The early drama of Eugene O'Neill, 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 O'Neill's dramatic text--changing scripts to omit offensive
epithets, inserting African American music and dance, or including
citations of Black internationalism--theater artists of color have used
O'Neill's dramatic 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 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, O'Neill's plays such as The Emperor Jones and All God's
Chillun Got Wings make ideal case studies because his work stimulated
extraordinary, and underappreciated, traffic between Broadway and
Harlem--between white and Black America. While it focuses on
investigating Broadway productions of O'Neill, the book also attends to
the vibrant transnational exchange in early to mid-20th century artistic
production. Anchored in archival research, Racing the Great White Way
recovers not only vital lost performance histories, but also the layered
contexts for performing bodies across the Black Atlantic and the
Circum-Atlantic.
