The National Black Drama Anthology: Eleven Plays from America’s Leading African-American Theaters

Though New York remains the de facto capital of American theater much of the most daring and interesting work today is done by regional theaters. This is doubly true of plays by African American authors who despite a few notable exceptions (August Wilson George C. Wolfe) suffer under a commercial apartheid that keeps black plays off Broadway. Of necessity African American theater artists have to create their own venues from the ground up. This wide-ranging anthology edited by the founder of the New Federal Theater celebrates the work of that company’s black-owned black-run peers by presenting work by 11 dramatists. Among the most interesting are Jeff Stetson’s moving EThe MeetingE which imagines a meeting between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and Shauneille Perry’s fascinating updating of EIn DahomeyE the 1903 musical hit that was the first ‘all-Black show’ on Broadway. - EJack Helbig BooklistE