SOUL STRUGGLE
Directed by Elizabeth Van Dyke
Dramaturgy by Arminda Thomas
GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON: From Poet to Playwright
by Arminda Thomas
By the time Georgia Douglas Johnson turned her hand to playwriting, she was already recognized as a major poetic voice in the New Negro movement (which would in time be called the Harlem Renaissance). She had published two books of poetry, The Heart of a Woman (1918) and Bronze (1922), and her poems regularly appeared in the NAACP’s Crisis and the National Urban League’s Opportunity magazines. In addition, her weekly informal gatherings of artists, intellectuals and activists were fast making her Washington D.C. home ("The Half-Way
House," she called it) a destination spot in African-American civic and cultural life--a place where Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman could dream up a literary magazine for more experimental writing, where A. Philip Randolph could make his case for unionizing sleeping-car porters to the city’s disapproving black elite, and where Carter G. Woodson (educator and organizer of Negro History Week) could convince playwrights May Miller and Willis Richardson to curate an anthology “dramatizing every phase of
[Negro] life and history”i as a learning tool for African-American schoolchildren. That book, Negro History in Thirteen Plays, included two of Johnson’s works.
Johnson’s entry into playwriting was encouraged by various friends, including Zona Gale (the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in drama), Alain Locke, curator and herald of the New Negro movement, and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois. The rise of the Little Theatre movement, along with the trend towards serious dramas focused on the lives of common people–including "Negroes"–had created an opportunity for the birth of an authentic African American drama, which Locke, Du Bois and others in the community were eager to encourage (though they often differed on the form that drama should take). To that end, Opportunity and Crisis magazines began offering playwriting contests with cash prizes; and in order to provide a venue (and, it was hoped, to build an audience) for the works, small theatre groups sprouted up in African American communities, schools, and organizations across the country.
The short lifespan (and dearth of record-keeping) for many of these venues, along with the destruction of most of Johnson’s own papers after her death, makes it difficult to say with certainty how many of Johnson’s plays received productions in her lifetime. It seems clear, however, that two of her earliest plays were her most “successful” in terms of publications and acclamation.
Blue Bloods, a one-act comedy that manages to tackle the absurdity of colorism in the context of sexual exploitation, was awarded honorable mention in Opportunity’s 1926 contest. It was published as a single play by Appleton-Century and subsequently anthologized in Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory’s Plays of Negro Life (1927) and in Frank Shay’s 50 More Contemporary One-Act Plays (1938). Blue Blood was staged by Du Bois’ Krigwa Players in New York in 1927 and by the Howard University Players in 1933.
Johnson’s next play, Plumes, was also well received. After taking first place in Opportunity’s contest, Plumes was published by Samuel French in 1927 and later appeared in Locke and Gregory’s anthology, as well as V.F. Calverton’s Anthology of American Negro Literature. Set in the rural south, Plumes brings us an impoverished woman struggling to choose whether to spend her life’s savings on a surgery that might possibly save her beloved daughter’s life – or to save the money for the daughter’s funeral. It was produced by the Harlem Experimental Theatre
(1927) and Chicago’s Cube Theater (1928). Aside from the two pieces included in Richardson and Miller’s historical drama anthology, Plumes and Blue Blood were the only plays to be published in Johnson’s lifetime.
As the 1920s gave way to the bleaker ‘30s, the Harlem Renaissance began to lose steam. Crisis and Opportunity turned their focus away from the arts. The Krigwa Players and Harlem Experimental Theatre disbanded. The opportunities for playwrights to see their work staged were dwindling. Langston Hughes recalled:
We were no longer in vogue, anyway, we Negroes. Sophisticated New Yorkers turned to Noel Coward. Colored actors began to go hungry, publishers politely rejected new manuscripts, and patrons found other uses for their money.ii
Some relief came in the form of the Federal Theatre Project, which was created to ease the high levels of unemployment in the arts communities. The FTP even established Negro Troupes in several cities. The plays Johnson submitted to the FTP met with mixed reviews, and ultimately none were selected for production. Her plays about lynching met with particular criticism: some objected to the static nature of the pieces, as Johnson’s plays were all set away from the murderous crowds in an effort to hone in on the effect the barbaric practice had on the victims’ family, friends and neighbors. Another remarked disapprovingly that Johnson trivialized the offences that led to lynching, when “in fact the crime that produces lynching is far fouler.”iii
The lynching plays also met resistance where she might have expected none. When Johnson sent her lynching plays to NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White for possible production by the Youth Council, he replied that the Council had rejected the pieces because “they all ended in defeat.” Johnson replied, “It is true that in life things don’t end usually ideally.”iv In this more recent era of unwarranted police shootings caught on video, of the Black Lives Matter movement, some theatre groups have revisited Johnson’s lynching plays. Theater for a New City included one, The Blue-Eyed Black Boy, in a 2015 production of “lost” one-acts from the Harlem Renaissance. Of the six lynching plays that Johnson penned, this play comes closest to White’s desired triumphant ending. The mother is able, in the end, to convince someone to save her son--though the reason she succeeds is not ideal.
