Gotta Sing? Gotta Dance? : Is American theater relegating blacks to musicals set in less enlightened times and places?

Oh, I got plenty o’ nuthin’,

An’ nuthin’s plenty fo’ me.

--from “Porgy and Bess” by Ira Gershwin “That’s a wonderful expression of what white people think we ought to be feeling. Still.”

--C. Bernard Jackson, executive director Inner City Cultural Center

In 1821, an audacious group of theater artists formed New York’s African Company, the first African-American stage troupe on record in the United States. Nearly 170 years later, the spiritual descendants of those thespian pioneers are still singin’ and dancin’ to please the powers that be.

With a slew of period African-American musicals having come out over the past decade--and a new crop just beginning to hit the Southern California boards, starting with last week’s opening of “Blues in the Night” at the Los Angeles Theater Center--some professionals argue that today’s African-American stage artists are still being kept down on the farm.

Despite putative advances toward “cultural diversity,” African-Americans still compete for relatively few, often stereotypical roles. There’s a dearth of African-American dramas on stage--almost none that address the current plight of this segment of the U.S. population--and nearly all of the fare that does make it to major venues consistently relegates African-Americans to another place and time.

“As we move into the 1990s, there’s a backlash of racism,” says actor-writer-director Shabaka, leader of LATC’s Black Theater Artists’ Workshop. “The (societal) situation is far worse than it was 10 years ago. You don’t see that on American stages. That’s what has to be seen.”

“The age-old stereotypes are still prevalent,” says Floyd Gaffney, chair of UC San Diego’s Contemporary Black Arts Program and coordinator of a UCSD conference concluding today on “Cultural Diversity in the American Theatre.”

“Blacks are known to sing and dance. Music will sell. Mostly what (these musicals) are talking about has nothing to do with the problems we face.”

Besides LATC’s current West Coast premiere of Sheldon Epps’ “Blues in the Night,” a musical set in the ‘30s, in January, the San Diego Repertory Theater will offer the world premiere of Amiri Baraka’s “The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson,” set in the Harlem Renaissance, and in February, the Mark Taper Forum presents George C. Wolfe’s “Mr. Jellylord,” about the seminal jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton.

Currently on Broadway is a David Merrick revival of the George and Ira Gershwin musical ‘Oh, Kay!” featuring an all-African-American cast. New York Times critic Frank Rich said the production--set in jazz-age Harlem--seems like “a minstrel show,” and refers to “eye-popping gags and stereotypes that are less redolent of the Cotton Club than of ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy.’ ”

And there are more period works on the way. The La Jolla Playhouse recently won a $40,000 AT&T; grant for a new Eric Overmyer play with music called “The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin.”

These productions and projects follow a pack of stage works--”Bubblin’ Brown Sugar,” “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grille,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “Black and Blue,” “Shout Up a Morning,” “Further Mo’,” “Mama, I Want to Sing (I and II),” “The Wiz,” “Dreamgirls” and many others that filled New York and regional houses during the ‘80s. They are all musicals or plays with music and they are all set in the past, the majority of them in the 1920s to 1940s.

Most of them are also pointedly apolitical. “Dreamgirls,” for instance, chronicled the rise of a ‘60s girl group a la the Supremes with virtually no mention of the social upheaval of the decade.

This retro-boom also extends to the non-musical theater. With dramas, the dominant voice of the ‘80s was two-time Pulitzer winner August Wilson, whose cycle of five plays--”Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Fences,” “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” “The Piano Lesson” and “Two Trains Running”--all take place in earlier decades.

Nor is this dated presence of African-Americans onstage limited to new works. Facing increased pressure from granting sources to meet affirmative-action goals for hiring nonwhite performers, opera companies from New York to California are trotting out in record numbers “Porgy and Bess,” “Cabin in the Sky” and “Showboat”--the latter staged earlier this year by Opera Pacific in Orange County.

“Many of us had hoped these shows were all dead and gone,” says one member of a national funding organization who asked to remain anonymous. “The problem with major companies doing these shows is that it gives these musicals a validation they didn’t used to have. The biggest statement in ‘Showboat’ is, ‘Here we all work while the white folks play.’ ”

“White audiences obviously feel very comfortable with these works,” says Inner City Cultural Center executive director C. Bernard Jackson, referring to both the newer musicals and the revivals.

“Nobody is protesting or defying anything. The idea is ‘Let’s go back to the days when blacks were not a threat’--just this poor, naive race of people. And what they do best, as everybody in the world knows, is sing and dance.

