This paper will examine, in some depth, performances of five O’Neill plays: All God ’s Chillun Got Wings (1924 and 2001), S. S.  Glencairn (1937), Mourning Becomes Electra (1944), The Iceman Cometh (1973) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1981-82). It will parenthetically discuss other O’Neill productions. I selected these five plays because, in some circles, they may be the best known ones where African­American actors played non-traditional roles. I define non-traditional not merely as black actors (or other underrepresented racial groups) playing roles traditionally cast with Caucasian actors, but also roles that debunk the myth of racial stereotyping. While O’Neill always described the appearance of his characters in minute detail in his famous stage directions, many African­American actors have attempted to portray the essence, if not the surface description, of those roles. Those attempts have sparked contentious reactions and vehement debate.

I would wager that audiences and critics are thoroughly acquainted with O’Neill plays in which black actors play heavily stereotyped black characters. Charles Sidney Gilpin and Paul Robeson are the best known early African­American actors who have played some of O’Neill’s traditional black characters. They played to generally favorable reviews, which in some instances, were in the superlative. In fact, President Warren G. Harding invited Gilpin to the White House in 1921. Conversely, on tour with The Emperor Jones, the Ku Klux Klan met Gilpin in Richmond to protest his traveling with an otherwise white troupe. The actor played Brutus Jones 1,500 times before his death. Robeson played the role, as well, to highly laudatory reviews, as well as to the enthusiastic endorsement of O’Neill. In 1936, Rex Ingram, following his success in Green Pastures, played The Emperor Jones in Suffern, New York, and received ten curtain calls after the performance. The interpretations of Gilpin, Robeson and Ingram may be the last of virtually unanimous critical and audience approval of black actors’ portrayals of the works of Eugene O’Neill. These actors were praised for playing a tyrannical, frightened black brute who speaks in dialect.

My research on critical response and audience reception revealed more resistance than acceptance of African-American actors in non-traditional roles throughout most of the twentieth century. Since O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings exploded on the stage of the Provincetown Playhouse in 1924, with Paul Robeson as the black lawyer, Jim Harris, hopelessly in love with the demented and white Ella, played by Mary Blair, the furor surrounding African-American actors playing non-traditional roles has barely subsided. O’Neill certainly wrote the male leading role for a black actor to play, but not as audiences expected. This college educated black man married to a white woman was no ruthless despot. Critical and audience reception of the 1924 All God’s Chillun Got Wings created a firestorm stronger than that following any other O’Neill production with African-American actors. The Hearst newspapers launched a campaign of hysteria against it. The Ku Klux Klan issued death threats, one to O’Neill personally, on Klan stationery. Audiences threatened to tear down MacDougal Street, on which the Provincetown Playhouse stood, if Robeson kissed Blair on opening night. Rumors vary as to whether or not he kissed her at all, but the next day, on 16 May 1924, John Corbin of the New York Times reported: “MacDougal Street stands where it stood.” Fearing that he might be misunderstood as overly sympathetic to the play, Corbin hastened to clarify his thoughts by writing yet another review in the Times on 18 May 1924: “Let me add with all possible emphasis that I do not believe in mixed marriages, especially between races as different as the white and the black. Common observation tells us that in many respects, both mental and moral, the average negro [sic] is inferior to the average white, and the army tests have strongly confirmed it.” Other critics also wrote blatantly biased reviews.

Percy Hammond, of the New York Herald Tribune, notorious for disliking African-Americans in classical roles, called the play “mildly dull and audacious.... A bit overdone and breathless, it is a vehement exposition of a marriage between a stupid negro [sic] and a stupid white woman” (qtd. in Gelb 555). Arthur Pollock of the Brooklyn Daily News declared: “Paul Robeson and Mary Blair, black and white, as advertised, play the leading roles. Mr. Robeson to us was a sad disappointment. He is an earnest, hard-working amateur and nothing more, apparently. During the first act he is merely a big awkward boy.” “Boy” was an insult, even in 1924. While Robeson was not the experienced actor he came to be, it is not clear that he was a complete amateur at the time. Contrary to more non-objective reviews of the time, Ludwig Lewisohn of the Nation wrote that “Mr. Paul Robeson is a superb actor, extraordinarily sincere and eloquent.” Robert Gilbert Welsh of The Telegram and Evening Mail “admired the play without reservation.” He observed: “All God’s Chillun is likely to take a permanent place in the American theatre” (qtd. in Gelb 556). According to Glenda Frank, though, “Its next significant production was 1975” and there was not another production after that until 19 October 2001, when the Pecadillo Theater Company of New York City put on a “highly professional and poignant production” (159) with actors of color Maurice McRae as Jim Harris, the black lawyer, and Rita Pietropinto as Ella Downey, the white wife. Ethnic casting in this production diluted the black and white contrast of opposites and perhaps made the play more palatable for its audience. Throughout its history, the drama has seldom been without controversy, the furor being over a play based on miscegenation, a legal term for racially mixed marriages. Many states, North and South, once had laws against miscegenation. To my knowledge, all such laws are finally off the books.