In one of her later plays, The Starting Point (1938), Johnson captures the heartbreak and disappointment of an elderly couple who have invested all their hopes and treasure on a beloved son, only to have him squander it all. In order to save him, they must convince him to accept a life of radically diminished expectations. It is a work that may well reflect the disappointment that Johnson and others of her generation experienced as the post- Renaissance years left most of them scrambling for opportunities that had once seemed certain. Still, there is resilience in the old couple, as there was in their creator, who continued to write— and to nurture and champion other writers--for the rest of her life.
by Arminda Thomas
By the time Georgia Douglas Johnson turned her hand to playwriting, she was already recognized as a major poetic voice in the New Negro movement (which would in time be called the Harlem Renaissance). She had published two books of poetry, The Heart of a Woman (1918) and Bronze (1922), and her poems regularly appeared in the NAACP’s Crisis and the National Urban League’s Opportunity magazines. In addition, her weekly informal gatherings of artists, intellectuals and activists were fast making her Washington D.C. home ("The Half-Way
House," she called it) a destination spot in African-American civic and cultural life--a place where Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman could dream up a literary magazine for more experimental writing, where A. Philip Randolph could make his case for unionizing sleeping-car porters to the city’s disapproving black elite, and where Carter G. Woodson (educator and organizer of Negro History Week) could convince playwrights May Miller and Willis Richardson to curate an anthology “dramatizing every phase of
[Negro] life and history”i as a learning tool for African-American schoolchildren. That book, Negro History in Thirteen Plays, included two of Johnson’s works.
Johnson’s entry into playwriting was encouraged by various friends, including Zona Gale (the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in drama), Alain Locke, curator and herald of the New Negro movement, and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois. The rise of the Little Theatre movement, along with the trend towards serious dramas focused on the lives of common people–including "Negroes"–had created an opportunity for the birth of an authentic African American drama, which Locke, Du Bois and others in the community were eager to encourage (though they often differed on the form that drama should take). To that end, Opportunity and Crisis magazines began offering playwriting contests with cash prizes; and in order to provide a venue (and, it was hoped, to build an audience) for the works, small theatre groups sprouted up in African American communities, schools, and organizations across the country.
The short lifespan (and dearth of record-keeping) for many of these venues, along with the destruction of most of Johnson’s own papers after her death, makes it difficult to say with certainty how many of Johnson’s plays received productions in her lifetime. It seems clear, however, that two of her earliest plays were her most “successful” in terms of publications and acclamation.
Blue Bloods, a one-act comedy that manages to tackle the absurdity of colorism in the context of sexual exploitation, was awarded honorable mention in Opportunity’s 1926 contest. It was published as a single play by Appleton-Century and subsequently anthologized in Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory’s Plays of Negro Life (1927) and in Frank Shay’s 50 More Contemporary One-Act Plays (1938). Blue Blood was staged by Du Bois’ Krigwa Players in New York in 1927 and by the Howard University Players in 1933.
Johnson’s next play, Plumes, was also well received. After taking first place in Opportunity’s contest, Plumes was published by Samuel French in 1927 and later appeared in Locke and Gregory’s anthology, as well as V.F. Calverton’s Anthology of American Negro Literature. Set in the rural south, Plumes brings us an impoverished woman struggling to choose whether to spend her life’s savings on a surgery that might possibly save her beloved daughter’s life – or to save the money for the daughter’s funeral. It was produced by the Harlem Experimental Theatre
(1927) and Chicago’s Cube Theater (1928). Aside from the two pieces included in Richardson and Miller’s historical drama anthology, Plumes and Blue Blood were the only plays to be published in Johnson’s lifetime.
As the 1920s gave way to the bleaker ‘30s, the Harlem Renaissance began to lose steam. Crisis and Opportunity turned their focus away from the arts. The Krigwa Players and Harlem Experimental Theatre disbanded. The opportunities for playwrights to see their work staged were dwindling. Langston Hughes recalled:
We were no longer in vogue, anyway, we Negroes. Sophisticated New Yorkers turned to Noel Coward. Colored actors began to go hungry, publishers politely rejected new manuscripts, and patrons found other uses for their money.ii
Some relief came in the form of the Federal Theatre Project, which was created to ease the high levels of unemployment in the arts communities. The FTP even established Negro Troupes in several cities. The plays Johnson submitted to the FTP met with mixed reviews, and ultimately none were selected for production. Her plays about lynching met with particular criticism: some objected to the static nature of the pieces, as Johnson’s plays were all set away from the murderous crowds in an effort to hone in on the effect the barbaric practice had on the victims’ family, friends and neighbors. Another remarked disapprovingly that Johnson trivialized the offences that led to lynching, when “in fact the crime that produces lynching is far fouler.”iii
The lynching plays also met resistance where she might have expected none. When Johnson sent her lynching plays to NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White for possible production by the Youth Council, he replied that the Council had rejected the pieces because “they all ended in defeat.” Johnson replied, “It is true that in life things don’t end usually ideally.”iv In this more recent era of unwarranted police shootings caught on video, of the Black Lives Matter movement, some theatre groups have revisited Johnson’s lynching plays. Theater for a New City included one, The Blue-Eyed Black Boy, in a 2015 production of “lost” one-acts from the Harlem Renaissance. Of the six lynching plays that Johnson penned, this play comes closest to White’s desired triumphant ending. The mother is able, in the end, to convince someone to save her son--though the reason she succeeds is not ideal.
In one of her later plays, The Starting Point (1938), Johnson captures the heartbreak and disappointment of an elderly couple who have invested all their hopes and treasure on a beloved son, only to have him squander it all. In order to save him, they must convince him to accept a life of radically diminished expectations. It is a work that may well reflect the disappointment that Johnson and others of her generation experienced as the post- Renaissance years left most of them scrambling for opportunities that had once seemed certain. Still, there is resilience in the old couple, as there was in their creator, who continued to write— and to nurture and champion other writers--for the rest of her life.