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The Refuge Plays trilogy—which tells the story of one Black American family over 70 years—falls into the theatrical genre of domestic drama: serious stories that focus on the actions and relationships among ordinary, middle- or working-class people. (This sets it apart from classical drama, like Oedipus, which features high-ranking rulers whose actions, however personal, affect entire nations.)

Domestic drama developed over centuries beginning around 1600 and reached full expression in the plays of Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, whose best-known play A Doll’s House (1879) was recently revived on Broadway, showing the genre’s staying power. In the United States, the domestic dramas most often produced or taught in school feature white families: the Kellers in All My Sons by Arthur Miller, the Talley family in Lanford Wilson’s Talley Trilogy plays, Lil’Bit and Uncle Peck in How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel, the Blakes of The Humans by Stephen Karam. White families have been put forward as bearers of the universal experience in American family drama.

Dramas by and about Black American families have an equally rich history. Many of these works—for example, Angelina Grimke’s Rachel—speak directly to the experience of race in the United States and are aware of the “white gaze” of the audience. Others were written with a Black audience in mind and explore intracultural or universal themes: Shirley Graham DuBois’s 1939 comedy I Gotta Home is one example. A few have achieved wide recognition, particularly the works of August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry—but the total number of productions of plays by Black playwrights vs. white playwrights across the nation reveals a stark contrast. Of the 119 productions that made American Theatre Magazine’s most-produced plays lists between the 2009-10 season and the 2019-20 season, only 14 were by Black playwrights.

Today, more plays by Black playwrights are asking audiences—all audiences—to see the Black American experience as a universal experience. These plays feature Black characters who experience the world as it is, but whose primary struggle is not tied to issues of race. Consider the example of Primary Trust: protagonist Kenneth’s opening monologue features a mention of his experiences as a Black man in a small town, but the action of the play is concerned with his experience of loneliness and his opening to new possibilities.

In an interview for this Upstage Guide, director Patricia McGregor contextualized The Refuge Plays by quoting actor Lizan Mitchell, who plays Clydette:

Lizan Mitchell has been in the development [process of The Refuge Plays] for a while. She would often say, ‘This is a feast that feels like it was made for us.’ These plays feel like a feast that are meant to not explain me, but to nourish me. The more we do pieces that are meant to not just explain ourselves to each other, but to nourish and center a variety of communities, there's an incredible value in that.

In keeping with Roundabout’s mission to spotlight classic works from the past—and pulling from the work done in Year One of the Refocus Project—here is a small sample of Black American family dramas from the past 100 years to put on your reading list.

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A Reading List

Rachel by Angelina Weld Grimké – 1916

Originally produced by the NAACP’s Drama Committee in Washington DC in 1916, Rachel is believed to be the first play by a Black woman professionally produced in the United States. Rachel tells the story of Rachel Loving, a young Black woman living with her mother and brother in a northern city at the turn of the 20th century. When her mother reveals a brutal story from the family's past, Rachel is shaken to her core and is forced to confront what it really means to bring a Black child into this world.

Rachel is part of a group of anti-lynching plays from the first decades of the 20th century, most written by Black women. The playbill for the original production stated that it was 

[T]he first attempt to use the stage for race propaganda in order to enlighten the American people relative to the lamentable condition of the ten million of colored citizens in this free Republic.

The Chip Woman’s Fortune by Willis Richardson – 1923

The Chip Woman’s Fortune was the first non-musical play by a Black American writer produced on Broadway. A one-act play, it tells the story of an urban Black family saved from a debt by the elderly woman boarder who shares their home. As Freda L. Scott wrote in “Black Drama and the Harlem Renaissance,” an article published in Theatre Journal in 1985, the play was

[M]et with critical success as a realistic slice of life which acknowledged some of the problems Blacks faced due to discrimination, but which sought simply to portray a specific family solving a specific problem among themselves.

Big White Fog by Theodore Ward – 1938

Big White Fog, a three-act drama set between 1922 and 1932, was produced as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project in Chicago in 1938. It follows the Mason family, an educated Black family who has come north in the Great Migration in search of better opportunities. Each family takes a different approach to navigating a nation where most doors are closed to them. The tragic ending holds out the possibility that communism offers a way forward. In a letter to The Daily Worker quoted in “Successful Federal Theatre Dramas By Black Playwrights” by Jeanne-Marie A. Miller, the correspondent described the play:

Seldom in literature or on the stage has the inner dignity of an oppressed people struggling to affirm its nationhood risen so indestructibly, so magnificently as in the Negro family portrayed in Big White Fog.

