Edith Juliet Rich Isaacs began her career in theater in 1904 as a critic for Ainslee’s Magazine. By 1918, she became editor of the influential magazine Theatre Arts. It was then that she established herself as one of the most important and influential members of the American theater community. One of Isaacs’s main projects was the promotion of a national theater. She believed very strongly in the connection between theater and life; accordingly, she felt that a rich national American theater, rooted in American folk traditions, could enrich American life. She did not believe that theater in New York was fulfilling this purpose because it was too commercial, largely inartistic, and dull in general. Instead of following the uninspired paradigm of theater in New York, Isaacs urged Americans to go to “the four corners of the country and begin again, training playwrights to create in their own idiom, in their own theatres” (quoted in Martin 1996, 26). Also, Isaacs believed that in order for Isaacs, there to be a national theater—a national anything, for that matter—the American Negro must have an important role. Not only must black Americans be included in a national theater, she asserted, but the folk tradition she saw as vital to the existence of a national theater was most alive in black communities. In the June 1935 issue of Opportunity, Isaacs said that “the American theatre and the American Negro had a world of good things to place at each other’s service if the road between them could be cleared. And . . . these things, rightly used, would enrich not only the theatre, but the whole of life” (174). With that, she set out to clear the road.

In August 1942 Isaacs devoted an entire issue of Theatre Arts to “The Negro in the American Theatre.” The forty-nine-page feature included Isaacs’s narrative along with copious photographs of actors (Ira Aldridge as Othello, Charles Gilpin in The Emperor Jones), productions (Porgy and Bess, The Green Pastures), and the like. Five years later, in 1947, Isaacs used this project as the basis for a landmark book-length study, also called The Negro in the American Theatre. In the introduction to this book, she stated her goal, again with an eye toward a unified national theater, and added: ”The goal may not be reached until it is no longer possible to isolate the story of the Negro from the much broader panorama of the American theatre as a whole, in which the Negro plays his part as actor, dramatist, citizen. But at least the road is open now” (17). Alain Locke praised this goal, remarking: ”The Negro in the American Theatre is all the more important because [it is] told in the overall context of the development of the drama of American life. . . . The story of the Negro’s part in all this and of his progressive integration with it profits greatly through being told as an integral part of the general story.” Locke also said that Isaacs was the most “consistent and constructive” friend of Negro drama (1948, 8–9). Isaacs was indeed a constructive friend; almost single-handedly, she opened the previously locked door of American theater to African Americans. Biography Edith Juliet Rich Isaacs was born on 27 March 1878, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; her parents were Adolph Rich and Rose (Sidenberg) Rich. She graduated from Downer College (later Lawrence University) in 1899 and became a reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel; she became literary editor of the Sentinel in 1903. She married Lewis M. Isaacs, a lawyer, in 1904 and moved to New York. She wrote for Ladies’ Home Journal and was a drama critic for Ainslee’s Magazine; she was named editor of the magazine Theatre Arts in 1918 and served in that capacity until 1946. She worked with Alain Locke to sponsor the Blondiau Theatre Arts Collection of Primitive African Art. She edited Theatre: Essays on the Arts of the Theatre (1928), Plays of American Life and Fantasy (1929), The American Theatre in Social and Education Life: A Survey of Its Needs and Opportunities (1932), and Architecture for the New Theatre (1935). Isaacs aided in the creation of the National Theater Conference in 1925 and the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA) in 1935; she also served as ANTA’s first vice president. In the mid-1930s, she was often consulted by Hallie Flanagan of the Federal Theater Project. Isaacs devoted the August 1942 issue of Theatre Arts to “The Negro in the American Theatre” and made this short narrative into a book of the same title in 1947. She relinquished the editorship of Theatre Arts to Rosamond Gilder in 1946. Isaacs died on 10 January 1956, at age seventy-seven.