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Tarell McCraney's having a pretty good couple of years. He's the playwright who last year won an Oscar for writing the daring screenplay for the exquisite movie , and next year he'll see his play open on Broadway.

He's also part of a long tradition of African-American playwrights who have long been at the forefront of pushing the art form of the American theater into new artistic, political, and popular territory. Whether the plays are doggedly realistic, bitingly satirical, or wildly expressionistic, the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library has on its shelves a variety of examples from this tradition that are well worth reading. A selective compendium follows.

The first African-American playwright to reach Broadway with a non-musical play was Willis Richardson with The Chip Woman's Fortune in 1923, a play you don't hear about too much anymore. But Lorraine Hansberry was the first African-American woman to hit Broadway (collaborating with Lloyd Richards, a black director), and the play she took there in 1959 has been enormously influential. A searing family drama about class and race and community pride, A Raisin in the Sun is a cornerstone of American literature and continues to dialogue with successive plays and writers to this day.

As disquieting as the economic realities exposed by Hansberry were, the naturalism and domestic setting of her play made her uncompromising vision of the world digestible to a broad audience. Just a few years later, the playwright LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) took a very different approach. His 1964 play is starkly allegorical and viscerally violent, following the tumultuous interaction between a white woman and a black man on a subway car.

James Baldwin, of course, is a colossal figure in American thought and literature, known primarily for his bracing prose. But he also wrote plays. Most notable is his 1964 play Blues for Mister Charlie, a history play inspired by the horrific murder of Emmett Till.

Vastly different in style is Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy, which shared the Obie award with Dutchman in 1964. Ambitious and exhilarating and occasionally exhausting, Kennedy's play about racism and stereotypes is absurdist and dreamlike, featuring masks and hair loss and an enormous statue of Queen Victoria. Even though she emerged on the scene decades ago, Kennedy is still relevant; the University of Toledo produced Funnyhouse as recently as 2003, and her latest play He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box just opened in New York last month.

Meanwhile, Charles Gordone was the first African-American playwright to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama, in 1970, for his play No Place to Be Somebody. Inspired by what he observed in his job as a bartender at a Greenwich Village watering hole, the play's story of struggling urbanites chasing broken dreams seems descended from Hansberry and O'Neill, but with the sordid and flashy elements of gangsters and gunplay mixed in to goose the action.

Gordone's play has a rough poetry to it, but for a play that takes lyricism to a whole other level check out Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf. Shange calls this theatrical work, a collection of twenty poetic and idiosyncratically punctuated monologues, a choreopoem, because each character's speech - some about very difficult subjects and upsetting experiences - is composed to be paired with music and choreography.

Samm-Art Williams's 1978 play was originally produced by the Negro Ensemble Company and transferred to Broadway where it was nominated for a Tony. Like some of the other plays on this list, Home - a kind of staged bildungsroman - chronicles the experiences of a character who enters an urban milieu and is buffeted by crime and economic woes and poor choices. What differentiates the play from a lot of serious issue-oriented theater is its sense of humor and its ultimately sunny outlook; this protagonist, when things are going poorly, merely hypothesizes that God must be "on vacation in Miami."

Charles Fuller's 1982 Pulitzer-Prize-winning A Soldier's Play, by contrast, doesn't have much humor, but it does do interesting things with genre, appropriating the conventions of a murder mystery to explore violent bigotry and internalized racism. With its use of flashbacks and multiple locations, Fuller's play is thoroughly cinematic, and it made an effortless leap to the screen in a film adaptation featuring Denzel Washington.

Before George C. Wolfe became one of the most celebrated and influential theatrical directors in the country, shepherding major works by other writers like Tony Kushner to the stage and running the Public Theatre, he wrote The Colored Museum, an exuberant and bitingly satirical series of sketches best remembered for "The Last Mama-On-The-Couch Play," an irreverent parody of A Raisin in the Sun.

There are few more towering figures in American theater than the playwright August Wilson. His ten-play oeuvre, The Pittsburgh Cycle, chronicles the twentieth-century black American experience decade by decade in plays that range from rambling kitchen-sink naturalism to magic realism while always maintaining a remarkable tonal unity. Probably the most famous of these plays is , which Denzel Washington turned into an award-winning film.

Encouraged in college to become a playwright by James Baldwin, Suzan-Lori Parks exploded onto the scene with early plays like The America Play, which established her as someone who writes for the stage with a grammar and orthography that are all her own. She explores about race and America and history by approximating a heightened version of Black English and telling unconventionally theatrical stories about characters with evocative names and symbolic resonance.

With two actors playing multiple roles, by Dael Orlandersmith explores how being dark-skinned or light-skinned influences its characters' experiences of the pressures exerted by race and class - and shapes their relationships with one another. Orlandersmith is currently in New York performing a new play of hers, Until the Flood, about the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

Lydia Diamond often writes about affluent African-Americans, in plays that typically open with congenial interactions among friends and colleagues until conflicts over issues like race and poverty boil to the surface. Check out her play .

