A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance, 1910- 1927. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

2002 Finalist for the Theatre Library Association’s George Freedley Memorial Award.

David Krasner’s book is a brilliant follow-up to his award-winning Resistance, Parody and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910 (1997). It is also an important addition to the now extensive scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance. This scholarship, however, includes few works that deal with theater, drama, and various forms of performance. Performance is broadly understood here to “denote a public art that stresses the expressive power of voice, body and gesture” (p. 11). Thus, Krasner begins his study with a detailed analysis of the heavyweight championship fight between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries (July 4, 1910) and concludes with a final chapter on the black musicals of the 1920s (Shuffle Along [1921] to Africana [1927]). Within this frame, Krasner explores the choreography and dance of Aida Overton Walker and Ethel Waters, W. E. B. Du Bois’s pageant, The Star of Ethiopia (1913), the little-discussed folk drama of Georgia Johnson and Willis Richardson, and Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel and Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck (1925). Krasner also gives close attention to the pagentry and theatrical politics of Marcus Garvey, the rise of the Black Little Theater Movement, and the career of Charles Gilpin and his inspired performance as Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1921).