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HOME: THEN

Theatre and The Black Arts Movement The Vietnam War and Urban Decay Reception

HOME: NOW

Equity and the American Theatre How Will Contemporary Audiences Respond?

Home by Samm-Art Williams was first presented by the Negro Ensemble Company at the St. Marks Playhouse in December 1979. The show was a huge success and transferred to Broadway in 1980. Forty-four years later, Roundabout Theatre Company is reviving Home on Broadway. The history of the original production and the cultural context in which it was originally presented sheds light on how original audiences responded to the story and informs interpretation of the piece today.

HOME: THEN

Theatre and The Black Arts Movement

The Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) was one of many Black theatre companies founded in the 1960s, including the National Black Theatre and the New Federal Theatre. This proliferation grew out of the Black Arts Movement (the cultural arm of the Black Power Movement) which focused on themes of Black self-determination, culture, and political activism.

The NEC was founded in 1965 by Douglas Turner Ward and Robert Hooks. Its goal was to “create a theater concentrating primarily on themes of Black life.” In a 1980 article by the New Amsterdam News, a Black-owned newspaper in Harlem, the NEC was described as “the major conduit through which a number of Afro-American artists, writers and technicians have filtered through to B’way, H’wood and Tubecity.”

The National Black Theatre was founded in 1968 by dancer-actor Barbara Ann Teer. Still active today, it takes “a multidisciplinary theatrical approach as a means to center, humanize, and heal Black communities through the power of unapologetic Black storytelling.”  

The New Federal Theatre (NFT), established in 1970 by Woodie King Jr, sought to be a “community-based theater that promoted the work of writers from diverse ethnic backgrounds” with a particular focus on Black writers. Notably, Ntozake Shange presented for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf with the support of the NFT before its 1976 Broadway transfer.

In 1982, Woodie King Jr. told The New York Times that while the theatre’s programming featured multiracial themes and casts, he had difficulty attracting white audiences. The NEC faced a similar issue; typically, shows at the NEC would attract an audience that was 80% Black and 20% white. Speaking about Black theatres’ audiences, writer and Black Arts Movement leader Amiri Baraka offered his reasoning, “Most whites can’t bear stories that don’t have to do with themselves.” On the other hand, NEC co-founder Douglas Turner Ward saw no reason for this discrepancy. He told The New York Times:

We are not presenting plays whose themes are exclusively intended for blacks. The plays of Sean O'Casey are set in Ireland, but has anyone ever suggested those plays are intended for the enjoyment of only the Irish? Of course not. Why shouldn't the same be true of a black play?

While these organizations were guided by differing ethos, at their core they were motivated by the same things. Their existence grew out of a need for their stories to be seen on stage; it was a need that was caused and exacerbated by societal issues.

The Vietnam War and Urban Decay

In Home the protagonist, Cephus Miles, is imprisoned for refusing to serve after being drafted during the Vietnam War, a conflict that lasted from 1954 – 1975. In the years preceding Home’s production, the Vietnam War dominated the national discourse, and the rise of television made it “the first television war.” Average Americans watched the carnage from their homes in nightly news reports. The nation was embroiled in debates surrounding communism, imperialism, patriotism, military force, and the draft. Anti-war activists believed the draft was designed to send the poorest and most oppressed American men to die or be permanently disabled in a fight they had no place in.  In a 2009 interview with Signature Theatre, Williams described the culture that his play was originally produced in, “Vietnam...was still on the minds of people in America. Everything was Vietnam, the war, anti-war demonstrations, etc.” Everyone in Home’s original audience likely knew someone personally affected by the Vietnam War and had strong feelings about the topic.

The Vietnam War was just one theme contemporary to the times that the play addressed. In Home, Cephus moves from his small Southern town to a big, northern city in the early 1970s. New York City was experiencing urban decay. A bad economy, robust social programs (including a tuition-free CUNY system), loss of manufacturing and industry, and the flight of the mostly white middle class to the suburbs had rendered the city unable to pay its bills. To avoid bankruptcy, city services were cut dramatically, and the physical infrastructure of the city decayed. Poor communities suffered the brunt of the consequences of these cuts. For example, as reported by Jody Avrigan on the website FiveThirtyEight, “Between 1970 and 1980, seven census tracts in the Bronx lost more than 97 percent of their buildings to fire and abandonment. Forty-four tracts lost more than half.”

