Harlem Nocturne, a play written and directed by Carleton theater professor David Wiles, performed by the Carleton Players, will debut on Friday, February 19, 2016. Set in New York City in the summer of 1927 at the height of The Harlem Renaissance, this play speaks on color prejudice among African-Americans, class-consciousness, family conflict, the necessity of friendship and the consolations of art and music.
The Harlem Renaissance was essentially the first period in American history where a group of African Americans, primarily well-educated and financially successful, joined together, with the support of organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League, to showcase African-American arts, literature, and scholarship in an attempt to further black equality. This movement, melding into American popular culture through film, the record industry and radio, is arguably the marker for when African-Americans first entered the American mainstream.
Wiles has always been fascinated by the Harlem Renaissance for the fact that it offered early hope for a change in African Americans’ sociopolitical positions before the Civil Rights Movement approximately 3 decades later. As someone who grew up during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, Wiles is interested in the tension between the expectation of social progress and the actual outcomes.
Harlem Nocturne is ultimately about a core contradiction: being American and a black person, being separate and unequal. Revolving around this contradiction are the tensions within the black community with respect to class, internal color prejudice and homophobia. It illustrates how color prejudices arise within communities of color as they’ve dealt with racism. The exploration of it in this play speaks to its longevity.
What differentiates this play from others done by the Carleton Players is the execution of Carleton’s Theater Department’s commitment to perform work that speaks specifically to communities of color. Harlem Nocturne was conceived for a black audience with awareness that a multi-cultural audience would see it. With the nature of this play, it is inevitable that some from a very diverse audience may be uncomfortable at different times and for different reasons; however, Wiles feels strongly that “a play about race that makes no one uncomfortable is a waste of time”.