And Passing Strange, an acclaimed musical by a playwright and performer who calls himself Stew, combines autobiography, allegorical drama and rock & roll into a highly entertaining mélange.

One of the most significant writers in the American theater today is Lynn Nottage, a prolific and eclectic playwright who's also the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama twice: in 2009 for Ruined, a riff on Brecht's Mother Courage that interrogates the human capacity for resilience and compromise amidst the unrelenting brutality of wartime in Congo; and in 2017 for Sweat, a portrait of working-class malaise in the 21 st-century American heartland.

The playwright Katori Hall has written a number of plays and won several awards, but thus far has attracted the most attention for her slyly metaphysical two-hander The Mountaintop, which imagines an interaction between Martin Luther King and a hotel housekeeper on the night before his assassination. Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett played the roles on Broadway, and the play helped initiate a conversation about theatrical representation of race when another theater produced the play with a white actor in the King role.

Thomas Bradshaw, meanwhile, is a provocateur, writing plays about violence, sexual aberrations, and racism that are designed to make the audience uncomfortable. His (possibly ironically titled) play Intimacy, about pornography, is no exception.

And then there's one of the most striking success stories of the recent American theater, the self-made writer/director/actor Tyler Perry. He went from writing, self-producing, and starring in his own plays at community theaters to making feature films and being named the highest paid person in entertainment by Forbes magazine. But his plays are where it all began, and several are available in their theatrical form on DVD from the library, including Diary of a Mad Black Woman, The Marriage Counselor, Madea's Big Happy Family, The Haves and the Have Nots, Neighbors From Hell, and Madea On the Run.

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Plays by African-American Playwrights | Toledo Lucas County Public Library

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For decades, African-American playwrights have pushed the American theater to embrace bold, daring and popular new forms and have, in the process, contributed some of the most enduring stories and characters in the American literary canon. The library has on its shelves an assortment of scripts from this robust tradition.

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February is Black History Month, and Broadway.com is spotlighting some of the contributions black artists have made to Broadway. Here are the power players, major events and groundbreaking shows.

1898 - First All-Black Show Produced at a Major House
The premiere of the one-act musical Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk, technically didn't take place in a theater. The extended after-show featured an all-black cast and took place on the roof garden of the Casino Theatre, a Broadway venue, in front of an exclusively white audience.

1903 - In Dahomey
The first full-length musical comedy to feature an all-black cast and writing team to play inside a major Broadway theater would come later. Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy, which satirized the "back to Africa" movement of the early 19th century, ran for 53 performances at the New York Theatre, going on to tour nationally and internationally. Unfortunately, this was also one of the many shows in which black actors appeared in blackface.

1920 - Charles Gilpin, the First African-American Honored by the Drama League
Charles Gilpin broke onto the scene as the lead in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones when the play premiered on Broadway. The Drama League named him as one of 10 people who impacted the American theater that year but didn't invite him to the awards dinner because of his race. After O'Neill led a protest for the League to do the right thing and invite Gilpin, the organization obliged.

1921 - Shuffle Along
Shuffle Along marked the first full-fledged Broadway musical with an all-black cast, playwright, composer and lyricist. The show was a hit, running for about 484 nights on Broadway, a record at the time, according to The New York Times. Shuffle recently came back into the mainstream when George C. Wolfe wrote and directed an adaptation that also detailed the backstage saga of the original's creation. The production featured Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Joshua Henry, Billy Porter, Adrienne Warren, Brandon Victor Dixon and more.

1935 - Porgy and Bess
George and Ira Gershwin penned this opera, featuring an all-black cast of classically trained singers. Even though it has been criticized for stereotyping African-Americans with depictions of drug abuse, poverty and prostitution, it has been revived on Broadway seven times, most recently in the 2012 Audra McDonald- and Norm Lewis-led production.

1950 - Juanita Hall, the First Black Performer to Win a Tony
Juanita Hall, who played Bloody Mary in the original 1949 production of South Pacific, was the first African-American performer to win a Tony Award. The actress has 12 other Broadway credits to her name, including Flower Drum Song, and she starred in the film versions of both musicals.

1959 - Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun Premieres on Broadway
Inspired by fellow African-American writer and Broadway playwright Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem" (also known as "A Dream Deferred"), Lorraine Hansberry's legendary play opened on Broadway in 1959. The story follows a black family at odds over how to transcend disenfranchisement and segregation in 1950s Chicago. The play has had two Broadway revivals and a musical adaptation, Raisin.

1967 - Pearl Bailey's All-Black Hello, Dolly!
In what might be seen as a radical casting move even today, in 1967, the entire Broadway cast of Hello, Dolly! turned over to welcome an all-black cast, led by actress and singer Pearl Bailey as Dolly Levi. The reviews for Bailey and the new cast were glowing, and the production ran for another two years. Bailey received a 1968 Special Tony Award for her performance.

1969 - James Earl Jones Makes Tony History
For his leading turn in The Great White Hope, James Earl Jones was awarded Best Actor in a Play at the Tony Awards, the first African-American winner in any play category. The acting legend is also one of the few artists to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Award, giving him the status of EGOT.

