Rachel (play)

Rachel is a play that was written in 1916 by African American teacher, playwright and poet Angelina Weld Grimké (February 27, 1880 – June 10, 1958). Grimké submitted the play to the Drama Committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). For the first production of the play the program read: "This is the first attempt to use the stage for race propaganda in order to enlighten the American people relative to the lamentable condition of the millions of Colored citizens in this free republic.".^[1]

Characters

• Mrs Mary Loving, a widow
• Rachel Loving, her daughter
• Thomas Loving, her son
• Jimmy Mason, a small boy
• John Strong, a friend of the family
• Mrs. Lane, a caller
• Ethel Lane, her daughter
• Mary
• Nancy
• Edith
• Jenny
• Louise
• Martha
• little friends of Rachel

Plot summary

Originally titled Blessed are the Barren, this three-act play depicts an educated and sensitive young woman who comes into an understanding of the realities of American racism. Eventually she experiences acute melancholia because of her new understanding. In Act One it is clear that her love for children inspires a deep desire to someday carry her own. She proceeds to fill her mother's house with little brown and black children, whom she lovingly tends to. Her mother reveals to her and her brother the fact that her father and another brother were lynched ten year earlier. In the Acts that follow, Rachel learns of the racism the young children she loves have been made to endure in their school and resolves to never have children. In so doing, she must ultimately reject the love of her brother friend and the man who courts her and that she loves John Strong.

Production history

Rachel was first performed at Myrtill Miner Normal School (a teacher's college) in Washington, DC., by the National Guy Players under the auspices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. From its status as a work in progress years earlier through this production, the white New York critic, playwright, producer and member of the Board of Directors of the NAACP John Garrett Underhill guided Grimké. It ran from March 3, 1916 to March 4, 1916.^[1]

Approximately a year later, the play was restaged at the experimental and community theater the Neighborhood Playhouse in the Lower East Side of New York. The New York production maintained most of the actors from the D.C. production and was arranged with the aid of John Underhill and the NAACP. It opened on April 25, 1917.^[1]

One month later, May 24, 1917, at the urging of Maud Cuney-Hare, the prominent musician, writer, and daughter of the black leader, Norris Wright Cuney, the play was performed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Brattle Hall, the auditorium of the Cambridge Social Union. A local church, Saint Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, sponsored the performance, given by amateur actors.^[1]

In 1924, The Colored Branch of the Young Men's Christian Association staged Rachel in New Castle, PA.^[2]

Rachel was produced by Spelman College's Department of Drama and Dance in Atlanta, GA, in 1991.

Rachel receieved its European premiere at the Finborough Theatre, London, in 2014.

Criticism

Patricia R. Schroeder argued that like Mary Burrill, Angelina Weld Grimké's anti-lynching drama relied upon naturalistic settings, vernacular language in the hopes "to use realism's mimetic power to question stereotypes and illustrate social injustice." ^[3] Similarly, Judith L. Stephens has argued that the recourse to realism in anti-lynching plays illustrated the graphic nature of the act and its pervasive influence in everyday life.^[4] Will Harris offers an interpretation of Grimké's realism highlighting its move towards a liberative racial and sexual politics: "While dramatizing the plight of their race, as a means of both raising a black racial consciousness and appealing to a possible white audience, early black women playwrights also formulated dramatic strategies which enabled them to stage substantive, independent African American female presences, and thus propose their sexual equality."^[5]

While some critics focus on the realism in Grimké's play, other find the extreme sentimentality more akin to the genre of melodrama. Grimké's biographer Gloria T. Hull notes that Rachel comes across as extreme and thus "too sensitive, too good, too sweet––almost saccharine." ^[6]

David Krasner published a critical reading of the play Rachel by way of Walter Benjamin in his book on the Harlem Renaissance "A Beautiful Pageant." In it he argues that Rachel is neither realistic nor symbolic, and in its sentimentality both mourning and allegory pervade. The play exceeds realism and relies upon allegory because in its ambiguities and contradictions, "allegory has the power to express the amorphous aesthetic of lynching's effect on a sensitive and overwrought character."^[7]

References

1. Robert J. Fehrenbach, "An Early Twentieth-Century Problem Play of Life in Black America: Angelina Grimké's Rachel (1916)" in Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and Contemporary Literary Renaissance, edited by Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLughlin (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
2. Black Drama, Alexander Street Press: http://solomon.bldr.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/bldr/productionidx.pl?prod_code=PR001058&showfullrecord=on.
3. Patricia R. Schroeder, The Feminist possibilities of Dramatic Realism (Madison Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 112.
4. Judith L. Stephens, "Anti-lynching Plays by African American Women: Race, Gender and Social Protest in America," African American Review 26.2 (Summer, 1992), 332.
5. Will Harris, "Early Black Women Playwrights and the Dual Liberation Motif," African American Review 28.2 (Summer, 1994), 205.
6. Gloria Hull, Color Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 123.
7. Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant, 111.