Reception

When Home opened at the St. Marks Playhouse in December of 1979, it was booked for only two weeks. However, the press began to show enthusiasm for “this celebration of rural life – and of life itself,” as Carol Lawson described it in The New York Times on March 14, 1980. The NEC decided to bring it back for a few more weeks. Later that year, the producing forces of Elizabeth I. McCann and Nelle Nugent partnered with Gerald S. Krone (the administrative director of the NEC) to have Home join the 64 new productions that played on a Broadway stage that year.

The Broadway premiere of Home was a smashing success. The play was nominated for a Tony Award® for Best Play, a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play, an Outer Critics Circle Award, an NAACP Image Award, and the North Carolina Governor’s Award.

HOME: NOW

Equity and the American Theatre

While Home was able to find success beyond its beginnings with the NEC, it was only one of very few Black stories reaching Broadway stages. In recent years, amidst a national conversation on race, the American theatre industry has been called to face its history of inequity and exclusionary practices. On June 8th, 2020 “We See You White American Theatre” (WSYWAT) an alliance of arts workers, all of whom are people of color, launched a “crusade against the racism and erasure pervasive in American theatre.” WSYWAT published a manifesto that asked for “land acknowledgment practices to be ingrained in the rehearsal process; design teams to be composed of more than 50 percent creatives of color; and Actors Equity Association, the labor union representing live performers and stage managers, to provide mandatory anti-racism training for its 50,000-plus members.”

In 2021, Roundabout Theatre Company launched the Refocus Project, with the aim of shining “a spotlight on the plays and playwrights that were left behind by history, not because of their merits but because of their identities.” The first year of the Refocus Project featured staged readings of five plays written by 20th century Black playwrights. Home was one of the plays selected.

In a 2022 article in American Theatre Magazine, playwrights Mansa Ra and Dave Harris, who both had shows opening at Roundabout, discussed the company’s production history and equity practices. “When I read the We See You White American Theater demands,” Ra said, “I had a realization: Roundabout does none of this.” Ra stated. Earlier in the article Ra said: “I was talking to a mentor early in my career, and I was telling her, ‘I’m really excited about a reading coming up at the Roundabout Theatre.’ And she said, ‘Oh my God, that’s amazing—I didn’t know they did anything other than white plays.’” To which Harris replied, “I had an interesting realization with Miranda Haymon the other day: I voice-memoed them and was like, ‘I think these are the first two plays at Roundabout that are about Black people in the 21st century.’ Which is not a judgment specifically on Roundabout; the American theatre loves old-school Black people.”

Ra and Harris’s conversation continues the conversation Ward, King, and their contemporaries engaged in in the early 1980s. How do we create a theatre industry that reflects, uplifts, and empowers artists and audiences of color, and shows the power of those stories to those of all backgrounds?

How will contemporary audiences respond?

There are many differences between the world today and the world of Home’s original audiences. However, much is the same. The cries from anti-war protestors in New York City streets regarding the Vietnam War sound like the cries of the protestors today fighting for peace in the Middle East. Urban decay has been replaced by gentrification, though the city struggles to provide access to shelter and treatment for the unhoused. There remains a heavy demand for theatre that represents the lives and experiences of the global majority in a complete and complex way.

To audiences carrying the memories of a controversial war and confronting the daily decline of their city, this play offered a respite; it relishes and celebrates the human spirit and the capacity for change. How will Home resonate with audiences in 2024? It’s likely to offer the same respite. In his 2009 interview with Signature Theatre, Williams spoke about the universal resonance of the play:

[I didn’t say] ‘Now I’m going to write a play that’s...going to transcend time and 400 years from now will still be proper and appropriate.’ I didn’t think about all those things... There are certain things that your heart just leads you to, and I guess this is one of those things...it seems to be quite timeless. And I hope that it continues to be so.

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