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Description of  Racing the Great White Way: Black Performance, Eugene O Neill, and the Transformation of Broadway (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance)

047205578X epub The early drama of Eugene ONeill, with its emphasis on racial themes and conflicts, opened up extraordinary opportunities for Black performers to challenge racist structures in modern theater and cinema. By adapting ONeills dramatic writingchanging scripts to omit offensive epithets, inserting African American music and dance, or including citations of Black internationalism theater artists of color have used ONeills texts to raze barriers in American and transatlantic theater. Challenging the widely accepted idea that Broadway was the white-hot creative engine of U.S. theater during the early 20th century, author Katie N. Johnson reveals a far more complex system of exchanges between the Broadway establishment and a vibrant Black theater scene in New York and beyond to chart a new history of American and transnational theater. In spite of their dichotomous (and at times problematic) representation of Blackness, ONeills plays such as Read more