The Plays of Carlton and Barbara Molette: The Transformative Power of African-American Theater pp. 94-114

Abstract

My paper will explore several plays of Atlanta based playwrights Barbara and Carlton Molette, former staff at Spelman College and members of the Dramatist Guild. The first play, Rosalee Pritchett (1970), is clearly representative of the social analysis and change that occurred in the United States during the mid 1960s through the 1970s, and it portrays responses to the challenges confronting African Americans at the time, raising issues which are still relevant today. The play discards the integrationist view, claiming that upper-middle class Blacks who have decided to embrace the tenets and values of the White world, living by its standards, are doomed to failure because White society is not ready for that kind of change and because ignoring their own racial and social position as Blacks will destroy their human agency. The second play that falls into this category is Noah’s Ark (1974) as representative of the “drama of accusation” or “protest drama.” Although lacking the bitterness of the previous play, it is committed to denounce the strategies of White America to keep Blacks away from social and economic power. As Elizabeth Brown Gillory suggests in her study about Black women’s plays, Barbara Molette’s play Rosalee Pritchett can be classified as a “drama of accusation” or “protest drama” because it advocates that Blacks should disassociate themselves from White society (1988, 20). I will argue that the Molettes are part of the Black intellectual tradition that Manning Marable claims is at the core of African American cultural expression which gives shape to the concept of African American studies (Marable, 2000, 1). The purpose of this paper is to analyze several plays written by Carlton and Barbara Molette, and their contributions to the field of not only Black theatre but also Black studies.