“It puts us back to where we were 40 years ago, to being portrayed as slovenly, primitive, indolent and super-sexed,” Jackson continues. ‘I wouldn’t say it’s a backlash, because I haven’t seen any forward movement.”

There is, though, disagreement in the theater community over who’s to blame for this selective--and some say reactionary--representation of African-Americans.

Los Angeles Theatre Center artistic director Bill Bushnell sees the breakdown of what’s onstage as merely a reflection of what’s being written. “Theaters around the country are in need and desirous of product,” Bushnell says. “There seems to be a shortage of straight black plays. We’re seeing very few good black plays.”

LATC producing director Diane White disagrees. “There are lots of things out there,” she says. “There are wonderful works by black artists out there other than musicals. The opportunities for black work and black artists have been vast. I know that there’s no shortage of plays by black artists.

“People enjoy seeing musicals about the black experience. It doesn’t seem like a trend (toward more period African-American musicals) to me, because it isn’t at LATC--except at this very second in time.”

Des McAnuff, artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, agrees with White that there’s no trend in evidence, and suggests the many upcoming musicals and plays with music are “probably coincidental.

“The reason we’re doing ‘The Heliotrope Bouquet. . .’ has nothing to do with any movement or trend,” McAnuff says. “It wasn’t that we were looking for a play that addressed a particular topic.”

“The biggest lack right now is work that takes a look at black contemporary life. I say that as a gentle challenge,” says Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum, who recently returned from London, where he saw, among other plays, a “charming” work titled “Five Guys Named Mo,” about the music of ‘40s rhythm and blues artist Louis Jordan.

“I think you have to look at the playwrights,” says Sam Woodhouse, producing director of San Diego Repertory Theatre, whose “The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson” is described as a biographical “bopera”--with music by Max Roach--about “one of the most powerful black gangsters in 20th-Century history.”

“It is very much the story of their community, their immediate mentors,” Woodhouse says of the apparent trend. “As black writers look to their own heritage, they want to share these untold stories.”

Skeptics, however, maintain that the situation indicates the limits to what white producers and artistic directors are willing to put on their stages.

“Is it because musicals are easy to take or because music has been the principal vehicle of expression for blacks throughout America’s history?” Jackson asks. “My own view is that it’s a little of both.

“I certainly don’t think that’s all that’s out there. Producers are looking for work that’s not going to frighten their audiences.”

“The average producer is thinking about keeping the doors to his theater open,” says San Francisco Mime Troupe veteran Shabaka. “The black musical has always been a black vehicle. But I do think that while there is this incredible amount of activity, it’s activity that shows it is less threatening to see a black person in a non-threatening place back in time.

“There’s a perception on the part of white producers that the white American ticket-buying public is not interested in seeing blacks onstage outside a certain setting.

“You hear the same excuses over and over again. People who were going to white networks were constantly met with ‘Our viewers in Iowa won’t like it’ and ‘We have to pay attention to demographics.’ Things like ‘The Cosby Show’ have proven them wrong. Studios wouldn’t go for it ‘because you’ve got a black lead.’ Well, Eddie Murphy proved them wrong. You still constantly have to fight that battle to convince people in power that they’re wrong. Folks feel the safety of the familiar.”

Even if producers and artistic directors are willing to open up to new types of work, change also depends on reforms in the development processes of major theaters throughout the country. Artistic directors contend they would happily produce such dramas as Shabaka describes, if only they could get their hands on them.

“I’m hard pressed to find out where the writers are who are writing plays that can capture a large audience,” Bushnell says. “And I’m not the only one. (LATC) is about as progressive and advanced on this subject as anyone right now.”

“There’s a rich exploration of the contemporary black experience currently being written,” says Robert Blacker, associate director/dramaturge of the La Jolla Playhouse. “Unfortunately, after nurturing a number of black writers in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the American theater has developed a bad habit of not knowing how to continue to feed itself through the imagination of their work.

“I came to New York to work for Joseph Papp in the late ‘60s and worked on Charles Gordone’s ‘No Place to Be Somebody,’ an extraordinary hit in ’69. The plays being written around that time were very political, and they were being produced in a period when the theater was displaying that political turmoil.

“In the ‘70s and ‘80s, the American theater has backed off from that kind of political exploration, and, in so doing, from exploring the black experience in America,” Blacker says. “We’re profoundly affected by politics, but there’s been a denial of this in the past decade. If you deny that politics is a part of your life, you’re going to be denying the experiences of black Americans who know undeniably that it is.

“At a time when white playwrights seemed unable to make realism interesting, writers like Gordone were able to give it new vitality. Now, writers of color in this country are moving away from realism, to more imaginative forms that are perhaps not as accessible to the American public.