1975 - Geoffrey Holder Makes History with The Wiz
Geoffrey Holder was the first African-American director to win Best Director of a Musical, as well as the first to win Best Costume Design in a Musical. He won both trophies for The Wiz!, another seminal musical that featured an R&B/soul score and an all-black cast.

1984 - August Wilson's Broadway Debut
The playwright launched his Broadway career and legendary cycle of plays, beginning with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which is about a group of blues musicians in the 1920s. He would go on to make an enormous impact in American theater with his works chronicling the 20th-century African-American experience such as Fences and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, which have both received Broadway revivals. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, and his Jitney won Best Revival of a Play at the Tony Awards in 2017.

1996 - Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk
Director George C. Wolfe collaborated with the prodigious, young choreographer Savion Glover to bring the story of the black experience in America to vivid life onstage, from the days of slavery to the advent of hip-hop. The production, which showcased tap dance, won five Tony Awards, including trophies for Wolfe, Glover and featured actress Ann Duquesnay.

2002 - Suzan-Lori Parks W ins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Suzan-Lori Parks is the prolific playwright behind off-Broadway triumphs The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, In the Blood and the Public Theater's upcoming White Noise. The Broadway staging of her play Topdog/Underdog, directed by George C. Wolfe, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002, making her the first black woman to be honored. Fellow black playwright Lynn Nottage has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, for Ruined in 2009 and Sweat in 2017.

2002 - Whoopi Goldberg completes her EGOT
Whoopi Goldberg is the first and only black woman on the shortlist of EGOT achievers. She has an Emmy for the Hattie McDaniel documentary Beyond Tara, a Grammy for the recording of her 1986 Broadway solo show and an Oscar for her role in Ghost. After winning her first Tony in 2002 for producing Thoroughly Modern Millie, she completed her quadruple crown.

2014 - Audra McDonald Sets the Tony Awards Record
When Audra McDonald won the 2014 Best Leading Actress in a Play Tony for Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill, she set two records, becoming the first performer ever to win six Tony awards, and also the first to win in all four acting categories.

2016 - Four Acting Tony Categories, Four Black Winners
The revolutionary musical Hamilton swept the 2016 Tonys, including wins for three of its leads: Renée Elise Goldsberry, Leslie Odom Jr. and Daveed Diggs. Cynthia Erivo, the standout talent from that season's revival of The Color Purple, joined the all-black acting winners circle with a trophy for Best Leading Actress in a Musical.

2018 - George C. Wolfe Reigns as the Most Nominated African-American Theater Artist
Renowned writer-director George C. Wolfe has brought to Broadway works like Angels in America, Jelly's Last Jam and The Wild Party. He is the most Tony-nominated black theater artist, with 23 Tony nominations and five wins. He was most recently nominated for directing The Iceman Cometh in 2018.

2019 and Beyond - Continued Color-Blind and Color-Conscious Casting
There is still a long way to go toward racial equality, but strides have been made by black actors who have recently originated, replaced or gone on as an understudy as characters that have usually been perceived as white. Some wins for representation in the past few years include Norm Lewis as the Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera, Noma Dumezweni as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Nicolette Robinson as Jenna in Waitress, Joshua Henry as Billy Bigelow in Carousel, Aisha Jackson as Anna in Frozen, Michael Luwoye as Alexander Hamilton in Hamilton, Brittney Johnson as Glinda in Wicked and Christiani Pitts as Ann Darrow in King Kong.

Additional research by Caitlyn Gallip

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Celebrating Black History Month: Broadway Milestones You Ought to Know

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February is Black History Month, and Broadway.com is spotlighting some of the contributions black artists have made to Broadway. Here are the power players, major events and groundbreaking shows. 1898 - First All-Black Show Produced at a Major House The premiere of the one-act musical Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk, technically didn't take place in a theater.

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On Broadway, Black artists push for racial equity

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Most-influential black artists in
musical theater

List

Most-influential black artists in
musical theater

Compiled by Associate Professor of Sociology Paula Marie Seniors, author of "Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Culture of Uplift, Identity, and Politics in Black Musical Theater" (Ohio State University Press, 2009), winner of the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians.

Born in 1970, Audra McDonald is arguably the most well-known black theater talent of the 20th and 21st centuries. She has received multiple Tony, Drama Desk, and Drama League awards, among others, for her roles in such shows as "Carousel," "Master Class," "Ragtime," "A Raisin in the Sun," "110 in the Shade," "Porgy and Bess," and "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill."

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Virginia Tech University Relations, Marketing and Creative Services

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List: Most-influential black artists in musical theater | Virginia Tech Magazine

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Virginia Tech Magazine, the university's flagship publication, forges stronger relationships among alumni, donors, and friends of Virginia Tech. The magazine highlights the vibrancy of a university positioned on the leading edge of technology, service, learning, research, and scholarship and showcases the achievements of alumni, faculty and staff, and students.