For over half of the twentieth century, the negative stereotype of African­Americans prevailed in most Hollywood films and on Broadway. However, out of the needs of The Great Depression and under the aegis of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, Congress created the Federal Theatre Project (1935-l939) which gave employment to 13,000 actors, 851 of whom were black. It allowed black actors to play the classics. In l937, the New York City Negro unit of the Federal Theatre Project fueled controversy when Canada Lee, a prizefighter turned performer, played Yank in O’Neill’s Moon of the Caribbees and Bound East for Cardiff, two plays in O’Neill’s seafaring tetralogy billed as S. S. Glencairn (see fig.1).

Reviews were mixed. St. Clair Bourne, African-American critic for the New York Amsterdam News, wrote: “The capable players of the Negro theatre have undertaken O’Neill and done well under the circumstances, because O’Neill characters are about the most difficult to portray.” Brooks Atkinson, a highly respected and well-known Caucasian critic for the New York Times, wrote: “Up in Harlem the savory seamen of the S. S. Glencairn are Negroes. Although this is logical it is also surprising.... Although the Negro unit of the Federal Theatre is competent enough in most circumstances it flattens out the personalities of Mr. O’Neill’s seamen.” Atkinson further bemoaned: “People who still cherish the beauty of Walter Abel’s Swedish seaman in that master performance [at the Provincetown Playhouse thirteen years earlier] will be a little astonished now to find Olson translated into a New Orleans Negro, dreaming of his mother’s farm near the delta of the Mississippi.” Strengthening his argument further, Atkinson denounced the casting as irrational, believing that O’Neill “deserved a much more sensitive performance than the Negro actors could provide.”

Interestingly, African-American Leonard de Paur, music director for the production, agreed with Atkinson’s assessment in a personal interview with me:

The other aspects of the thing were so totally alien to black performers. That was one of the things that we should not have done—except to show that we could remember the O’Neill lines. It brought me into contact with a body of folklore, the sea chanties, which I had not known too much about before. I felt particularly bad about the failure of these plays, in my estimation, because the man who I believe adapted them and who directed them for us was a fine actor by the name of William Challee, who had been a member of the Group Theatre, and who was a very sensitive man in terms of the blacks and their opportunities or lack of them in the theatre and this was one means that he chose to sort of broaden the range of things that black actors could do and thus, hopefully, broaden the range of opportunities available to us. With the best of intentions, I’m afraid Bill failed.

Two years later in 1939, believing that the Federal Theatre was infiltrated with communists, Congress shut it down and destroyed its records, thus effectively ending an experimental and briefly enlightened age of theater in this country.

With the close of the Federal Theatre, the only places black actors could now perform in classics were underfunded black community theaters and equally underfunded black colleges. Theater programs in these colleges often had only one dedicated faculty member, and the director called on others to volunteer for any and all other tasks: electrical wiring, props, programs, scene design, and artwork. Local stores loaned furniture. Campus musicians on the faculty played or sang. Many theater programs had no budgets. Many had no theaters.

Owen Dodson, an African-American director at Howard University in Washington, D.C., who had trained at Yale, put on O’Neill’s Homecoming, the first part of the trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra, with an all black cast in 1944 (see fig. 2). To my knowledge, there were no white students at Howard, although a few white faculty did teach at a few of the historically black colleges and universities in the 1940s and 1950s. Dodson selected a cast of unusually fine actors, including professional ones.

In his definitive biography of Owen Dodson, Sorrow Is The Only Faithful One, James V. Hatch indicated:

He [Dodson] spent his summer directing O’Neill’s Homecoming for Howard University’s summer school, billing it as “the first non­professional production of any part of the trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra”. . . he staged it on the columned portico of Douglass Hall and persuaded James Braxton of the School of Engineering to devise and install outdoor lighting [see fig. 3].

