Barbara and Carlton Molette were Atlanta-based playwrights, and faculty at Texas Southern University in Houston, Eastern Connecticut State University, and Spelman College. They were members of the Dramatist Guild, and both started their careers as playwrights, teachers, and production designers. They co-authored two books, Black Theater: Premise and Presentation (1986) and Afrocentric Theatre (2013). The Molettes describe the nature of African-American theater as an expression of culture and as a medium for communicating values. They were part of the “Militant Theater” of the 1970s, which Olga Barrios considered “the most vibrant and prolific decades in Black Theatre,” with plays bursting “out like forceful waterfall of red-blood — expression of a long time-held rage and expression of life” (2008, 13).

Rosalee Pritchett (1970), one of the Molettes’ earliest major productions, is representative of the conflict and change that occurred in the United States during the mid-1960s and 1970s; it portrays responses to the challenges confronting African Americans at the time, raising issues which are still relevant today. The play discards the integrationist view, claiming that upper-middle-class Blacks who have decided to embrace the tenets and values of the White world, living by its standards, are doomed to failure because White society is not ready for that kind of change and because ignoring their own racial and social position as Blacks will destroy their human agency. Rosalee Pritchett was first performed by the Morehouse Spelman Players in 1970, and later staged off-Broadway by the Negro Ensemble Company, together with Noah's Ark. Although lacking the bitterness of Rosalee Pritchett, Noah's Ark (1974) denounces the strategies employed by White America to keep social and economic power inaccessible to Blacks; Noah's Ark also explores Black diasporic identity. It was first performed in 1974 by the Morehouse Spelman Players. Both Rosalee Pritchett and Noah's Ark have all-Black casts and are concerned with both intra-racial and interracial issues of the Black middle class.