 While musicals dominated commercial theatre in the 1940s, four dramas about the African Americans addressed the nations racial dilemma.The first, Richard Wright's, "Native Son" (1941), opened at the St. James Theatre on Broadway on 24 March 1941.Wright's novel had firmly laid the responsibility for Bigger's brutality on the doorstep of white America, but in adapting the novel to the stage, Paul Green, a southern folk dramatist, had insisted that Bigger take some responsibility for the murders he had committed.