Owen pulled in Gordon Heath [American born actor of color who lived in Paris much of his life] for the lead as Adam Brant. For Lavinia he got Patricia Harris, née Roberts, the leading player from Howard. (She later became head of Housing and Urban Development for the Carter administration.) For the third major role, Owen chose a woman he had seen act with Gordon in the Harlem production of The Merchant of Venice, Sadie Browne . . . and he played the Gardener walk-on himself, singing “Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you.” (120)

In Gordon Heath’s autobiography, Deep Are the Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate, he, who later in 1953 played Brutus Jones in London for the BBC, recalled the l944 Mourning Becomes Electra:

He [Dodson] recognized in Sadie Browne, my friend from the NYA, a special emotional depth and persuaded her to forsake Brooklyn long enough to play Christine, the great Alla Nazimova’s role. He invited me to play Sadie’s elderly husband and her lover. . . . Owen thought my rehearsal performance as the aging husband was fine and flinty, but he observed that I had a tendency to project scorn for the character of Sadie’s lover. (70-71).

Portraying dual roles must have been an amazing feat, since Brigadier-General Ezra Mannon, the Agamemnon figure and elder husband of Christine who is off fighting the Civil War, was played by the same actor who plays her 40­year old lover, Adam Brant, “yard child” of a former servant girl and Ezra’s brother, David Mannon. Anne Harrington, in a professional newspaper review, gave Heath the following kudos:

Gordon Heath was personable and gallant as Brant. His first antagonistic scene with Lavinia was swift-paced and climactic. His second character­ization as Ezra, bearded and gaunt like a pine tree, was full-bodied and tragic. . . . Heath towered and crumpled in death with a magnificence matched only by the greedy triumphant cry of Christine, free to seek her love at last.

And of the actor who played the 40-year old Clytemnestra figure, Christine, Harrington observed: “Sadie Browne wearing the same gown Nazimova wore when she created the role, brought striking personal beauty and maturity to the part of Christine. She met the demands of an exacting part with resources of voice and emotional flexibility that are highly individual acting gifts” (see fig. 4).

Patricia Roberts, who became a lawyer and eventually Dean of the Howard University Law School, played the 23-year old Electra figure. Of her work, Harrington wrote: “Patricia Roberts as Lavinia, the daughter, was implacable in black, a match for Christine, hewing to a straight avenging line.”

Thomas D. Pawley, PhD, who later became a theater scholar at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri and eventually Dean of Arts and Sciences there, played Orin in an abbreviated version of The Hunted which Dodson added to the production at the end. Of his performance, Harrington wrote, “Thomas D. Pawley, as the youngest Mannon, played the last scene with tortured and wretched overtones like Hamlet appalled at his Mother’s infatuation and thirsting for revenge.” Dodson had sent him a telegram just three days before the play opened telling him to come play Orin, with all his lines memorized. In a letter to me on 9 July 2003, Pawley described that invitation: “As you can see from the telegram, Orin was a last minute addition to the cast after Owen learned I was in Petersburg, Virginia.” The telegram, dated 1 August 1944, read: “Come to Howard at once. Expect you before 7 p.m. Tuesday. Memorize Orin, Act Five, The Hunted, from Mourning Becomes Electra. Call me at Howard Extension 282 before leaving. Owen.” Pawley complied, but there was no time to add his name to the printed program. It is typed on the printed program of 4 August 1944.

Dodson directed a number of classics, even though he, himself, was also a playwright. He strongly believed:

So many of our Negro playwrights are so saturated with the idea of Negro oppression, which of course, they should be, that they have left out the lasting power, the universality, of their art: They just keep trampin’. They aren’t trying to make heaven their home. They seem to prefer infernos to the blaze of light that can come in the future. Many of them have discipline . . . but they hardly have the daring or the flair to infuse high vision with our present angry condition (qtd. in Peterson 378).

One can well argue that O’Neill was not trying to make heaven his home, either, since he also wrote of his familial and marital oppression, but Dodson’s point is well taken, and one subscribed to by many at the historically black colleges in Dodson’s era. Dodson was not oblivious to the struggle of African­Americans and he originally wrote the above statement in Black World in l968, a time much more fraught with visible racial strife than 1944 when Dodson’s production of Mourning Becomes Electra crossed the boards.

