SOURCE: "On Black Theater," in Theater, Vol. 9, No. 2, Spring, 1978, pp. 59-61.

In the essay, below Baraka discusses the commercialization of American theatre and the role of the Black theatre as an alternative to traditional American theatre.

At the end of 1975, beginning of 1976, I wrote two plays. The shorter one is called S-1, and the other which is called The Motion of History is about four hours long. I'm not writing plays regularly—perhaps that's why they come out so long. I'm now writing a play called The Factory that I hope to have produced soon. We have a workshop called "The Yenan Theater Workshop" that meets in New York. We're getting ready to do a poetry reading of revolutionary poetry from around the world, and then we're going to orchestrate it with music. We're going to put it together so we can do it in Soho, in a...