Theater and Ethnic Diversity

Early American Theater

There are records of Native American theatrical performances since European settlement in America in 1607. In 1640s Massachusetts, the Puritans wrote of similar indigenous ceremonial performances, which they moved to prohibit. Resident theater companies became commonplace by the end of the 18th century. They produced significant works of theater in cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. New York City's African Grove, founded by William Henry Brown and James Hewlett in 1821, was one of the first all-black theater companies in the United States.

After the Revolutionary War, the American theater first established its own unique aesthetic with blackface minstrelsy. From the 1830s to the 1910s, minstrelsy was the most popular and pervasive performance genre in the United States. The shows, which initially starred white performers in blackface, and then after the Civil War featured African American performers in the same types of roles, were composed of songs, dances, and slapstick comedic skits that parodied black culture. Its stock characters, including the mammy, the clever slave, the dandy, the bumbling soldier, the savage native, the Sambo, and the jezebel, remain influential in American comedies and dramas. Many of America's most popular early plays concerned the experiences of people of color. Dion Boucicault's melodrama about an ill-fated biracial woman, The Octoroon, debuted at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City in 1859. Furthermore, María Ruiz de Burton, the first Mexican American woman author to write in English, adapted Don Quixote for the stage in 1876.

Twentieth-Century Innovations

Immigration, and the contact with disparate cultures that it brings about, contributed to the diversification of the American theater in the 20th century. The Yiddish theater, which has its origins in the celebrations of the Jewish holiday Purim, was imported to the United States—specifically, the Lower East Side of Manhattan—by Ashkenazi Jews from central Europe in the second half of the 19th century. It was the Yiddish theater that launched the careers of influential theater practitioners and theorists Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, as well as animating the performance aesthetics of Fanny Brice, Mel Brooks, Molly Picon, and Barbra Streisand. Its conventions were instrumental in the development of vaudeville and musical theater. Folksbiene, the National Yiddish Theatre, was founded in New York City in 1915, and as of 2012 it was one of the oldest theater companies in continuous operation in the city.

The community theater movement of the 1910s accorded individual communities the opportunity to explore the peculiarities of their experiences through the theater. Two decades later, the Federal Theatre Project served a similar purpose. The first significant black theater performer in the United States was Charles Sidney Gilpin, an actor originally from Richmond, Virginia, who went on to play a number of leading roles on Broadway. Most notably, he originated the eponymous role in Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones in 1920. That same year, he became the first African American to be awarded the Drama League of New York's annual award for his contributions to theater in [Page 2068]the United States. Lynn Riggs's experiences as a Cherokee man were the subject of some of his plays in the 1920s; his 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs served as the source material for the musical Oklahoma!, adapted by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.

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