On the stage of the E. C. Mabie Theatre at the University of Iowa in 1955, eleven years after Mourning Becomes Electra at Howard, J. Preston Cochran, a former director at the Alabama A & M College at Normal, starred in The Emperor Jones while earning his Iowa doctorate. In writing to a former student, Willie Hinton, Cochran spoke of his triumph:

I really upset the local actors’ equity when I did Brutus Jones. They didn’t think I had the fire in me, for I am the epitome of culture in their eyes. I’m told that the audience was spellbound, that tears flowed, that nerves tingled, etc. But the amusing thing said about it was this: in one of the scenes, I strip to the waist, baring my manly chest. I’m told that I glistened feverishly virile and giantlike on the stage, and that muscles rippled everywhere. God knows where they came from; I was certainly chagrined. But from then on I thrust my chest forward and flexed what I had. It got results. I’ve been stopped on the streets by strangers, many of whom tell me I have a truly wonderful build (ha!). All think my body was oiled to make this impression. Truth is, I merely sweated.

Such a performance, arguably traditional and stereotypical, was a rarity for a black actor on a predominantly white campus in the mid-l950s. (In l957, Cochran played the title role in Othello, also at Iowa.)

By the l960s, America experienced one of its most turbulent decades with the Civil Rights Era. In June 1963, George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to prevent James Hood and Vivian Malone from enrolling. In September of that year, members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four black girls. John F. Kennedy, President of the United States, was assassinated, as was Medgar Evers, Field Secretary for the Mississippi unit of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In l965, African-Americans reputedly killed Malcolm X in the Audubon Ballroom of Harlem. Martin Luther King, Jr., who preached non­violence all of his life, met his death, ironically, at the hands of a sniper in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April 1968. Moreover, Sirhan Sirhan snuffed out the life of Robert Kennedy who had, as Attorney General of the United States, advocated equal rights. Riots erupted everywhere, especially in Chicago, Washington, D. C. and the Watts section of Los Angeles. In the midst of this turbulent period, James Earl Jones played Brutus Jones in l964 and the NAACP picketed.

In the next decade, in 1973, whites also protested classics in chocolate when James Earl Jones played Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, a daring feat done at Circle in the Square in New York City. By this time, Jason Robards almost owned the role. Paul Libin, producer at Circle in the Square in 1973, remarked about how much hate mail he and Ted Mann got for casting Jones in that role. Louis Sheaffer refrained from discussing Jones at all in his review in the New York Times. Clive Barnes, drama critic for the New York Times, wrote: “James Earl Jones as Hickey was all right but all wrong. He is a thoughtful actor rather than an impassioned one. He teases climaxes rather than rides them. . . . He looks and sounds as if he is selling insurance rather than dreams.” In a personal interview with me, Jones indicated: “O’Neill wrote about the common man . . . and most black people in this society have common man roots. . . . My biggest problem with Hickey was that I thought I didn’t have the temperament, nothing to do with race or other cultural factors. Hickey had the temperament of a fast-talking Hoosier and I didn’t.” With Hickey, Jones, himself, questioned his ability to play the role. But the actor does not feel this way about a number of his other classical parts. Despite the actor’s misgivings, Walter Kerr, also of the New York Times, declared “James Earl Jones’s first appearance in the Circle in the Square revival of The Iceman Cometh is virtually magical . . . there he is, suddenly, warm light playing over his bright cream suit, the curl of his smile exactly matching the curl of his hatbrim, seated astride the bar like God come to call.”

As it became more common to see black actors in non-traditional roles on the stage, Mical Whitaker, Co-Founder and former Artistic Director of the Richard Allen Center for Culture and Art (RACCA) in New York City, recollected:

We began to talk about the dream of having major black actors playing roles which seemed definably white. ‘We’ were actress/director Geraldine Fitzgerald, producer Hazel Bryant and me, an Off-Broadway director. . . . Our first venture was O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1981), with [African-Americans] Gloria Foster and Earle Hyman heading the tragic Tyrone family. The production proved to be a huge success and was moved first to the Theatre at St. Peter’s Church at East 53rd Street; then to the larger and more prestigious New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theatre in the Village. Public acclaim and rave reviews followed. Then television came a’ calling. And in a year’s time we were headed to Toronto. . . . Due to scheduling conflicts, the role of Mary Tyrone was now to be played by Ruby Dee. The television production was as successful as the stage production had been. Ruby and Earle both won ACE Awards as Best Actress and Actor.

