Staging ethnicity in contemporary American drama.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the negotiation of ethnic and racial roles in works by selected contemporary playwrights of color: Ntozake Shange, David Henry Hwang, Luis Valdez, August Wilson, Philip Kan Gotanda, Maria Irene Fornes, and Anna Deavere Smith. These writers both inherit and participate in the complex, intertwined histories of ethnicity and the American theater. On the one hand, the theater has contributed to the socialization and Americanization of immigrant audiences; yet the theater has also produced and capitalized upon acts of racial and ethnic stereotyping throughout much of its history. Contemporary American drama highlights two major changes in the history of institutionalized theater: the development of minority-authored drama as a challenge to the depiction of cultural stereotypes, and the growth of a diversified theatrical marketplace not centered on Broadway. Moving from a consideration of Broadway to regional theater to Off-Off Broadway, the dissertation argues that the institutional sites of theater play a crucial role in the staging of ethnicity. The study furthermore is comparative across ethnic lines in an effort to disrupt the familiar categories of ethnic identity and to critique the black/white racial paradigm that tends to dominate the scholarship on race and ethnicity. Chapter One provides a historical overview of the ethnic subject in American theater; Chapter Two focuses on the work of Ntozake Shange, a key figure in the mainstreaming of contemporary minority discourse; Chapter Three examines how David Henry Hwang and Luis Valdez negotiate the commercial market of Broadway; Chapter Four uses August Wilson and Philip Gotanda to explore the politics of family in regional theater; and Chapter Five discusses how Maria Irene Fornes and Anna Deavere Smith destabilize the terms of identity politics by working in non-traditional venues and performance styles. The argument turns on the premise that ethnicities are neither authentic nor fake, but are dynamic processes of negotiation that theatrical performances both embody and transform.