Passing:

Both teams should have:

Irene

Clare Kendry

Nella Larsen

Quicksand:

Both teams should have: I would say only Helga Crane and Larsen are essential.

Both texts:

Optional characters might include (but feel free to suggest others):

Supporting characters, like Jack Bellew, Brian, Ted, and/or Brian Jr. (Passing), or Robert Anderson, Axel Olsen, Anne Grey, Pleasant Green, etc. in Quicksand.

One of the principals in the Rhinelander case, a 1925 court case involving a woman married to a white man who was “passing” for white

Carl Van Vechten: white writer and man-about-town who was central to both the New Negro movement and the broader landscape of aesthetic modernism in NYC. Alternatively, could play Hugh Wentworth, the character in Passing who resembles CvV.

You might get really creative and play one of Larsen’s biographers (Thadious Davis or George Hutchinson), a critic who has engaged Larsen’s work (Judith Butler, or any of the critics in our Zotero biblio, really), a reviewer of her work from the 1920s, a figure associated with the New Negro movement, like Alain Locke, or even an ordinary reader, whom you would richly characterize in terms of race, class, gender, political orientation, and so on. You could also create a character who thematizes other aspects of Larsen’s biography: her work as a nurse or a librarian, the scandal around her alleged plagiarism, her obscurity late in life, or her revival in the 1990s (here might be interesting to play a publisher or the organizer of a conference or cultural prize?).