Federal Theatre Project - African American Theatre

African American Theatre

The Negro Theatre Project (NTP) was part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) and had units that were set up in cities throughout the United States. The units were located in four different geographical regions of the country. In the West, units were located in Seattle, Washington, and Los Angeles, California.In the East,units were located in New York City, New York, Boston, Massachusetts, Hartford, Connecticut, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Newark, New Jersey. In the South, there were units in Raleigh, North Carolina, Durham, North Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama. In the Midwest, units were located in Chicago, Illinois, Peoria, Illinois, and Cleveland, Ohio. The project provided employment and apprenticeships to black playwrights, directors, actors, and technicians. The project offered a much needed source of assistance for African American theatre from 1935 to 1939.

The New York Negro Unit was active and well known. It was located at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, and staged some 30 plays. The most popular production was the Haitian, or “voodoo,” Macbeth (1935), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play set in the Caribbean and directed by Orson Welles. Other plays included Frank Wilson’s folk drama Walk Together, Children (1936), which described the deportation of 100 African American children from the South to the North to work for low wages. Arna Bontemps and Countee Cullen’s The Conjur Man Dies (1936), was a farcical mystery that dramatized Rudolph Fisher’s mystery-melodrama. Also in 1936, J. Augustus Smith and Peter Morrell co-authored Turpentine, a social drama focusing on the injustice of Southern labor camps. George MacEntee's The Case of Philip Lawrence (1937) was a courtroom melodrama and Haiti (1938) by William DuBois, was a historical drama about overthrowing the Haitian government.

A lightly fictionalized version of the FTP's story is presented in the 1999 film Cradle Will Rock.