A Harlem Triptych:
Plays by Eulalie Spence

The Hunch (1927), The Starter (1923), Undertow (1927)

Direction and Dramaturgy by Arminda Thomas

 with:
Noah Anderson*, Langston Darby*, Janelle Clayton, Sharon Hope*,
Daniel Neusom*, Kirya Traber*
(* appearing courtesy of Actors' Equity)

THIS EVENT IS A FUNDRAISING BENEFIT FOR OHS
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Thursday, August 13 - Monday, August 16, 2020
Launching at 7:00pm August 13 on You Tube)

From Harlem Renaissance playwright Eulalie Spence (1894-1981), an evening of one-act comedies and dramas (The Starter, The Hunch, and Undertow) featuring Harlem everywomen and everymen in their efforts to find, maintain, or recapture love.

"Eulalie Spence was the most influential force in my life." 

Joseph Papp, Founder of The Public Theater

The program begins with The Play in Context by Arminda Thomas, who situates the scripts in their historical time and place, followed by the readings. The League of Professional Theatre Women is a co-sponsor of the Play In Context component, which includes scholarly essays and the live lecture.

EULALIE SPENCE (1894 - 1981) was a writer, teacher, director, actress and playwright from the British West Indies. She was an influential member of the Harlem Renaissance and a prolific writer during the 1920s and 1930s with fourteen known plays. Harlem was the setting for many of them. Spence, who described herself as a "folk dramatist" who made plays for fun and entertainment, was considered one of the most experienced female playwrights before the 1950s, and received more recognition than other Black playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance period, winning several competitions.

In 1924 she was a student at the National Ethiopian Art Theatre School, which was dedicated to the training and employment of Black actors. As a follower of Alain Locke, she held fast to her belief that her actors have the voice of the everyday working people, black dialect included. Many of Spence’s plays were comedies and some of her contemporaries did not believe that the "New Negro" was ready for such frivolity in any arena of American life. Nonetheless, her plays helped to make a name for the Krigwa Players— a guild founded by W.E.B DuBois— amongst both Black and white critics. Her opened Kriwga's second season in 1927 and critic William E. Clarke wrote in the New York Age:

 “Her…was by far the best of the bill. It was a ghost story and was written with such skill that it rose to the heights of a three-act tragedy that might have been written by O’Neill."

Krigwa sponsored Spence's Fool’s Errand to compete in the Fifth Annual International Little Theatre Tournament, a first for Black theatre artists since the finalists competed in a Broadway theatre. The play won one of four prizes and was published by Samuel French. A dispute with DuBois about the prize money sadly led to the disbanding of the Krigwa Players after this triumph.

Spence received a B.A. in 1937 from New York University and an M.A. in speech in 1939 from Teacher's College, Columbia University. She turned her focus to acting for Columbia University's Laboratory Players, and then returned to her career as a public school teacher. Her thirty-one year career at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn was groundbreaking, especially given that she was a black teacher in a predominantly white school. It was there that she became a mentor to Joseph Papp, who would go on to create The Public Theatre and who cited Spence as "the most influential force in my life." Eulalie Spence died in Gettysburg, PA, on March 7, 1981, at the age of 86. Her obituary did not mention her career as a playwright, saying only that she was a retired schoolteacher.

ARMINDA THOMAS (Director/Dramaturg) is pleased to return to NPTC's On Her Shoulders program, where she previously served as director for Peculiar Sam by Pauline Hopkins and dramaturg for Wine in the Wilderness and Soul Struggle: The Works of Georgia Douglass Johnson. Other recent credits include Mirrors (Parity Productions), Black History Museum...According to the United States of America (HERE); Jazz (Marin Theatre Company/Baltimore Center Stage); Zora Neale Hurston (New Federal Theatre); and The First Noel (Classical Theatre of Harlem). She has served as associate artistic director and resident dramaturg for the Going to the River Festival and Writer’s Unit, and is currently dramaturg and co-producer for CLASSIX.