ABSTRACT
With the recuperative projects of scholars such as Kathy Perkins, Nellie McKay, Bruce Kellner, and James Hatch, women writers of the Harlem Renaissance are finally receiving attention within the field of theater studies. This attention is long overdue. While the Harlem Renaissance is a slippery historical category, no scholar would dispute African-American women's significant contributions to the artistic milieu that existed in northern U.S. cities of the 1920s. Marita Bonner was one such woman. Bonner published essays, short stories, and plays in The Crisis and Opportunity from the early 1920s through 1941. She earned many awards from those publications as well as the regard of fellow writers such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Willis Richardson. Her one-act play, The Purple Flower, was the prize-winner in The Crisis's 1928 playwriting contest. Decades later, this “non-realistic,” “expressionistic,” or “allegorical” piece has been hailed by critics as “possibly the most provocative play” by an African-American woman in the first part of the twentieth century (Wilkerson 1986:xvii), and as “one of the most unusual plays ever written on the subject of black liberation” (Hill 1986:419).
