ABSTRACT

This chapter explores anti-lynching plays set in white households/private spaces. It examines lynching plays in white households as sites of preliminary, embedded and subsequent lynching performances including a discussion of how these plays perform catharsis through clarification of the lynching event. Lynching plays set in white households foreground these environs as principal settings within the lynching cycle, including three classes: preliminary, embedded or subsequent performances. Tracy Mygatt’s The Noose, the earliest written lynching play set in a white household, dramatizes a privileged white woman’s efforts to combat lynching performances. Corrie Crandall Howell’s The Forfeit also depicts a preliminary lynching performance taking place in a white domestic setting; this time, the result is a duping and scapegoating of an innocent black male, Jeff, who works as a farmhand for Tom Clark, a white man. In The Forfeit, duping and scapegoating constitute preliminary lynching performances taking place in white households when evidence leads to white assailants.