ABSTRACT
From William Henry Brown’s The Drama of King Shotaway (1823) to William Branch’s In Splendid Error (1954), early Black playwrights chronicled Black life in historical drama (combination of fact and fiction), documentary drama (factual/verbatim), and historical pageants (panoramic collage), paving the way for the celebrated contemporary works to follow. Black historical theatre celebrates and preserves Black culture in the tradition of the African griot (storyteller/oral historian)—remembering, recovering, and re-envisioning historical narratives on the stage. This chapter defines the history play genre and analyzes its purpose, theatricality, and themes in the pioneering period from the early1800s to the 1950s.