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Ibram X. Kendi: This Is the Black Renaissance

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‘The Black Renaissance is stirring Black people to be themselves. Totally. Unapologetically. Freely.’

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Black women speakers from all over the world are often featured in The Eloquent Woman Index of famous speeches by women. Whether African, American or from elsewhere in the world, they make up close to 20 percent of the speeches we've collected and featured so far.

No shortages here: Check out the 29 famous speeches from the Index given by black women speakers, arranged in chronological order. It's our way of kicking off Black History Month:

1. Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech "Ain't I a Woman?" is oft-quoted, but has a disputed source, illustrating why it's often tough to find famous women's speeches. In this case, that happened because Truth could neither read nor write. That doesn't detract at all from her message about equality for all women of all races. Read Soujourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman" Speech: A Primary Source Investigation for more about the many versions of this speech, only one of which contains the most-quoted phrase.

2. Ida B. Wells's 1909 "This Awful Slaughter" busted the myth that women's safety was the reason lynchings were carried out, and used a mix of data and defiance to fight against the practice of mob killings of black men. Read the book To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells to learn more about her campaign.

3. Josephine Baker at the March on Washington shares the brief remarks of the lone woman to share the program with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and scores of other, male speakers. Those who thought of her as a notorious showgirl learned more about her self-enforced exile to France as a way of seeking racial equality.

4. Fannie Lou Hamer's 1964 convention committee testimony failed to gain her a seat at that convention, but succeeded in raising the visibility of violence against blacks attempting to register to vote. Four years later, she became an historic convention delegate. You can read more about her public speaking in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is.

5. Coretta Scott King's 1968 "10 Commandments on Vietnam" - a speech she gave in her husband's place, just weeks after his assassination - took scribbled notes found in his pockets and made them into a powerful call to action. Desert Rose: The Life and Legacy of Coretta Scott King is a recent biography.

6. Shirley Chisholm introduces the Equal Rights Amendment wasn't a first. This member of Congress was re-introducing the legislation, 40 years after it was first proposed-and did so in her usual fiery and forthright style.

7. Barbara Jordan's 1976 Democratic convention keynote broke barriers for women and for blacks in one speech, suggesting that "the American Dream need not be deferred." It's loaded with elegant rhetoric and is a wonderful listen, thanks to Jordan's vocalizing skills. A Private Woman in Public Spaces: Barbara Jordan's Speeches on Ethics, Public Religion, and Law takes a focused look at the speeches of one of America's most eloquent women.

8. Anita Hill's 1981 Senate testimony about Clarence Thomas disrupted the Senate confirmation hearings of the then-nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, leveling sexual harrassment allegations against him that ultimately did not prevent his appointment to the court. "It would have been more comfortable to remain silent," she said in this televised testimony that stunned viewers and brought harrassment into the open as an issue. In Speaking Truth to Power, she tells her story.

9. Maya Angelou's 1995 poem, "Phenomenal Woman," often delivered by her and others as a speech, summed up for me and many others what made this frequent speaker so special. Listen closely to her charming delivery.

10. Angelou's 2006 eulogy for Coretta Scott King might be any eulogy from one close friend for another, as Angelou tells stories about the civil rights icon that only a girlfriend would know. This is a lovely, simple and moving tribute.

11. Edwidge Danticat's 2007 testimony on death in detention gave the novelist a gripping real-life story to tell, about her uncle's treatment at the hands of U.S. immigration and customs officials when he was held in detention. It's moving, direct and powerful, just like her fictional writings. You can read more about this dramatic story in her book Brother, I'm Dying.

12. Rep. Gwen Moore's 2011 floor speech on abortion rights and family planning came during a debate about federal funding for family planning. She chose to use her status as a member of Congress to share a personal perspective as a former teenage mother.

13. Michelle Obama's 2011 speech to young African women leaders took place in a powerful setting, and used that visual reminder to call these young women to action. Michelle Obama: Speeches on Life, Love, and American Values collects speeches of our current First Lady, preserving the legacy of a frequent speaker.

14. Viola Davis's 2011 awards acceptance speech, "What keeps me in the business is hope," went far beyond the usual platitudes and confronted what it's like to be a black actress in the movie industry. An eloquent extemporaneous speech.

15. Chimamanda Adichie's "we should all be feminists," a 2012 TEDxEuston talk, has inspired pop icons and women and men around the world with its frank, funny, and fierce viewpoint.

16. Michelle Obama's 2012 Democratic National Convention speech follows a formula for memorable speeches recommended by President John F. Kennedy's speechwriter, Ted Sorensen. And it worked with today's audiences, garnering more than 28,000 tweets per second from those who watched it.

17. Viola Davis's 2012 commencement speech is titled "Go out and live!" It's a stunning example of what you can do with a tired speaking format, and is like no college commencement speech you've ever endured. Perhaps my favorite line: "The two most important days in your life are the day you were born, and the day you discover why you were born."

