ABSTRACT
Ambitious in scope, The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance provides a selected overview from William Henry Brown’s foundational nineteenth-century African Grove Theatre in New York City to Toshi Reagon’s and Bernice Johnson Reagon’s innovative twenty-first-century adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, an Afrofuturistic opera. We have created a book that seeks to meet the broad content of theatre and performance as practiced in various African American communities. In this approach, we include a wide range of contributors not often included in books dealing with African American theatre, or theatre in general. The voices represented here reflect those of scholars (who research without practicing theatre to a large degree), scholars (who research and are also out there in the field making theatre), actors, designers, dancers, poets, directors, producers, theatre managers, playwrights, hip hop artists, composers, Black Indian chiefs, storytellers, lawyers, and more. Where the shapers, critics, and brokers of African American theatre and performance have led, we have attempted to follow.
