Metropolitan Playhouse
The American Legacy

220 East Fourth Street  ~  New York, New York   10009
(212) 995 8410
connect@metropolitanplayhouse.org

PRIZING WOMEN’S WRITING
The movement to cultivate Black American literature and art in the 1920’s, flourishing in the Harlem Renaissance, created new opportunities for artists who had been ignored up to that time…and most of the time since: Black women playwrights. Important to the creation of their work were new play contests sponsored by literary magazines, notably Crisis (founded in 1910 by the NAACP) and Opportunity (published by the National Urban League from 1923-1949).
Commercial opportunities in the theater were limited enough for Black writers at large, and that much more for women.  Prizes and publication created a market for new work, and short work in particular. The magazines also complemented the growing number of Little Theaters—non-commercial producers around the country housed in schools and churches as well as established performance halls—and helped feed those theaters new plays.
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
Nearly one-hundred years on, many of these plays remain barely known.  In part, obscurity is a function of theater economics that discourage production of short plays.  Investment in them cannot be justified to many producers beyond school or community groups.  In part, they fall victim to persistent marginalization of Black and female writers. Even a writer as recognized as Zora Neale Hurston, herself a prize-winner in the 20’s, cannot be said to be “over-produced” today.
The most successful of the contest writers, with four prize-winning plays in her repertoire, was Eulalie Spence, whose near-effacement is a great loss to American culture. Her distinctive humor embellishes her feel for human foible and triumph, and she captures life as it is lived by people she knows with an authenticity perfectly balanced by her sense of drama.
The three plays that Metropolitan presents as She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind are each prize-winners. In “The Starter,” a hard-working and hopeful couple negotiate what may or may not turn out to be their engagement; in “Hot Stuff,” a jaded numbers game banker makes a series of bad bets leaving her owing as much as (and maybe more than) she has to lose; and in “The Hunch,” a starry-eyed bride-to-be gets a dose of unwelcome but life-changing clarity from a devoted admirer.
These three tales are simple and recognizable stories of specific people’s lives, populated by characters with complicated motivations and moralities. Neither sanctified portraits of the virtuous, nor histrionic tales of the villainous, they are that special breed of theater that is artful for its artlessness and powerful for being unassuming.
THE POWER IN THE TRUTH
In spite of that quality, or perhaps because of it, there is something subversive and daring about the plays, particularly considered in their own time.  Because Spence writes of everyday people, she writes of mundane and profane concerns, both innocent and illicit.  The plays are filled with generosity, understanding, caring, and love, but their world includes sexual affairs, gambling, cheating, and fighting.  For a Black woman to write frankly and truthfully of such common human behavior is to run the risk of stimulating all-too-readily inflamed prejudices and stereotypes, whether in 1920 or 2020.
And yet, if producing them represents a kind of political act—the expression of an unheard voice speaking the truth of her community—their author never intended them to be political declarations. In a 1973 interview with the Hatch-Billops Collection, Spence spoke of her aspiring to theater "that has universal good and joy and welcome and understanding, [and] opens the door of humanity a little wider." She goes on: "hammering at an old illness and old injury, whether it is of eighty years, one hundred years or one thousand, does no good at all. It's defeating."  Her work is no less than a celebration of Black life.
Presenting them is a gift: to honor and admire Eulalie Spence and the world she conjures simply for being what they are.  Metropolitan is honored in return to be able to do so in our second in-person presentation of our 31st Season, the season of Awakening.
-Alex Roe

EULALIE SPENCE (1894-1981)A childhood immigrant to New York from the Caribbean island of Nevis who earned her BA from NYU and her MA from Teachers College, Spence was a New York public school teacher for most of her adult life. During her long tenure at Brooklyn's Eastern District High School,  she included among her students Public Theater founder Joseph Papp, who called her "the most influential force in [his] life." Through the 20's and 30's, she was also a well-respected playwright, actor, and director, closely involved with the Krigwa Players, The Dunbar Garden Players, and Columbia University's Laboratory Players.  Of her 14 known plays, 5 earned prizes.  Her greatest mainstream commercial success was nonetheless a near-miss: her only full-length play, The Whipping, adapted from a novel by Roy Flannagan, was slated for a commercial premiere in 1933 starring Queenie Smith, but was canceled before opening.  Spence optioned the script to Paramount Pictures for a film that ultimately became the barely recognizable Ida Lupino comedy, Ready for Love. The Whipping was her last play, though she remained an active director and drama teacher for her remaining years.

   

connect@metropolitanplayhouse.org