18. Myrlie Evers-Williams's invocation at President Obama's second inaugural in 2013 marked the first time the invocation at the ceremony was given by a woman, and by someone other than a member of the clergy. The widow of assassinated civil rights activist Medgar Evers summoned the spirits of the leaders of that movement to witness the day's proceedings. Read more about her story in her memoir Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be.

19. Gabourey Sidibe's speech at the 2014 Gloria Awards used an iconic photo of her aunt and Gloria Steinem to honor Steinem, and to talk about being confident despite how she's taunted because of her weight.

20. Michelle Obama's eulogy for Maya Angelou in 2014 echoed words from "Phenomenal Woman" and told how the poet inspired her as a child.

Come to my pre-conference workshop at the Spring Speechwriters and Business Communicators Conference in Cambridge, UK, this April. What goes into a TED-quality talk will help speakers, speechwriters and conference organizers understand how to craft and deliver a talk in the style of TED, whether you're getting ready for a TEDx conference or just a presentation in this popular style. Go to this link for more details on what's included, as well as a significant discount for readers of The Eloquent Woman. The workshop is on 15 April, and the conference is 16-17 April. Please join me!

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For Black History Month, 29 famous speeches by black women - Denise Graveline

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Black women speakers from all over the world are often featured in The Eloquent Woman Index of famous speeches by women. Whether African, American or from elsewhere in the world, they make up close to 20 percent of the speeches we've collected and featured so far.

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"Life is as hard on Broadway as it is in Blues-originating-land . . . The Brill Building Blues is just as hungry as the Mississippi Levee Blues," Langston Hughes wrote in his late essay "Jazz as Communication." This insistence on the expressive value of commercialized forms of American popular music may surprise those who think of Hughes primarily as a blues and jazz poet. It's undeniable that the rhythms, forms, and moods of African-American vernacular music pervade his work, but Hughes's ears were also open to the sounds that blew up to his beloved Harlem from Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, and the downtown vaudeville houses. Their impact is nowhere more apparent than in Simply Heavenly, the 1957 musical comedy for which Hughes wrote both book and lyrics-a sadly neglected production that illuminates the poet's long engagement with popular song.

It is unsurprising that Hughes, himself no singer or instrumentalist but gifted with a profoundly musical sensibility, would try his hand as a lyricist and librettist. Throughout his career, Hughes collaborated with a range of composers on freestanding songs, such as "America's Young Black Joe," a prideful paean to Joe Louis and other black athletes that doubled as an answer to Stephen Foster's lachrymose "Old Black Joe," and the satirical "Mad Scene from Woolworth's," included in Duke Ellington's revue Jump for Joy. He also penned operatic texts for German émigré composer Jan Meyerowitz and for William Grant Still's Haitian-themed Troubled Island, as well as words to Kurt Weill's music for the 1947 Broadway show Street Scene, which included "Lonely House," his best-known and most-sung single lyric by some distance.

By comparison, Simply Heavenly has fallen into relative obscurity, though the show ran on and off Broadway for the better part of a year, briefly in London, and in regional productions later in the decade. As dramatic writing, the work can hardly be called "lost." Its lyrics can be found in The Langston Hughes Reader, perennially in print, and in the University of Missouri's massive collected works. But musicals suffer on the page even more than straight plays, and this one had gone largely unheard until the recent appearance of not one but two recordings of its score. A 2003 revival at London's Young Vic resulted in both a West End commercial run and a cast recording ( First Night Records), which may in turn have inspired the U.K. specialty label Sepia to issue the original Broadway cast recording, out of print for decades, on CD for the first time last February.

Despite the show's postwar Harlem setting and all-black cast, Hughes and composer Dave Martin did not aim to revolutionize the American musical, either politically or aesthetically. Most numbers fulfill time-honored musical-theater functions. "Let's Ball Awhile" is a pretext for a lindy hop, while "When I'm in a Quiet Mood" is a comic-romantic duet for Melon and Miss Mamie, two squabbling "second leads." "Let Me Take You for a Ride," a sprightly come-on studded with then-contemporary pop-cultural references, is solidly commercial Broadway fare, no more or less:

Let me take you for a ride
Make your heartstrings hum like mad
Let me gaze into your eyes
While you make like Alan Ladd

"Let Me Take You For A Ride" - Anna English & Melvin Stewart (Sepia)

Such writing, deft but conventional, raises the suspicion that Simply Heavenly was a mere potboiler. Hughes's fame outstripped his fortune at this point in his career, and he privately described himself as a "literary sharecropper" in the 1940s and 1950s, collecting fees and advances for lecture appearances, children's books, and other occasional work that sapped the energy he might have devoted to more ambitious projects but enabled him to eat. His sarcastic January 1957 letter about the show to a confidante, Arna Bontemps, suggests a lack of serious intent: "What Broadway needs [is] a real good old-time colored singing and dancing HAPPY show, instead of all these sleepy white-orientated problems and half integrated watered down white-scored musicals."