In the stage production, the well-known African-American actor Al Freeman, Jr. played Jamie, and Peter Francis-James, Edmund. According to Brenda Murphy, this was “one of the most important productions of this period” (75). Not everyone agreed.

John Simon, critic for New York, wrote: “The all-black production of Long Day’s Journey into Night is a disaster that reduces one of our two or three greatest dramas to a mirthless farce. Black actors do not begin to convey the bio- and autobiographical elements that are not unimportant to O’Neill’s play, and their blackness runs counter to much of what is explicitly stated even in this trimmed version” (56). “Worse yet,” Simon continued, “is the James Tyrone of Earle Hyman, from whom I have yet to see a good piece of acting anywhere, and who here lacks both the brute virility and thespian proficiency of the scarcely veiled James O’Neill. Hyman slithers, slouches, sashays about, and spouts his lines in untenable tempos and in gushes of chaotic sound uncivilized by consonants” (56).

Simon, an older critic, has made a pattern of such harsh reviews. Hyman responded:

It used to be that casting black actors in traditionally white roles seemed daring, like marching in the street, and maybe things have gotten better and maybe they haven’t. . . . I’m not bitter, but I am angry. In Norway, where I have performed for three decades, I have played a Norwegian archbishop and no one has raised the question. (Qtd. in Gill, “Triumphs and Struggles” 52)

Mel Gussow of the New York Times and younger than Simon, has, historically, been more positive in his assessment of African-American actors. Gussow evaluated the performance quite differently: “Mr. Hyman is a tall, dignified actor with a mellifluous voice and a grand manner. . . . He is a pretender who can communicate stage presence even in his own home, rationing out his paternal concern as he does his whisky and his wrath.” Jack Kroll of Newsweek added: “Earle Hyman captures the grandiloquent cowardice that has turned the father, James Tyrone, from a potentially great actor into a matinee idol whose miserliness has grievously injured his family.”

Gloria Foster, who played opposite Hyman in the stage production of Long Day’s Journey into Night, fared more poorly: Gussow observed that she “lacks the fragility of Mary Tyrone,” and appeared to be more like Lady Macbeth. John Simon declared that “Gloria Foster is a powerful actress when able to indulge her forte: black anger. Here she seems to lack elementary insight into, let alone the temperamental endowments for, a 1912 genteel, white, convent-bred matron” (56). Is there such a thing as white anger? An earlier review of Foster’s 1973 portrayal of Madame Ranevskya in the all­black version of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard suggested that she might chop down the entire orchard by herself. Foster suffered from what scholar Trudier Harris calls “this disease called strength,” applied only to black women. The stereotype of “strong black women” has prevailed even before l939 when Hattie McDaniel played the quintessential Mammy in Gone With the Wind. Hollywood has reinforced the stereotype with such current images as Oscar nominee Queen Latifah who plays a rough night club singer and prison matron in the highly touted film Chicago. Among her classical roles, Foster had previously played such “strong women” as Clytemnestra, Volumnia to Morgan Freeman’s Coriolanus, Medea and Mother Courage.

Interestingly, Gussow added to his review of Long Day’s Journey into Night that “The apparently endless controversy of whether or not black actors should play so-called white roles should achieve some resolution after Miss Fitzgerald’s impressive staging.” He was premature. Dave Billington of the Edmonton Sun stated in a his review: “Theoretically we are color blind. . . . Unfortunately our society isn’t, and it certainly wasn’t when some of America’s classic plays were being written.” Perhaps his “we” refers to the world of critics, but review after review suggests that critics see color very clearly and often try to put it in its proper place.

In the last twenty years, some critics have been kinder. In the Eugene O’Neill Review, Robert Simpson MacLean applauded a 1977 production of O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms put on by the Peccadillo Theater Company in New York City: “The cast was well chosen, and even revealed some interesting innovations. Director Wackerman cast Ephraim Cabot’s three sons with black actors, suggesting that the patriarchal Ephraim had two slave women as first and second wives” (210). Later in the review, MacLean added: “Carl Jay Cofield excelled in the role of the scheming and materialistic Eben, who becomes caught in a Freudian duel with his father for the love of Abbie. Cofield and [Devora] Millaman worked well together, presenting moving scenes of conflict, of competition and ultimately of love” (213). Cofield is a classically trained African-American who studied and earned a certificate from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Speech training may have helped to contrast his voice with the black dialect used by the two brothers. McLean noted that Mr. Cofield “spoke articulate English” (213).

