Rites and Reason Theatre

Rites and Reason Theatre is a theater within the Africana Studies department of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

[2][3] The theatre serves to develop theatrical and visual performance works that articulate and understand the expansive African Diaspora.

[6] The Rites and Reason Theatre was founded in 1970 by professor George Houston Bass in order to give Black students an outlet to express their diverse racial and cultural traditions and ideas.

For Rites and Reason, he also served as a playwright, writing numerous plays including Black Masque and De Day of No Mo.

RPM expanded the typical roles of directors, playwrights, actors, designers, and dramaturgs by setting up playmaking teams and collaborative processes to include scholars, writers, and community persons in creating and developing significant new works.

This method was born of a research project called, “Oral History as an Index to Change” which focused on race relations in Providence between 1920 and 1940.

Most recently, RPM has featured "folkthought", essentially a conversation between audience members and the directorial team that follow the performance.

Katherine Dunham employed the RPM method when exploring the performance ethnography of Afro-Caribbean and African-American styles of culture and dance.

Based on an independent study, students of Professor Rhett S. Jones interviewed African Americans around Providence on the subject of race relations in the city in the early 20th century.