* * *

Such comments, along with the show's own generic qualities, may explain its relative neglect. But where Hughes is concerned, the line between artistic and commercial production-like those between "blues poem" and "song lyric," and between authentic and synthetic black expression-is especially tricky to negotiate. Hughes valued accessibility more than most significant poets of his time, especially with respect to the ordinary black Americans he saw as both the wellspring of his writing and its core audience. He could be scathing about "watered down, white authored" appropriations of black-originated cultural forms. The speaker in the 1940 poem "Note on Commercial Theater" seems to express his views at that time with little mediation-though not without a touch of bluesy repetition:

You've taken my blues and gone-
You sing 'em on Broadway
And you sing 'em in Hollywood Bowl,
And you mixed 'em up with symphonies
And you fixed 'em
So they don't sound like me.
Yep, you done taken my blues and gone.

Later in the poem, he insists that:

[. . .] someday somebody'll
Stand up and talk about me,
And write about me-
Black and beautiful-
And sing about me,
And put on plays about me!
I reckon it'll be
Me myself!

In presenting ordinary and even "low-down" facets of contemporary Harlem life as matter-of-factly as he did in his poetry, Simply Heavenly marked a step toward Hughes's career-spanning goal of a theatrical culture in which black authors, himself included, could speak and sing in their own voices-and, not incidentally, reap the rewards of doing so.

Adapted from the so-called "Simple" stories, since 1942 a popular feature of his weekly column for the Chicago black newspaper The Defender, the show follows the exploits of fitfully employed machinist Jesse B. Semple (nicknamed "Simple") and his fellow patrons at Paddy's Bar. The plot follows Semple as he tries to secure a divorce from his first wife, estranged in Baltimore, and win the hand of his pure-hearted new love, Joyce, while also resisting the attentions of Zarita, the neighborhood vamp. In the song "(I'm Gonna Be) John Henry," Simple invokes the black hero of postindustrial folklore to steel himself for the Herculean task of saving five dollars a week-normally spent on nightlife-toward his divorce. The battle for Simple's wavering soul recalls, intentionally or not, the plot of the most significant "book" musical about black characters up to that time, 1940's Cabin in the Sky by Lynn Root, Vernon Duke, and John Latouche. Hughes disdained that white-authored work, with its ersatz rural Southern setting and folk-religious supernatural elements; Simple's heaven and hell, by contrast, are right there on Lenox Avenue, no devils or angels required.

In their original prose form, the Simple stories are comic dialogues that, often as not, serve as vehicles for sociopolitical comment. Simple's cynicism and gift for exaggeration contrasts with the more measured-and grammatically normative-responses of the stories' unnamed narrator, a bookish barroom acquaintance that is a slight caricature of the author. Both figures refract aspects of Hughes's sensibility: the narrator may chide his friend: "You always bring race into everything," or dryly comment, "Your thinking borders on the subversive," when Simple wonders what would become of the Jim Crow South if blacks had an atom bomb, but the barroom intellectual always lets his streetwise friend say his piece. Within this format, Hughes could satisfy both casual and radical readers by voicing the less ecumenical side of his views on racism and civil rights without openly subscribing to it.

On the stage, Simply Heavenly mutes much of the stories' social criticism; the Defender columns' recurring satire on Joyce's bourgeois aspirations, for example, is all but absent. What explicit political bite the play does retain is in the script rather than the songs, especially in two monologues closely based on Defender columns and tied only tenuously to the show's romantic plot. In one speech, newspaper reports of UFO sightings, all by whites, lead Simple to claim that ". . . they don't even let flying saucers fly over Harlem, just so black folks won't see them!" This paranoia-tinged claim leavens the more serious charge that "unless we commit murder, robbery or rape, or are being chased by a mob. . . . Negroes can't even get into the front page news no kind of way."

Flying Saucer Monologue - Melvin Stewart (Sepia)

A longer set piece, just before the show's finale, finds Simple taking military integration to its logical conclusion, imagining himself as a general in "World War III," in command of a none-too-willing white regiment. "Gentlemen of the Old South. . . . I'm willing to let bygones be bygones and forget how you failed to obey my orders in the old days, and right-faced when I told you left, 'cos you thought I was colored. . . . But I'll forget that because you are me, and I am you, and we are one." Unusually for musical theater recordings, which then and now cut dialogue to the bone, the 1957 cast album includes these speeches as "numbers" in their own right. As sour martial strains of "Dixie" and "Sewanee River" rise behind lead actor Melvyn Stewart's delivery of this "Mississippi Monologue," the complex ironies behind the tall-tale humor are unmistakable-and hardly the stuff of the "HAPPY colored show" Hughes described to Bontemps.

* * *

If this material seems dry and polemical for a Broadway show, well, there were the musical numbers, which were often magnificent. They added escape, affirmation, lament, complaint, and a challenge to the reduction of rhythm to clock-time. The show's best songs are distinctive, witty, and touching, combining Martin's idiomatic sense of melody and phrasing with Hughes's own predilection for "composed" urban blues over Southern "country" styles. "Did You Ever Hear the Blues?" opens with cleverly rhymed "pop" sections ("Did you ever hear the blues / on an old house-rent piano? / Did you ever hear the blues / like they play 'em in Savannah?"), which give way to more traditional blues stanzas ("Good morning, blues, good morning!") that exemplify what the earlier sections merely describe. In a way, the song is a formal inversion of W.C. Handy's venerable "St. Louis Blues," with its then-innovative hybrid of 12-bar verses and a contrasting 16-bar bridge.

