THE FIRST MULTICULURALIST

William Brown’s integrationist Theatres forged a progressive agenda in the New World

By Carlyle Brown

WHITE PEOPLE DO NOT KNOW HOW TO BEHAVE AT

ENTERTAINMENTS DESIGNED FOR LADIES & GENTLEMEN OF COLOUR

William Brown’s African and American Theater

By Marvin McAllister

The University of North Carolina Press / Chapel Hill and London

239pp,

Despite its outrageous title, Virginia-based historian Marvin McAllister’s White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour is a surprisingly thoughtful book. It is a comprehensive study that takes us to the epicenter of African-American theatre-to its roots and early beginnings in 19^th century New York, where it was spawned from the activities of an extraordinary freeman of color named William Brown.

Brown is a character in my 1993 history play, The African Company Presents Richard III. I imagined him through my research, and even historians have remarked on how well my play had captured the period. I thought that I knew William Brown as no one could-but reading McAllister’s bold new book, I realized that I hardly knew him at all. How could I not help but feel a strong identification with Brown? We were, after all, two African-American theatre artists sharing identical surnames nearly 200 years apart, acting out of the same impulses and struggling with the same issues-issues with their roots in the history that McAllister’s book reconstructs and then deconstructs.

The setting for the actual events of William Brown’s theatrical enterprises was early New York City in the years between 1821 and 1823. The city was a teaming seaport that surpassed Liverpool as the chief port in the world for capitalizing and outfitting the international slave trade. The northern limit of the City was Canal Street: Greenwich Village was a country escape, a coach ride away through the forest. In 1816 the American Colonization Society had been formed to eliminate the problem of free blacks in American life by deporting them back to Africa. Free Negroes, too numerous to deport, protested against the Society’s stark racial inequities, vowing never to abandon their brethren in slavery.

Elsewhere in the new nation-particularly in the American South, where the country’s great agricultural wealth was concentrated and where black slaves greatly out numbered whites- the atmosphere was apprehensive and fearful. After the fall of Toussaint L’ Ouverture, the Hatian general who had defeated Napoleon’s army, France was inspired to sell its Louisiana Territories to the United States. And, with the Louisiana Purchase the American Congress, in the form of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, began its long, partisan battles over that evil necessity which in 40 years time would give shape to the Civil War.

This was the atmosphere in which William Brown’s African and American theater experienced its rise and fall. In a three-year span, Brown produced a broad variety of theatrical events under the various banners of the African Grove, the Minor Theatre, The American Theatre and the African Company. He mounted Eurocentric plays like Shakespeare’s Richard III and Othello; William Moncrieff’s contemporary satire Tom and Jerry: or Life in London; the Indian drama Pizarro by Richard Sheridan, and slave insurrection plays such as Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack and his own The Drama of King Shotaway, which is regarded as the first play authored by an African-American. He even produced new works by a Native-born playwright-the Indian drama She Would Be a Soldier; or The Plains of Chippew- and the gothic melodrama Fortress of Sorrento written by his nemesis and most ardent critic Mordecai Noah. As editor of the National Advocate and sheriff of the City of New York, Noah would become the principal architect of the demise of Brown’s theatrical enterprise.

Brown’s productions, like his world were cross-cultural and transracial. His audience was integrated; white musicians were included in his ensembles, and there is even a white actor, known only as Mr. Smith, who played the role of “the brutalizing man” in Tom and Jerry. Brown became perhaps America’s first multi-culturalist in a new nation determined to define itself as a white men’s country-and he did so half a dozen years before slavery would be abolished in New York State in 1827.

Like many early Americans, Brown, a free man of color and a retired ship’s steward, was a recent arrival. He was emblematic of a large spectrum of people from different language, cultural and ethnic groups who immigrated to America in chains. Being forcefully deprived of the knowledge and practices of their former cultures for the sake of social control, they had in common only the things that were forced upon them – the distinction of their skin color, the condition of slavery and a new language, English. The displaced Africans of that time were a cultural-less people who were making culture in a world where culture was denied them. We know now that they were not just re-making an African culture or even an African-American culture- they were creating the most visible and essential forms of an original American culture. They were actors in the act of becoming, actors in the most heroic kind of story where the heroes and the heroines shatter a void to create something completely new and enduring.

Many of the new Euro-Americans had also been outcasts, second sons without hope of inheritance, debtors, bondservants, criminals, people politically and religiously persecuted. This uncommonly disparate group united and defined themselves not so much by who they were or what they would become, but by what they were not- they were not Europeans, not Indians, and not Negroes.

At the same time and within a stones throw of the place where we last hear of the existence of Brown’s theatrical enterprises, a white actor named Daddy Jim Rice was arriving late for a performance at a New York theatre. Outside the theatre was a ragged, cripple black boy, who, with a bent and broken jig, entertained passers-by for the coins they threw at his feet. Jim Rice borrowed the black boys garments, put boot black on his face and imitated the boy on the stage inside. Rice was an instant hit, and on that night racism as we know it was born. The boy’s name became the title of a song and the description of a condition – “Jim Crow”- and the courageous legacy of an oppressed people was transformed into a comic entertainment for a white nation’s amusement.

Meanwhile, Brown’s denuded progressivism was lost, and there would not be a reemergence of an original African-American theatre for more than another 100 years. The battle that is Brown’s legacy started all over again with the appearance in 1959 of Lorraine Hansberry’s seminal play, which took up Langston Hughes’s poetic question (“What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”) It is a legacy with which we are still struggling and striving.

Marvin McAllister’s book about Brown and his formative era speaks to the future as it links us to the past. He writes, “If we decide to revisit and expand our notions of what ‘American’ means and to discard the defensive position that certain cultures can be owned, authenticated, or protected, or that certain populations must remain fixed or essentialized, we can recover Brown’s legacy. And if we rediscover his triracial, multiethnic, transcultural performative and managerial practices, more contemporary theater practitioners can cultivate expansive institutions that actively attract and honestly represent an entire nation.”

Carlyle Brown

From:

American Theatre Magazine

March 2004

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