“It’s the old chicken-and-the-egg story,” Blacker says. “Because of a perceived lack of opportunity, there’s less being written now than in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, because the opportunities (for production) aren’t there.”

Jackson agrees with Blacker that black writers may be discouraged from work that is more challenging to the status quo. “The thought is that black writers have no business writing about the human condition, that they should write only about what they know, and we’ll tell them what they know,” he says.

George Wolfe, whom Jackson discovered and produced back in the early ‘70s, is a case in point--a writer whose public reception may have been shaped by such attitudes. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum,” seen at the Mark Taper Forum in 1988, was a satirical indictment of African-American stereotypes that broke with the period musical mold, as have a few other productions such as Lee Breuer’s “Gospel at Colonus.”

However, Wolfe’s writing didn’t always focus on the African-American experience. Jackson describes Wolfe’s plays prior to “The Colored Museum” as containing “no ethnic references whatsoever,” while Wolfe himself adds that, in addition to the “mythic worlds” Jackson recalls, there were also works that were a “warped take on black culture.”

Wolfe’s play immediately preceeding “The Colored Museum” was “Paradise,” a musical about a family that escapes to an island--not about the African-American experience. It was savaged by New York critics.

With “The Colored Museum,” Wolfe became identified as a writer concerned with things African-American. He also became a hit.

“Our interest in George Wolfe goes back to even before ‘The Colored Museum,’ ” Davidson says. The reason that work--rather than any previous Wolfe effort--made it to the Taper mainstage, was, according to Davidson, because “sometimes it takes a while for people to hit their stride.”

Wolfe followed “The Colored Museum” with “Spunk,” based on the writings from the 1930s of Zora Neale Hurston, and, although he has mounted a variety of projects in the meanwhile, he returns to a similar era with “Mr. Jellylord.”

Scenarios like Wolfe’s notwithstanding, Shabaka argues that there’s a “wealth of black drama out there” that is not getting produced. The reasons, he says, have to do with internal politics.

“In most mainstream theaters, there are no blacks in literary departments where the genesis of new work is, who have the responsibility to bring (such) plays to the attention of producers, who are generally white males,” Shabaka says. “As a lab leader, I am also working through the literary department.

“A theater like LATC, which in some ways has been a trailblazer, is going to have to take the step in producing new black work--unfortunately even before black theater does. With a lot of struggle and dedication, (African-American political drama) can occupy a place that will have to be dealt with. I will agitate until it’s done.”

He is, in fact, doing just that. Currently, the LATC Black Lab has several plays in the works. One play, for instance, deals with two families in parallel periods during the 1890s and 1990s. “During 1865 to 1885, the (rise) of African-Americans had escalated to a point that it has yet to parallel,” Shabaka says. “It’s a fascinating period that showed that once African-Americans got the opportunity, they excelled.

“It also created a white backlash, some in the form of governmental harassments and some in the form of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan,” Shabaka says. “By 1900, the African-American was almost totally disenfranchised, both by the established powers and by their tentacles in the Ku Klux Klan.”

The period immediately following--1900 to 1917--will be addressed in La Jolla Playhouse’s Overmyer script about musicians Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin.

Of that project, Blacker says, “When we choose to do a new work, we’re looking for a play that has something important to say about the lives we lead in the 1990s. As Americans, we have a limited sense of where we come from, so it’s difficult to understand where we’re going.

“During the period following the Civil War and resettlement, emerging black culture found potent expression in ragtime music,” Blacker says. “It also happens to be the period when black artists were beginning to have the extraordinary impact they were to have on American culture. It’s also a time when they were, as they continue to be, exploited by the white publishing industry, while they were laying the foundations of so much contemporary music.”

“I don’t know why certain plays get done and others don’t,” says Wolfe, who left L.A. in 1979. “I don’t sit down and go ‘Hmmmm, what (can I write that) will get done?’ At the time I wrote ‘The Colored Museum,’ what I was going through personally happened to coincide with what the country was going through--redefining what black meant for me. I wrote that strictly for myself, so I was amazed at how well it did.

“The door should be opened up to all kinds of work. When you get into regional theaters, the problem is some peculiar quota system evolves. They say, ‘Let’s do a Negro thing, a gay thing, an Asian thing.’ But a gesture is better than no gesture.

“Yes, there are agendas, paranoia, racism,” Wolfe continues. “Every ten years people sit around and say, ‘Things are starting to happen.’ And they are, it’s just not wide enough and deep enough.”