Similarly, "Good Old Girl," assigned to salty, middle-aged Paddy's regular Miss Mamie, is Hughes's tribute to the female vaudeville "shouters" of the '20s and '30s-and, in particular, to the character's namesake Mamie Smith, whose 1920 disc of "Crazy Blues"/"It's Right Here for You" is generally accepted to be the first blues recording by an African-American. (Broadway's Miss Mamie, Claudia McNeil, was a cabaret veteran who later found fame in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, its title drawn from one of Hughes's most enduring lines.)

"Good Old Girl" - Claudia McNeil (Sepia)

"Did You Ever Hear the Blues" - Claudia McNeil & John Bouie (Sepia)

"Broken Strings" is the score's undiscovered gem. Its lyrics, in full:

I've got something to tell you, if it's news to you
If you ain't got five strings, let four strings do.

If you ain't got four, play on three
That is what the blues has taught to me.

If you ain't got three, then pick on two
That is what the blues can do to you.

If you got ain't two, then pluck on one.
If you got one, then hum it with none.

[hummed stanza]

That is what the blues has done, done, done
That is what the blues has done, done, done.

Set by Martin to a four-bar strophic melody even more compressed than most traditional blues forms, the song's simple form and vocabulary belie its elegant construction and pitiless "blues logic." The key image-really, the only image-is that of the singer's own accompanying instrument, which, as the song begins, is already a string short ("five") of a full complement. As the available means diminish, the singer responds by discovering new actions ("pick," "pluck," "hum") that fulfill his imperative toward expression; the inexorability of the song's movement is emphasized by the repetitive finality of "done, done, done."

On the 1957 recording, the song is sung by Brownie McGhee, who joined the show when it was moved to the 48th Street Playhouse from an uptown theater after a string of safety violations. (An amused Hughes told the Herald Tribune, "In Simple's case, the Fire Department kicked him right square into Broadway.") McGhee's background would satisfy any blues purist. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he took up music after a childhood bout with polio left him unfit for fieldwork; an uncle improvised McGhee's first instrument from a marshmallow tin. Later a part of the New York circle of left-leaning folk and blues musicians that also included Pete Seeger and Leadbelly, McGhee wasn't a Broadway neophyte: Along with harmonica player Sonny Terry, his longtime touring partner, he had been part of the original production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. At once earthy and polished, McGhee's performance of "Broken Strings" is audible evidence of Hughes's connection to "the blues line"-and of that lineage's ongoing commerce with other musical styles.

"Broken Strings" - Brownie McGhee (Sepia)

If more of Hughes and Martin's score had merged these streams this affectingly, Simply Heavenly would likely be better known today. The original production failed to generate the profitable run for which Hughes hoped, and none of its component songs took on a life outside the show. (The current reissue includes Claudia McNeil's "pop" vocal version of "Did You Ever Hear the Blues?," an unsuccessful bid for radio and jukebox play.) Tellingly, Hughes never worked in quite this vein again. Though Jesse B. Simple found a home in his prose into the 1960s, Hughes's late poetic works ( Ask Your Mama, The Panther and the Lash), partaking of the license of the time, treated political and social concerns with an outspokenness their author had not found possible since the '30s. Two late theatrical works, 1961's Black Nativity and 1964's Jericho-Jim Crow, took their musical cues from spirituals and gospel rather than the secular blues, with elements of folk-pageantry replacing "well-crafted" plot construction.

Those productions anticipated such later shows as The Gospel at Colonus and Your Arms Too Short to Box With God. But the legacy of Simply Heavenly is more difficult to discern. Black-themed musicals, such as Ossie Davis's Purlie! and the white-authored Hallelujah, Baby!, did appear in the '60s and '70s, but few if any attempted Hughes's wholesale fusion of Broadway conventions with blues and jazz traditions. When those traditions have been celebrated, it has most often been in revue-type shows such as Eubie! and Ain't Misbehavin', which mined the song catalogs of important African-American songwriters of times past; with its emphasis on up-tempo production numbers in what is by now a period style, even the London revival of Simply Heavenly has one foot in this subgenre.

Few recent writers have taken up Hughes's mantle, perhaps because his attempted compromise with the arguably assimilationist form of the Broadway musical has come to seem a less attractive prospect. A recent production like Passing Strange, by the iconoclastic black rock musician Stew, derives much of its energy from a disdain for show-tune norms too open to be called subversive. On the other hand, the tensions and ambitions that animated Simply Heavenly are clearly recognizable in another current Broadway production-Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes's Tony-winning In the Heights, which employs salsa and up-to-date Latin pop to explore and celebrate the authors' Dominican-American community. Life is as hard in Washington Heights, Hughes might well have agreed, as it ever was in Harlem.

