"The Chitlin Circuit" by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The New Yorker (Feb. 3, 1997), 20 W. 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson’s call last year for an autonomous black theater for black Americans (subsidized by foundations and government agencies) still has the stage world in a tizzy. In January, he faced off with critic Robert Brustein, founder of the Yale Repertory Theatre, in a sold-out debate in New York’s Town Hall. "What next?" said Brustein in the New Republic. "Separate schools?" Overlooked in all the hullabaloo, observes Gates, head of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University, is the fact that a thriving black theater for the masses already exists: the "Chitlin Circuit."

It was born during the 1920s, when the Theater Owners Booking Association brought plays and other entertainments to black audiences throughout the South and Midwest. Though the association did not outlast the decade, the market it created—disparagingly labeled the Chitlin Circuit—did. Playing in theaters and school auditoriums, black touring companies crisscrossed black America, Gates says, providing "a movable feast that enabled blacks to patronize black entertainers. On the whole, these productions were for the moment, not for the ages. They were the kind of melodrama or farce— or as often both—in which nothing succeeded like excess. But the productions were for, by, and about black folks; and their audience wasn’t much inclined to check them against their Stanislavsky anyway." They still aren’t.

Today, working- and middle-class black Americans in the roughly 40 cities on the Chitlin Circuit go to see plays such as the one Gates saw in Newark, New Jersey: Adrian Williamson’s My Grandmother Prayed for Me. As art, Gates says, the play makes the TV sitcom Good Times "look like Strindberg." Yet the play deals with matters— gang violence, crack addiction, and teenage pregnancy—of pressing concern to the Newark audience, as its members’ intense engagement with what was happening on stage demonstrated.

The play’s comic moments, Gates says, put "all the very worst stereotypes of the race...on display, larger than life." The exclusively black audience was able to laugh uninhibitedly, without having to worry that whites might mistake the portrayal for an accurate depiction of black life. "You don’t want white people to see this kind of spectacle; you want them to see the noble dramas of August Wilson, where the injuries and injustices perpetrated by the white man are never far from our consciousness," Gates observes.

The people responsible for the Chitlin Circuit shows, he writes, "tend not to vaporize about the ‘emancipatory potentialities’ of their work, or about ‘forging organic links to the community’: they’d be out of business if black folks stopped turning up. Instead, they like to talk numbers." Some of the plays have grossed $20 million or more. (However, these large sums have attracted some criminal "investors," Gates notes.)

The "most successful impresario" of the Chitlin Circuit, Gates says, is a man named Shelly Garrett, who claims that his 1987 play Beauty Shop has been seen by more than 20 million people, and that he himself is "America’s No. 1 black theatrical producer, director, and playwright." Garrett has never met August Wilson; Wilson has never heard of Garrett. "They are as unacquainted with each other as art and commerce are said to be."

In an America that is mostly white, it is inevitable that the audience for serious plays is mostly white, Gates points out. "Wilson writes serious plays. His audience is mostly white. What’s to apologize for?"