The canon of African American religions continues to grow. Numerous studies reveal the ways in which the faiths of black people found expressions throughout the centuries of American life. In this book, Prentiss argues that a “highly educated and activist” class of playwrights in the early twentieth century, largely guided by humanism, employed their plays as forums for fighting the stereotypes placed upon African Americans. This study is a cultural history that displays a rich tradition of religious and theological discourse in the stage plays of prominent and lesser-known theatrical productions.

In chapter 1, Prentiss shows that African American theater inherited the tensions of the larger African American culture. He argues that a prerequisite to understanding the depictions of religion in the stage plays of African Americans is familiarity with the class relations of black playwrights, the state of the theater within the African American community, and the religious movements of the time. In order to argue this clearly, Prentiss identifies the class and cultural shifts within the Great Migration of African Americans from the southern portions of the United States to the north. The more “progressive” and/or educated strands within northern black Christianity and black communities negotiated the presence of African Americans with folk-based religious beliefs and practices. Labeled by the “romantic racialism” of social scientists and intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, African Americans were caught within the tensions that played out in the class dynamics of the race. Yet, northern-educated African American playwrights began to see folk traditions as a basis for “realism” in their productions. Connecting the developments of African American stage plays to the broader shifts in theatrical performances (i.e., Ireland's folk theater and Moscow's Art Theatre), Prentiss claims that white and black playwrights struggled with the notion of “authentic” portrayals of black life. From Ridgely Torrence's Three Plays for a Negro Theatre to later stage plays by African American playwrights, religion remained a topic for debate.

In chapter 2 Prentiss contends that several stage plays in the 1930s offered “radical critiques” of Christianity. These plays and playwrights wondered aloud about the value of Christianity for African American people. Prentiss presents a close reading of plays by Eulalie Spence, Willis Richardson, Andrew Burris, Langston Hughes, and Owen Dodson to show that previous notions of respect acknowledged by these playwrights and others toward Christianity shifted. Prentiss selects representative works by these artists that range from cynicism to outright disdain for the tenets expressed in conservative Christian beliefs. For example, in Burris's You Mus' Be Bo'n Ag'in, the religion can stand on its own—without the aid of the church. The Christians in this play are too busy putting their hands in the pockets and business of Clem Coleman and his common-law wife, Eliza. The preacher and church members are morally unfit to represent the “Christian ideal.” And the anti-hero of the play, Clem, becomes its paragon by interrogating the church and its traditions.

Chapter 3 finds Prentiss arguing for the existence of four types of plays that highlight theodicy and humanism: refusal of motherhood, exposing the church, awakening human agency, and futility of prayer. Anti-lynching plays by persons such as Angelina Grimké raised questions about God's presence in the midst of human suffering. Prominent women characters in these plays questioned the wisdom of bringing children into the world to suffer. Other plays challenged the passive nature of congregations that do little to nothing—other than pray—to save their people from the violence enacted by white supremacy and its agents. Although they had no simple answers, Prentiss writes that anti-lynching plays “functioned as a form of propaganda aimed at humanizing the victims of lynching and calling attention to the complicity of those standing idly by to let these crimes occur” (108).

Chapters 4 and 5 present the ways in which the sensibilities of primarily northern-educated black playwrights shaped the conversations about religion in a way that expressed their dreams and hopes for African Americans. These playwrights wanted to convict and empower people who practiced “premodern and unenlightened Christianity” (131). In chapter 4, Prentiss maintains that writers such as May Miller and Willis Richardson cast southern Christianity and the conjuring traditions of Africa as problems for racial uplift. Education was the salvation for the race in Miller's Within the Shadow and Richardson's The Deacon's Awakening. In chapter 5 Prentiss claims that Christianity was not always the problem. Instead, works by Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Edmonds depict Christianity as an agent of redemption.

Historians of American religion can celebrate Craig Prentiss for this wonderful contribution to the field. Prentiss and others, such as Judith Weisenfeld (Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949, University of California Press [2007]), enlarge the canon of sources in American religion. Prentiss identifies for the reader the value of mining popular culture and its varied expressions in entertainment and recreation to produce a significant reading of African American religion. Though mostly limited to black Christianity and the northern critique of its southern practices, Prentiss produces a compelling and inviting narrative. With time, historians may uncover what southern African American playwrights thought of these theatrical productions. (We may, moreover, find more plays by black southerners from this period.)

Prentiss's book is an accessible read that undergraduate and graduate seminar courses of American religion in the twentieth century should include. The illustrations, notes, bibliography, and thorough index will aid researchers in religion and theater history. This book contributes to ongoing conversations that shift our notions of black religion(s) in the twentieth century. More than anything Craig R. Prentiss's noteworthy book is one of the only—if not the only—book-length studies of the religious aspects of the African American theatrical experience.