Cheryl Black

Looking White, Acting Black: Cast(e)ing Fredi Washington

In October 1926 a leading African-American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier , featured adjacent photographs of two young women with a provocative caption: “White Actresses Who Open with Robeson and Bledsoe on Broadway during Week.” The actresses featured were Lottice Howell, starring with Jules Bledsoe in the musical play Deep River , and Edith Warren, starring with Paul Robeson in the drama Black Boy . In reporting this latest bit of integrated casting, however, the Courier was wrong on two counts. First, they misidentified the photographs, identifying Howell as Warren and Warren as Howell; and second, they misidentified Warren, whose real name was Fredi Washington, as “white.” Washington (who dropped the stage name during previews) was, by self-identification, Negro, or, in the language of the Savannah official who recorded her birth in 1903, “colored.”

Dorothy Chansky, Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre

Kitchen Sink Realisms examines both iconic and now-obscure works of American drama focused on domesticity and domestic labour. Chansky’s research is both extensive and sharply focused, and the study is remarkable for its breadth and its depth, its originality, and the persuasiveness of its arguments.