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One way to look at the complexities of black drama is to concentrate on the relationship between black drama and its audience. The first drama written by a black was able to be staged only with the efforts of whites with philanthropic intentions. The black theatre provided a special confrontation, for socioeconomic reasons, predominantly white, with a world created by a black playwright out of his own experience. The living presence of black actors created a significant difference between the experience of writing a play about blacks and that of reading about them from the printed page. It is certain that it was a tremendously complicated matter for a man to expose his ideas and feeling from a stage to an audience that frequently wanted either to ignore or to exploit those ideas. However, without the support of whites it was not possible for a black play to get staged at all. Further, even as plays by blacks moved onto the stage as their playwrights confronted the dilemma of adapting to a white audience, the playwrights worked with limited experience and knowledge of the theatre, as well as with concerns about the effectiveness of their dramaturgy. The white audience forced them to portray black people as the whites wanted to see them, rather than as the playwright knew them, regardless of whatever benign intentions might have motivated the whites. Even if there were black audiences, they were unaccustomed to the theatre and unused to the idea of thinking about it for themselves in terms of themselves. The problem of audience is not limited to a white audience. Throughout American history, the black majority has favored cultural assimilation and yet many blacks have supported separatist ideology. On the one hand, black playwrights are expected to resist moving into a polluted mainstream, to remain separate in their blackness and thereby to create a satisfactory sense of self, not just one imposed upon them by a dominant white society. On the other hand they are encouraged to support the assimilationist ideology and help their own race to move into mainstream society. Black playwrights have to struggle not only with their own race but also with the white audience. The moment any black playwright starts writing, this problem of audience is confronted, consciously or unconsciously. To whom shall playwrights address themselves, to black people with radical separationist ideology or to those who want to be assimilated into mainstream American culture? Answering this becomes a serious concern for black playwrights. Even today black playwrights are more or less in the same position they were in a hundred years ago. Black playwrights have been forced to make compromises with white middle-class society that have cost them their racial authenticity. The lack of a cultured black middle-class audience to support ‘black drama’ is still a major obstacle impeding its development. A black aesthetic will be viable among playwrights only when artists and audience alike feel the need for a genuine black drama.