SOURCE: A review of “Plays for a Negro Theater,” in The New Republic, Vol. X, No. 128, April 14, 1917.

In the following review, Hackett considers Torrence's Plays for A Negro Theater in the context of the conventional depiction of African-American characters and experiences.

Not long after Mr. Edward Sheldon began his career he wrote a play called The Nigger, which aggravated and solidified in one production almost everything that an audience of wine agents might require in a melodrama. There was, as I remember it, a rape committed somewhere off stage. There was a lynching in the wings. There was the imminence of a mixed marriage, a drop of Negro blood being discovered in the hero just in time to save the white fiancee. Mobs, I recollect, tumbled around the house where the fated man was communing with his soul, and these grim deliberations ended in his renouncing the governorship...