Review: Clifford Mason's Macbeth in Harlem

Reviewed by Kristen Wright

Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun
By Clifford Mason
Rutgers University Press, 2020
246 pages

Clifford Mason’s Macbeth in Harlem traces how African-American theater artists shaped theater in the United States, beginning in the early 19th century and ending in the mid-20th century. Mason reveals how events gave rise to different Black performers and movements, beginning with Harlem’s particular contributions to Broadway and concluding with a discussion of the post-World War II conditions that gave rise to Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in The Sun. As a scholar primarily of 20th and 21st century African-American theater, I found Mason’s text to be useful for contextualizing later developments in African-American theater history.

I was very intrigued by Mason’s use of primary sources, most notably as he charts the complicated arc of Ira Aldridge’s career. Aldridge, a great 19th century actor, is often spoken of as a man who overcame antiblackness in the US theater by becoming a European sensation. However, Mason complicates this tale through a close reading of British reviews that were written throughout Aldridge’s career. After he left the United States, Aldridge encountered equally racist and cruel critics while performing in London’s West End, which relegated him to performing in smaller English theaters and eventually, to Central and Eastern Europe, where he was more warmly received. It was not until the very end of his life that Aldridge received a tepid review of his performance of a show on the West End, which was even still more of a concession of his endurance and persistence as an actor than an acknowledgement of his great talent.

Mason’s voice shines bright and clear throughout, especially as he discusses the indignities that Black actors endured just to perform live theater. Despite the barriers that Aldridge experienced in Europe, he was still able to do more professionally than any other Black actor stateside. Mason notes that the years between the “death of the African Grove” theater company in antebellum New York City (which pushed Aldridge abroad) and the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin “produced nothing of consequence for the Black man in American theater”. Most of Mason’s subjects are male; Black women and gender-nonconforming actors are discussed more sparingly. While, of course, it is obvious that misogynoir in the theater foreclosed opportunities for Black women pre-1950, scholars like Daphne Brooks and Jayna Brown have discussed their experiences while covering similar chronological ground.

Mason also offers the provocative assertion that “the true romance of America was the romance of the fugitive slave.” He contrasts the slave narrative with other sentimental US tales, including the displacement of Indigenous people, the “New England character” of Emerson and Hawthorne, or the “Virginia plantocracy” of Thackeray. Yet, despite positioning these examples as four discrete modes of storytelling, one might argue that all of these tales are connected. Each tells a story of displacement, enslavement, and violence, though it is the “romance of the fugitive slave” that centers the Black subject.

Mason richly notes that this “romance” spans a number of forms, beginning with the “autobiographical sketches” of enslaved people escaping to freedom in the night. These sketches led to a new “form” called the “slave narrative,” but there was also form within form, as these narratives encompassed songs, novels, memoirs, and plays (and sometimes all of the above). Despite these creative innovations, Mason asserts that Black people could not become “cultural animal(s).” Yet they have always created culture, even if it was not recognized as such. Black people do not need white affirmation to become “cultural animals,” or individuals who consume and create art.

Mason’s discussion of white performers in blackface is also fascinating. He describes the construction of the “coon,” in which actors and audience “were in on a private ’joke’ that you one had to be American to appreciate – making fun of the nigger.” There is a silent “white” that can be placed before “American,” a silent rapport that extended beyond the text and gesture of the performance in unspoken communication between the performer wearing the mask of Blackness, and the unmasked audience, based of course in turning Black Americans into a punchline. Yet, there is a parasitism that precedes this comic moment. Mason argues that because Black people were not initially able to view and participate in minstrel shows, blackface performers, “through their own prejudice… cut themselves off from the source of their theft.” This discussion of the relationship between blackface performers and Black people recalls Eric Lott’s Love and Theft, in which the relationship between pleasure and revulsion in minstrelsy is explored.

One can find echoes of blackface minstrelsy today in white Instagram models who wear foundation several shades too dark and wear their hair in cornrows to appear Black-adjacent. Or in the recent case of Jessica Krug, the former George Washington University professor who assumed multiple Black identities throughout her career. This cosplay is an acknowledgement of the cultural richness of Blackness, yet the theft is a gesture of white supremacy. And the theft fails not because it is morally wrong — many of these thefts were allowed to persist for years — but because the racial imposter lacks the embodied experience of Blackness. Likewise, Mason argues that blackface minstrelsy fails because the white performer’s prejudice keeps them from the Black people who are the source of their ideas.

Mason returns to his discussion of sentiment while debating the limits of the gesture. He argues that “literature in general, and the drama in particular, is a form of magic.” Furthermore, “it releases the parts of our other mind that we only use under special circumstances.” Mason is calling on the mobilization of affect that appears when a white audience member watches or reads a slave narrative. Yet, this compassion — this sympathy for the plight of the enslaved — does not extend beyond the theater walls.

But despite his previous assertion that Black theater artists were not allowed to be “cultural animals,” Black playwrights still managed to mock white artist with the same relish with which they were discussed. Mason argues that William Wells Brown’s The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom was a parody of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I found this comparison illuminating. Like his complication of Ira Aldridge’s career arc, Mason expands upon standard readings of Brown’s play. It is not only an early work African-American drama, but the work of a formerly enslaved Black man who chose to upend a white woman’s saccharine depiction of enslavement. May we all continue to revise and reevaluate the historical record.

Kristen Wright is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities Scholars Program at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities. She previously earned a PhD and MA in Africana Studies from Cornell University, an MA in African-American Studies from Columbia University, and a BA in Theater Studies and Political Science from Yale College.