In spite of more favorable reviews from people like MacLean, the debate over non-traditional casting still rages. Jack Kroll observed in l979: “The American theatre has never really known what to do with its black performers. As with the society itself, the theatrical culture has responded to the situation with desultory spasms of tokenism, integration and separation”(“Black Shakespeare” 67). In that same year, John Simon wrote that black actors taking on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus “ranks as advanced dementia” (“From Wheel to Woe” 85). For quite different reasons, August Wilson, the most well­known African-American playwright, has agreed with the outspoken white critic. Wilson, who writes roles almost exclusively for black actors, has continually argued for a separatist black theater. “We do not need color-blind casting,” he said in 1996 (72). Such practice, he argued further, is simply the “slaves amusing the master” (Freedman).

How much have things changed in 2004? Perhaps in the light of more objective critics as well as efforts on college campuses and in larger communities, audiences may come to value skilled African-American actors as credible interpreters, rather than interlopers. After all, this was done with Gilpin, Robeson, Ingram, Heath, and J. Preston Cochran who played roles designated for black actors. Is it really not possible to see these actors in any other roles? Isn’t part of the joy of acting and theater the willingness to empathize with others and to embody other experiences? Isn’t it possible to imagine Sadie Browne and Patricia Roberts as Christine and Lavinia Mannon, just as audiences once pictured Alla Nazimova and Mary Blair? Can there be no expression of universal humanity? If not, does O’Neill have a future in an increasingly multi-racial and non-white world?

WORKS CITED

Atkinson, Brooks. Rev. of “S. S. Glencairn.” New York Times 30 Oct. 1937: 23.

Barnes, Clive. “Stage: Iceman Cometh to Broadway.” New York Times 14 Dec. 1973: n. pag.

Billington, Dave. “Long Journey for Black Artists.” Edmonton Sun 18 Oct. 1984: n. pag. (Courtesy of Ruby Dee.)

Bourne, St. Clair. Rev. of S. S. Glencairn. New York Amsterdam News 6 Nov. 1937: 16.

Broun, Heywood. Rev. of The Emperor Jones. New York Tribune 4 Nov. 1920: n. pag.

Castellun, Maida. “O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones Thrills and Fascinates.” New York Call 10 Nov. 1920. <http://www.eoneill.com/artifacts/reviews/ej1_call.htm>.

Cochran, J. Preston. Letter to Willie Hinton. 5 Dec. 1955.

Corbin, John. Rev. All God's Chillun Got Wings. New York Times 16 May 1924: 22.

_____."Among the New Plays." New York Times 18 May 1924, sec 7: 1.

de Paur, Leonard. Int. with author. 29 Mar. 1982.

Dodson, Owen. Telegram to Thomas D. Pawley. 1 Aug. 1944. (Courtesy of Thomas D. Pawley.)

Frank, Glenda. Rev. of All God's Chillun Got Wings. Eugene O’Neill Review 24.1-2 (Spring/Fa112000):159.

Freedman, Samuel G"The Mother of an Era: August Wilson's Ma Rainey." New York Times 2 Feb. 2003, sec. 2:1.

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Gill, Glenda E. "The Mereurial Canada Lee." Glenda Gill White Grease Paint on Black Performers: A Study of the Federal Theatre, 1935-1939. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. 21-66.

_____."The Silencing of Paul Robeson." Glenda Gill No Surrender! No Retreat! African American Pioneer Performers of Twentieth-Century American Theatre. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. 35-36.

_____."The Triumphs and Struggles of Earle Hyman in Traditional and Non-Traditional Roles." Journal of American Drama and Theatre 13 (Winter 2001): 52.

Gussow, Mel. "Theater: Black Cast Stages O'Neill." New York Times 3 Mar.1981, sec. C:1.

Harrington, Anne. "Negro Cast Distinguishes Self in DC Production of Electra." n.p., n.d. (Courtesy of Thomas D. Pawley.)

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Jones, James Earl. Int. with author. 15 Sept. 1998.

Kerr, Walter. "The Iceman Is Absent Too Much." New York Times 23 Dec. 1973, sec 2: n. pag.

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_____."Passionate Journey." Newsweek 20 Apr. 1981: 104.

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Monroe, John G. "Charles Gilpin and the Drama League Controversy." Black American Literature Forum 16.4 (Winter 1982): 139-141.

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Pawley, Thomas D. Int. with author. 5 July 2003.

_____. Letter to author. 9 July 2003.