Robbie McCauley 1942 - 2021

Robbie McCauley was an active presence in performance art and avant-garde theater for nearly five decades. She first came to prominence as one of the early cast members of Ntozake Shange’s groundbreaking play for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf on Broadway in the 1970s. But she was best known for her original work that was rooted in the African-American tradition of storytelling and pointed towards expansion of public discourse over issues of race/ ethnicity and class in this country and abroad.

 

In the 1990s, she received both an OBIE Award (Best Play) and a New York Dance and Performance (BESSIE) Award for Sally’s Rape, which she wrote, directed and performed in many locations nationally and internationally. In the same decade, she worked with The Arts Company on Primary Sources, a series of three multi-media theater works dealing with race and class relations in this country using pivotal events from the 1960s and 1970s in Mississippi, Boston and Los Angeles as her starting points. One of her more recent solo pieces, SUGAR, examined her struggle and survival with diabetes as connected to slavery, war, work, romance, food and the stories of others who have a history with “sugar” -- literally, medically and metaphorically.

 

​A professor in the Department of Performing Arts and later professor emeritus at Emerson College in Boston, Robbie also taught at City College of New York, Hunter College, Mount Holyoke College, Boston College and New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Widely anthologized, her work is included in Extreme Exposure; Moon Marked and Touched by Sun; Performance and Cultural Politics; and

Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic. Additionally, she was among 50 USA Artist Fellows for 2012 and received the IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Solo Performance,

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In May 2024, Theatre Communications Group will publish The Struggle Continues: Robbie McCauley: Scripts, Essays, & Reflections, 

which will contain the scripts for her Sally's Rape, Indian Blood, SUGAR and Jazz 'n Class as well as introductions to each play and additional essays by McCauley and other leading writers knowledgable about her work and legacy.

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Marie Cieri:

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Robbie died of congestive heart failure on May 20, 2021. There is, of course, so much more that could be written here about Robbie's life and work, but Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times did such a good job on her obituary for the newspaper that I will leave it at those facts and testimonials for now. It took me a full year before I could write anything about Robbie's passing, and I'm actually working on this particular webpage on May 20, 2023, which is two years to the day after her death. it's still very hard.

 

So, instead, I will include something I think Robbie would have liked here, a chapter she and I wrote together in 2007 about "participatory theater" for a book titled Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting people, participation and place, published by Routledge in 2007. "Wrote" actually is not the correct word: I recorded a dialogue between Robbie and me on the topic in relation to Primary Sources, transcribed it, and then Robbie and I edited it and wrote an introduction and conclusion. The chapter is titled "Participatory theatre: 'Creating a source for staging an example' in the USA,' and it can be accessed here.

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I will be publishing a website of my own in early 2024, and, undoubtedly, there will be more there about Robbie and the work we did together through and beyond The Arts Company. There was so much of it. There also may be more here, so check back later! As I wrote on Facebook about Robbie on May 20, 2021: "... family member Ed Montgomery said to me recently, 'Robbie can't just leave,' and he's right. I and so many others learned enormously from her, and let's trust that endures, not just in memory but also in action."  Despite everything, Robbie was just about the most hopeful person I've ever known, so revisiting her work and her words seems very important, now and in the future.