In Jonathan Shandell's new history of the American Negro Theatre (ANT), the Harlem-based group is finally getting the attention it is due. There has long been a need of a dedicated monograph and Shandell's readable, detailed, and unpretentious work offers much-needed insight into the company's productions and their inner workings throughout their ten-year history. Admirably, Shandell goes beyond the standard academic chronicle by dedicating three chapters of the work to the decade of the theatre's existence and then four chapters to the legacy of the ANT, bolstering the theatre's importance and making important connections across generations of African American theatre artists.

Shandell argues that, from the beginning, the ANT faced a “fundamental ideological tension” between the desire for self-expression and the theatre's policy of unprecedented collaborations with white theatre artists. This created an “ever-present symbiosis between diverging ideologies of black cultural autonomy and liberal integrationism” (2). Shandell believes that this conflict and the ANT's diverging approaches to it remain central to the experience of black theatre makers for the rest of the twentieth century, a legacy captured in his vision of the “long civil rights era.” The threading of the needle between “ethnocentrism and integrationism” becomes the study's central concern and Shandell succeeds in pulling attention away from a strict binary of integrationism and separatism in favor of an examination of the negotiation and weaving between them. Shandell demonstrates the nuance in these endless acts of brokering by artists, but there is value in simply coming to terms with the persistence of the unfortunate dichotomy faced by black artists that was first articulated by W. E. B Du Bois and then faced by groups from the ANT to the Classic Theatre of Harlem (founded in 1999).

Of significant interest are the book's second and third chapters, which examine specific productions by the ANT. Chapter 2 investigates three plays by black playwrights, and paints a picture of a developing African American dramaturgy that works from the “bricks” of “European and Euro-American traditions to build a distinctive African American drama” (44). Shandell maintains a clear focus on the position and response of the Harlem community for which the plays were intended, enabling him to mark as “a creative high-water mark for the company” the forgotten work Natural Man (1936) by Theodore Browne (61). This reorienting of the theatre's work revises prior assumptions about the theatre's most commercially successful piece, Anna Lucasta (1936), which is the focus of the third chapter. There has long been a sense that Anna Lucasta was, in the end, damaging to the institution of the ANT. Shandell offers clarity to that muddied assumption, considering the economic, racial, cultural, and artistic constituencies of the production (all of which are interrelated).

Moving past the closure of the ANT, Shandell chooses case studies that cumulatively demonstrate the reach of the theatre's legacy. He dedicates a chapter each to Frederick O'Neal, Alice Childress, and Sidney Poitier before concluding with more contemporary examples. His attention to O'Neal and Childress is especially valuable, as O'Neal's contribution to American theatre, in particular, has been overlooked. He was not only an actor with an impressive career, but a president of Actors’ Equity, a role in which, according to Shandell, he continued to walk the tightrope of racial politics in the American theatre using a balancing act he learned at the ANT. Childress too deserves note and, though her plays have been examined by other scholars, it is Shandell's contextualization of her work as an extension of the ANT's legacy that is so important here. Some of Shandell's objects of study can seem arbitrary. For example, the presence of two members of the ANT acting troupe (Early Hyman and Clarice Taylor) on The Cosby Show does not necessarily qualify it as germane. But Shandell is interested in the long view and his demonstration of the perpetual snags and barriers that African American performers faced across the decades still plays out clearly in this somewhat distant field. In the end, it is Shandell's ambitious attempt to trace the ebbs and flows of influence, inspiration, and legacy over a sixty-year period that distinguishes The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. His approach loosens the restrictive periodization of African American theatre for a more nuanced understanding of artistic intent and process.