"Before the Harlem Renaissance" illuminates early 20th-century black entertainment, theater, and silent film. Robert Levy (1888-1959), a theatre producer from New York, was among the pioneers of the early uplift movement. With over a hundred serious drama productions that Lafayette Players and Levy mounted together, they were among the first to showcase Black actors' talent performing a wide range of sophisticated and meaningful characters at the times when the stereotypical roles were all that was available for African Americans.
Set in Harlem (1916-1919) and Los Angeles (1928-1930), the documentary tells the story of the famous Lafayette Players, an all-black cast drama company, and the Reol Productions Corporation, a race film company founded by Levy in 1920.
Under Levy's management, the Lafayette Players performed in 110 memorable productions. From plays written by Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dumas to George M Cohan, the all-black cast were noted for the quality of their performances.
Robert Levy
Lafayette Theatre, Harlem, West 137 street, New York
Cast:
A'Lelia Bundles - Journalist and Madam CJ Walker great-granddaughter and Biographer
Allyson Nadia Field, Associate Professor, UMC Chicago
Arthur S.Penn - Levy’s grandson
Barbara Tepa Lupack - Author, Race Film Historian
Charlene B. Regester - Affiliate Professor UNC-CH
Christina Peterson - Author, Professor Eckerd College
David Krasner, Author, Professor Five Towns College
Jeff Melnick - Professor, UMASS Boston
Patrick McGilligan - Author, Biographer
Peter W. Wood - Educator, Author
Richard Koszarski, Museum Curator Barrymore Film Center
Susan Curtis, Professor, Purdue University
William Wolf, Writer, Film Critic
Director: Nada Ray
Production: BHR Productions
Abbie Mitchell, Summertime aria performance, composer George Gershwin, 1935
Madame X play, 1917 - Abbie Mitchell, Walker Thompson, Lawrence Chenault *
45 Minutes from Broadaway, musical, composer George M. Cohan, 1906
3 Musketeers play, 1917 - Lafayette players, actors Iris Hall, Walker Thompson, Sidney Kirkpatrick, Clarence Muse *
Aubrey Howard Browser, writer *
Performers Bert Williams and Adah Overton Walker and George Walker, musical In Dahomey 1903, composer Will Marion Cook
Florence Price, African American Harlem Renaissance composer
Macbeth, 1936, performance The New Lafayette Players, director O. Walles, playwright W. Shakespeare, 1606
Clarence Muse, black movie star, 1924
Othello review published in The New York Sun, in 1917 spotlighted Abbie Mitchell, Cleo Desmond, and Andrew Bishop in leading roles
Beginning in 1921, Levy assembled a group of actors from Lafayette Players and went on to produce Hollywood-style race films for Black audiences. Over the next two years, Reol studio made two documentaries, one comedy short, and nine feature-length silent films most notably “The Sport of the Gods” from Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s iconic novel. The movies were based on stories written by Black writers and featured Black actors.
The noted actors who worked with Levy in theatre and film were Evelyn Preer, Clarence Muse, Abbie Mitchell, Charles Gilpin, Edna Morton, Cleo Desmond, Andrew Bishop, and over four dozen more stage and screen African American artists.
Paul Laurance Dunbar published his epic novel The Sport of the Gods in 1902.
