Towards a Queer Black Feminist Theatre Aesthetic: Black American Theater by Three Black Female Playwrights in the Years 1915-1920

\u22Black women playwrights in particular have ensured its [Black culture\u27s] survival through creating performance pieces that reflexively evaluate their life experiences\u22 (Sunni-Ali). This dissertation is an analysis of three, queer, black female playwrights - Mary Powell Burrill, Angelina Weld Grimké and Alice Dunbar Nelson - from the early twentieth century who did just that. I am interested in the reflexive analysis of black life in America that their plays offered their audiences. I am interested in how these plays reached black audiences - their manner of disbursement and performance - in magazine publications such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People\u27s The Crisis and Margaret Sanger\u27s The Birth Control Review. I landed firmly with the first, professionally produced, non-musical dramatic piece of black theater created by a black female playwright, Rachel, by Angelina Weld Grimké (Brown-Guillory 5; Perkins 8). In 1919, The Birth Control Review, an \u22advocacy publication published in the US in the early 20th century by the American Birth Control League\u22 (\u22The Birth Control Review Archives\u22) published Mary P. Burrill\u27s They That Sit in Darkness, the second subject of this dissertation. The third subject, Mine Eyes Have Seen, by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, was published in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People\u27s magazine The Crisis, in 1918. An analysis of these three plays revealed early evidence of a queer black feminist theatre aesthetic as an early 20th century foundation of black drama. Burrill, Grimké and Dunbar-Nelson created a subversive black, queer, feminist theater that created fully fleshed black identities, in particular black female identities, in situations that reflected black existence of the time period. Through their publication in magazines, the work remained mostly within the community and acted as a model for rehearsing black identity in the sacred and safe spaces of the black community