CONCEPT FOR A PLAY

Part Two . The Nature of Performance

The Afrilan American Experience

Date

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1865-1877

1880

Event

African people first brought to New World as slaves by Spaniards. First African slaves in North America arrive in Virginia on a Dutch ship. slaves number 3.5million in the United states. about one-third the total population of slaveholding states.

Civil War.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in Confederate states. Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution, prohibiting slavery in the United States.

Reconstruction: Federal government is involved in governing former confederate states.

Beginning of Jim Crow legislation in the South, legalizing segregation and discrimination, including the loss of voting rights for black American citizens. The Jim Crow laws were part of the institutionalized oppression that shut off economic opportunity for southern African Americans. Migration of African Americans from rural South to urban North.

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blues. Wilson wanted ro put the life of the blues into a dramatic verbal forrn just as Bearden had created visual stories through paint and collage.

We begin our study of Joe Turner's Come and Gone by examining in this section the historical and cultural conrexrs of the play; in the follow- ing section we look at some of August Wilson,s sources. The historical and cultural contexts and Wilson's personal sources will help us to under- stand the w-orld of this particular play and at the same time provide insight inro the crearive pro- cess of the plal'wright in making theatre.

Theatre as History The theatre has always been a major repository of history. Some plays, such as Shakespeare,s histo- ries, interpret the lives and actions of actual his- torical figures-in Shakespeare's case, the kings who preceded Elizabeth I. Some plays feature legendary characters who q.,rnbolize the conflicts

and concerns of their own times. Greek tragedies are full of larger-than-life characters such as the mythological heroes who fought the tojan War.

By using a historical frame, August Wilson gives us something of the past and something of the present. In the case of Joe Tarner's Come and Gone, he gives us certain information about life for African Americans at the turn of the cenrury: the harshness of labor conditions in the South, from sharecropping to the chain gang; a sense of life on the road for a migrating people searching for a more fulfilling life; and the difficulties of remaking life yet once again, this time in north- ern cities eager for African American labor but resistant to sharing wealth and accepting cul- tural difference. Wilson also shows us individu- als engaged in a struggle to gain control oftheir own lives and to make connections with others that will sustain them. That stl-uggle, of course, continues today and includes all of us.

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