Reviewed by:

• Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett
• Elizabeth A. Osborne

Kate Dossett’s Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal joins the work of scholars like Rena Fraden, Glenda Gill, and Adrienne Macki Braconi that delves into the Federal Theatre Project’s (FTP) Negro Units. Widely celebrated by scholars as socially progressive, examinations of the Negro Units frequently appear in articles and book chapters rather than in complete monographs. As such, extant research tends to focus on single units, people, or productions—often Harlem’s behemoth, popularly known as Unit 891, and famous productions like Orson Welles’s “voodoo Macbeth.” In contrast, Dossett’s extensive study offers a scrupulously researched examination of the archival remnants of the 1930s using a multifaceted historiographic approach. Rather than focusing only on staged productions, she traces the lengthy and often fraught process of creation, including work that has never reached the stage. To do so, Dossett centers on what she calls “black performance communities”—a concept based on Richard Barr’s “temporary social organization” of performance, which incorporates the creative team, performers, audience, and the surrounding community as a temporary and fluid group. This approach allows her to consider the many invisibilized influences on a performance text. As Dossett argues, the FTP’s manuscript collection serves as “an archive of black agency, for they not only record how and when white mastery was contested within and beyond the theatre, they also document the scope and ambition of black creativity” (6–7).

Dossett organizes Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal into two primary sections, both of which include multiple chapters. The first two chapters focus on how Black performance communities operated outside of predominantly white theatre institutions. They functioned in ways that enabled these institutions to represent Black life on US stages, whether they were adapting white-authored plays for Negro Unit performances, writing manuscripts that were ultimately left unstaged, or engaging in debates within Black journals or newspapers. The first chapter examines the popular and well-known white-authored play Stevedore (George Sklar and Paul Peters). The second chapter delves into two living newspapers written by Black authors for staging in the Negro Units: Liberty Deferred (Abram Hill and John Silvera) and Stars and Bars (Ward Courtney and the Connecticut Negro Unit). Each chapter uses multiple script iterations to trace the negotiations each play endured within and beyond the theatre, and each shows the different ways in which Black agency and resistance circulated through the texts. I particularly appreciate Dossett’s work on Liberty Deferred and Stars and Bars. As plays that never saw production, these pieces are often omitted from the FTP narrative. Yet, as examples of how Black writers resisted the erasure of Black history and reckoned with the power of white institutions, Dossett’s meticulous analysis of the works and use of cultural and political contexts provide a compelling case for their prominent inclusion. Moreover, these early [End Page 129] chapters extend beyond the Harlem Negro Unit to companies in Seattle (Stevedore) and Hartford (Stars and Bars). Dossett attends to each with care, demonstrating the political, racial, and administrative differences and providing a multiplicity of under-represented perspectives outside New York City.

The second half of the book focuses on the different options available to Black creatives when their plays were produced, and it provides excellent examples of another facet of Dossett’s historiographical approach—“reading forward.” As she argues, many researchers use final published manuscripts to look back on Black theatre history, interpreting events through the lens of the past one hundred years. Reading forward centers Black communities in the cultural moment of creation, and she uses the FTP archives to illuminate community debates around how theatre could be used to mobilize radicalism. In three packed chapters, Dossett explores Natural Man and Go Down Moses (Theodore Browne), Big White Fog (Theodore Ward), and Haiti (William DuBois), with attention to Negro Units in Seattle, Chicago, and New York. Chapter 4 offers an excellent example...

 审阅者：

• 
  新政中的激进黑人戏剧凯特·多塞特
•  伊丽莎白·奥斯本

凯特·多塞特的《新政中的激进黑人剧院》与雷纳·弗拉登、格伦达·吉尔和艾德丽安·麦基·布拉科尼等学者的作品一起深入研究了联邦剧院项目 (FTP) 的黑人单位。对黑人单位的考察被学者们广泛称赞为社会进步，经常出现在文章和书籍章节中，而不是完整的专着中。因此，现有的研究往往集中在单个单位、人物或作品上——通常是哈莱姆区的庞然大物，俗称“891 部队”，以及奥森·威尔斯的《巫毒麦克白》等著名作品。相比之下，多塞特的广泛研究使用多方面的史学方法对 20 世纪 30 年代的档案遗迹进行了严格的研究检查。她不只关注舞台制作，而是追踪漫长且充满挑战的创作过程，包括从未登上舞台的作品。为此，多塞特以她所说的“黑人表演社区”为中心——这一概念基于理查德·巴尔的表演“临时社会组织”，其中将创意团队、表演者、观众和周围社区作为一个临时且流动的群体结合起来。这种方法使她能够考虑对表演文本的许多无形影响。正如多塞特所说，FTP 的手稿收藏是“黑人机构的档案，因为它们不仅记录了剧院内外如何以及何时争夺白人统治权，还记录了黑人创造力的范围和野心”（6-7 ）。

多塞特将新政中的激进黑人戏剧分为两个主要部分，两个部分都包含多个章节。前两章重点讨论黑人表演社区如何在以白人为主的剧院机构之外运作。他们的运作方式使这些机构能够在美国舞台上代表黑人生活，无论是改编白人创作的戏剧用于黑人单位的表演，撰写最终未上演的手稿，还是参与黑人期刊或报纸内的辩论。第一章考察了流行且著名的白人创作的戏剧《史蒂夫多》（乔治·斯克拉和保罗·彼得斯）。第二章深入研究了黑人作家为在黑人单位中上演而撰写的两份活报：《延迟的自由》（艾布拉姆·希尔和约翰·西尔维拉）和《星与酒吧》（沃德·考特尼和康涅狄格州黑人单位）。每一章都使用多个剧本迭代来追踪每部戏剧在剧院内外所经历的谈判，并且每一章都展示了黑人代理和抵抗在文本中传播的不同方式。我特别欣赏多塞特在《延迟自由》和《星条旗》方面的工作。由于从未制作过的戏剧，这些作品经常被 FTP 叙述中省略。然而，作为黑人作家如何抵制黑人历史被抹除并考虑白人机构力量的例子，多塞特对作品的细致分析以及对文化和政治背景的运用为他们的突出包容性提供了令人信服的案例。此外，这些早期的[结束第 129 页]章节已超出了哈莱姆区黑人部门的范围，延伸到了西雅图（Stevedore）和哈特福德（Stars and Bars）的公司。 多塞特细心地对待每一个问题，展示了政治、种族和行政方面的差异，并提供了纽约市以外未被充分代表的多种观点。

本书的后半部分重点讨论了黑人创作者在制作戏剧时可以使用的不同选择，它提供了多塞特史学方法的另一个方面的绝佳例子——“向前阅读”。正如她所说，许多研究人员利用最终发表的手稿来回顾黑人戏剧的历史，通过过去一百年的镜头来解释事件。向前阅读将黑人社区置于文化创造时刻的中心，她利用 FTP 档案来阐明社区围绕如何利用戏剧来动员激进主义的辩论。在三个紧凑的章节中，多塞特探索了《自然人》和《Go Down Moses》（西奥多·布朗）、《大白雾》（西奥多·沃德）和海地（威廉·杜波依斯），重点关注西雅图、芝加哥和纽约的黑人单位。第 4 章提供了一个很好的例子......