Josephine D Lee

August Wilson and the African-American odyssey

In this critical study of four plays by Pulitzer Prize-winner August Wilson-- Ma Raineys Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turners Come and Gone, and The Piano Lesson--Pereira show how Wilson uses the themes of separation, migration, and reunion to depict the physical and psychological journeys of African Americans in the 20th century.

The Chinese Other, 1850-1925: An Anthology of Plays, and: Asian American Culture on Stage: The History of the East West Players (review)

Dave Williams has rescued from obscurity several plays that testify to the history of the numerous legal, institutional, and social efforts to control Chinese access to the literal and imagined borders of the United States during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From short amateur vignettes to full-length professional works, each provides insight into the place of the Chinese immigrant in a changing American racial hierarchy and into the uses of the stage as a means of focusing and altering public opinion. Rife with infantile, demonic, and/or exotic characterizations, these plays serve as powerful reminders of how theatre articulates race through the language of distorted physicality (in stereotypes such as Bret Harte and Mark Twain’s Ah Sin, popular for his “grotesque gestures of roguish delight”) (31) or through spectacular Oriental fantasies (as embodied in the “splendid Chinese tent” of the Ravel family’s pantomime Kim—Ka! or the Misfortunes of Ventilator [1852]) (2).