On Striver’s Row by Abram Hill – 1940

On Striver’s Row is a satirical look at the well-to-do Van Striven family as they prepare for and host their daughter’s debut despite having fallen on hard times financially. While not quite a family drama, as a send-up of it, On Striver’s Row reveals how entrenched the genre was within the Black theatre community. On Striver’s Row was the first production of the American Negro Theater (ANT)—an influential company that grew out of the Federal Theater Project’s Negro Unit and trained many Black actors, including Alice Childress, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and Harry Belafonte. Audience members of a certain age will also be familiar with Earle Hyman and Clarice Taylor, who played Cliff Huxtable’s parents on The Cosby Show. Both got their start at ANT.

The Amen Corner by James Baldwin – 1954

The Amen Corner, James Baldwin’s first play, deals with Margaret Alexander, the strict pastor of a storefront church in Harlem and single mother of an 18-year-old son. When her long-estranged husband reappears, ill and seeking reunion with his family, it is revealed that she left him after the loss of their infant daughter—not that he had simply walked out on her, as she had told her congregation. The aftermath of the revelation and reunion challenge Margaret’s understanding of what is holy and what is right.

Ceremonies in Dark Old Men by Lonne Elder III – 1969

Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, produced by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1969 but set in the 1950s, tells the story of Russell Parker, a former vaudeville dancer, current owner of an unsuccessful barber shop in Harlem, and widower. His daughter is supporting him and his two sons. The men in the family struggle make ends meet in a difficult time and place by selling bootleg corn whisky out of the shop. Clive Barnes of The New York Times wrote:

The strength of Mr. Elder’s play is partly as a cry of pain in a dark night, partly as an American document, a very sad American document. It is a play about the rituals, or ceremonies, of survival.

First Breeze of Summer by Leslie Lee – 1975

Set over one weekend in June in small-town Pennsylvania, Leslie Lee’s admittedly autobiographical three-act play centers on Lucretia, a family’s aging matriarch, and Lou, her adolescent grandson. Through flashback, stories of Lucretia’s younger life and former loves are told; these revelations leave Lou to struggle with his understanding of his grandmother as he grapples with his own sexuality.

Zooman and the Sign by Charles Fuller – 1980

Zooman and the Sign—written by Charles Fuller, perhaps best known for A Soldier’s Play—is the story of the Tate family in Philadelphia whose 12-year-old daughter, Jinny, is murdered by a local teenage thug known as Zooman. Parents Rachel and Reuben have been estranged due to Reuben’s infidelity, but come together in their grief, sharing the stage with teenage son Victor and their Uncle Emmett. None of the Tate's neighbors will admit to seeing anything, prompting Reuben to hang a sign on the porch reading, “The killers of our daughter Jinny are free on the streets because our neighbors will not identify them.”

Flyin’ West by Pearl Cleage – 1992

Set in Kansas in 1898, Cleage’s play follows four women—sisters Fannie, Mabel, and Minnie and Miss Leah, an elderly neighbor they’ve adopted as family—as they navigate life on the frontier, where they’ve migrated to avoid the violence of the post-Reconstruction South. The story hinges on Minnie’s new husband, Frank, an abusive man intent on selling her land to white speculators, and women’s fight to stop him.

Stick Fly by Lydia Diamond – 2006

Stick Fly takes place in the vacation home of a wealthy Black family, the LeVays, in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard. Son Kent has brought home his fiancé, Taylor, an entomologist and daughter of a renowned Black intellectual who deserted her in childhood. Also at the house are Kent’s brother Flip and his white girlfriend Kimber; Joseph, the family patriarch with a secret; and Cheryl, daughter of the family’s longtime maid who is filling in for her ill mother. In a review of the 2011 Broadway production of Stick Fly published in Theatre Journal, Dr. Stacie McCormick noted:

The Broadway production of Lydia Diamond's Stick Fly coincided with a historically significant moment for black playwrights. For the first time ever, Broadway featured four black women playwrights in a single season: Katori Hall's The Mountaintop, Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre Murray's adaptation of the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, and Diamond's Stick Fly. More than fifty years after Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 A Raisin in the Sun appeared on Broadway, it is perhaps fitting that Stick Fly reflects Hansberry's historic work from contemporary perspectives on family, race, and class....Although these works deal with class and African American identity from markedly different vantage points, their structural similarities demonstrate Hansberry's enduring influence on contemporary playwrights like Diamond.

The Brother/Sister Plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney – 2007–2011

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s triptych of plays—In the Red and Brown Water, The Brothers Size, and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet—explore the connected stories of members of a family in the fictional town of San Pere, Louisiana. Each story is based in a Yoruba myth, and characters share the names of Yoruba deities or Orishas. Writing in Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men, Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., PhD offers this analysis of The Brothers Size:

This play offers an example of how one can use the play script as a place to imagine a complex manhood, without apology or apprehension. In The Brothers Size, we witness contradiction, possibility, and ‘goodness,’ within black men as a natural fact, rather than as an exception toward richer readings of black men’s real lives and representations.

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Published on September 21, 2023.

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