THE future of African American theatre, its history shows, swings by an intricately woven hanging rope, on which sway the classes, periods, and schools of drama, along with the theatre people, organizations and coalitions. So robust and dancing is this theatre that it invites forgetting. Hidden is James Hewlett, “de son of New York” who made handkerchief-waving women and ale-swigging men forget “de vinter of our discontent”: Manuel Noah plaited the murder and mayhem in and of Mr. Brown's Richard III and his African Grove Theatre. Noah knew that without strong cables to hold up the laughter loads, African American theatre organizations would so often be born and die that there would not be certificates enough to record them, nor graves enough to bury them. If only the publisher and editor Beth Turner had been there to warn Mr. Brown:

Suppose that Mr. Brown had listened. He would have knitted tougher ropes, opening lines to the African American leadership in New York City.