Just back from an extended university loan, posters, costume sketches and set designs exemplary of African American stage design from the Library's Federal Theatre Project collection are on the road again, now for an exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
"This is very exciting because it is the first exhibition of African American stage design ever done. Most people think black stage design began with the Black Theater Movement in the 1950s, but it really began some 100 years ago. The 1930s items show a great deal of professional skill," said Barbara Stratyner, curator of exhibitions for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
The project is credited with giving blacks an entrée to professional theater work, which previously was largely closed to them by the unions, wrote John O'Connor and Lorraine Brown in Free, Adult, Uncensored: The Living History of the Federal Theatre Project.
Among the 12 items on display at the public library is a blue, brown and yellow silk screen poster announcing the 1938 staging of Haiti: A Dream of the Black Napoleon. The melodrama by New York Times writer William Du Bois is about black Haitian nationalists who turn Napoleon's soldiers back from the shores of their homeland, the first-ever black republic. The action focuses on a Frenchwoman who learns that her father is black and must choose allegiance to either kin or country.
"Unlike the conventional 'tragic mulatto' of the period, she is able to make a clear choice -- to stay on the island -- and survive," wrote O'Connor and Brown.
The New York exhibition also displays designs for Jack and the Beanstalk, which include a 2-by-10- foot loaf of french bread for the giant. The miniature version was depicted on paperboard in pen and ink and watercolor. Other designs depict a silver-bladed knife and a cream- colored cow with muted pastel spots.
There are seven costume designs for Androcles and the Lion, some with fabric swatches for the players' Roman garb. A second silk screen poster, announcing "A Negro Production of George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion," also is part of the exhibition.
The final element is a pencil and charcoal sketch of the set design for the one-act play The Long Voyage Home by Eugene O'Neill. The piece was one of four plays of the sea collectively titled SS Glencairn and staged at the Lafayette Theatre on Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Androcles and Haiti also were staged there.
The 12 items in the exhibition are intended to whet the appetites of New York Public Library patrons who might be interested in the overall collection newly available in the Music and Performing Arts reading room at the Library of Congress. Researchers wishing to explore further source documents will find a profusion of ancillary materials, including backstage interviews from Haiti and detailed production bulletins from the two children's plays and SS Glencairn.
"ONSTAGE: A Century of African American Stage Design" is on view through May 20 at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at 40 Lincoln Center Plaza.