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Langston Hughes and the Broadway Blues by... | Poetry Foundation

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"Life is as hard on Broadway as it is in Blues-originating-land . . . The Brill Building Blues is just as hungry as the Mississippi Levee Blues," Langston Hughes wrote in his late essay "Jazz as Communication."

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Elizabeth Taylor, Vincent Snyder & Nia Lewis - Black History Month

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We're all going a little stir crazy in quarantine missing the theater, but there is no shortage of amazing Black theatermakers to get to know during this time.

We asked Broadway Black founder Drew Shade to share some of his favorite Black playwrights with us, and he did not disappoint. Read more below to learn about the work of these artistic giants, and check out their plays ASAP!

Tarrell Alvin McCraney

Photographed by Justin Bettman

McCraney may be best known as the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of "Moonlight" based on his play "In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue," but he is also the mastermind behind such works as the Tony-nominated play "Choir Boy" (Manhattan Theatre Club) and "The Brother / Sister Plays" trilogy, which includes "The Brothers Size" (The Public Theater, Young Vic), "In The Red And Brown Water" (Alliance Theater, Young Vic), and "Marcus, or the Secret of Sweet" (American Conservatory Theatre).

Dominique Morriseau

Photographed by Jenny Graham

Morisseau penned the Tony-nominated book to the hit musical " Ain't Too Proud - The Life and Times of the Temptations " as well as nine plays. Among the most notable of those works are her three-play cycle "The Detroit Project" which includes "Skeleton Crew" (Atlantic Theater Company), "Paradise Blue" (Signature Theatre), and "Detroit '67" (Public Theater, Classical Theatre of Harlem and National Black Theater). Morisseau is also a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 2018.

August Wilson

Photographed by Chris Walker

It's nearly impossible to enumerate the contributions August Wilson made to American theatre, but his most herculean accomplishment is his series of ten plays "The Century Cycle," which depicts different aspects of the 20th century African-American experience. The play cycle, which includes household titles "Jitney," " Fences," and "The Piano Project," earned Wilson two Pulitzer prizes, one Tony Award, and countless other acknowledgements.

Donja R. Love

Photographed by Joseph Marzullo

Love is a Juilliard-trained, Afro-queer playwright who "writes specifically about Black and Queer folx, for Black and Queer folx." Love's most recent play to debut on the New York stage was "one in two," which was produced by The New Group. The equal parts dramatic and comedic play provides insight into the Black, Queer, HIV positive experience, and its title stems from the 2017 CDC statistic that 1 in 2 Black gay men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime.

Loy A. Webb

Photographed by Erin Hooley

Not only is Webb a playwright with such works as "The Light" (MCC Theater), and "His Shadow" (16th Street Theater) she's also an attorney and theater critic. "The Light" was nominated for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play by the Outer Critics Circle and was the recipient of the Jefferson Award for Best New Play.

Jordan E. Cooper

Photographed by Joseph Marzullo

Cooper is the award-winning playwright behind the Off-Broadway play "Ain't No Mo" which debuted at the Public Theater and starred Cooper himself. "Ain't No Mo" imagined a mass exodus of Black Americans escaping the racism of the United States on the aptly named African American Airlines Flight 1619.

Erika Dickerson-Despenza

Photo by Victory Gardens Theater

A Queer, feminist poet-turned-playwright and a Tow Playwright-in-Residence, Dickerson-Despenza has written several works about injustices faced by the black community, including "cullud wattah," which follows a family during the Flint, Michigan water contamination, and "[hieroglyph]," which follows a 13-year-old girl surviving the trauma post-Katrina.

George C Wolfe

Photographed by Erin Baiano

Wolfe is a playwright and two-time Tony Award-winning director with 20 Broadway credits. The multi-talented Wolfe was both director and writer for the book of "Jelly's Last Jam," director, producer and writer for "The Wild Party," and both director and writer for the book of "Shuffle Along."

Alice Childress

Photo from Amsterdam News

Known as "the only African-American woman to have written, produced, and published plays for four decades," Childress's more notable works include "Like One of the Family" and "A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich." Her 1952 revue "Gold Through the Trees" made her the first Black woman to have a play produced with Equity actors.

James Baldwin

Photographed by Ted Thai

Baldwin pioneered works that explored the intersectionality of race and sexuality in his mid-20th century novels, essays, and plays. Best known for his novels "Go Tell It on the Mountain" and "Giovanni's Room," Baldwin also wrote two plays "The Amen Corner" and "Blues for Mister Charlie." The former examines the role of the church in African American life and the latter is loosely based on the murder of Emmett Till. Baldwin's novel "If Beale Street Could Talk" was adapted in an Academy Award-winning film in 2018.

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We asked Broadway Black founder Drew Shade to share some of his favorite Black playwrights with us, and he did not disappoint. Read more below to learn about the work of these artistic giants, and check out their plays ASAP!

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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/101640/celebrating-black-history-month