blood. You must give blood.... there can be no other way" (198-99). Because The Purple Flowers form and message are more in keeping with the revolutionary black theater of the 1960s and '70s than with the "folk" or "propaganda" plays typical of the Harlem Renaissance, the play has only recently been acknowledged as a singular contribution to African American theater.1
Since its 1974 reprinting in James V. Hatch and Ted Shine's Black Theater U.S.A....