Abstract: Toni Morrison’s play Dreaming Emmett premiered in 1986 in Albany, New York, where it had a successful one-month run. However, Morrison refused to continue with the play’s development and withheld its circulation. Drawing on Morrison’s archives and an interview with the play’s co-producer, this essay ruminates on how the legal and financial conditions of theatre collided with Morrison’s ideas for creative control. With Morrison’s tremendous cultural capital as an internationally renowned novelist, she could contest practices she found exploitative. The essay takes on Morrison’s direct engagement with theatre to divine covert power dynamics that have made mainstream theatre a financially and professionally inhospitable space for Black artists.
Rhaisa Williams (Fri,) studied this question.