Stage

...Woodie King, Jr., the director of Checkmates, circulated a letter which defended hot the word itself, but the rightness of Sylvester's feeling threatened by the designer as a white man...

...The New York times (July 31, 1988) printed the usual pre-opening article-interview, the kind of news as publicity that conventionally appears in the Arts & Leisure Section...

...The Williamses, their upstairs renters, are incipient Yuppies, over-thinged, who push themselves so hard (he is a liquor salesman, she is a department store buyer) that they seem to be losing themselves and one another...

...I prefer plays that are more complex, more elusive...

...having gained a sense of himself in World War II, has escaped menial jobs to become a contractor and the owner of several properties...

...Customarily such scenes provide the moment of revelation that will iron out the grievances and bring the happy ending...

...One of the points of contention between the young couple in the play is Laura's friendship with a gay designer, with whom she hopes to go into business, and whom Sylvester regularly calls "the fag...

...It is most interesting when Milner violates generic expectations...

...Checkmates is a reasonably efficient play with a sensible point to make...

...We learn all this from flashbacks (which I found awkward) and conversations with the young people, but we get a sense of the Coopers as a couple by the sureness of their playfulness together...

...That means that if you respond negatively to Checkmates you are racist, or-to put it in the vernacular of the play-you can call a fag a fag but not a spade a spade...

...The heart of the letter-unless I, too, am mishearing Milner-is that he rejected the implication that he had tailored the play for Broadway and the white audience that used to be its mainstay...

...STAGE COUNTING LOSSES MILNER'S 'CHECKMATES' Don Milner's Checkmates seems too bland a play to have caused controversy, but it stirred up a tiny tempest when it first opened in August-one that seems to have died down as the play settled into a comfortable Broadway run...

...I suspect that what Watlingon intended was to emphasize the shared material values of both black and white communities and to indicate that the message-if that is not too strong a word for a comedy like Checkmates-has relevance to both audiences which- pace Milner-I tend to think of as one audience consisting of people who can get up the price of a Broadway theater ticket...

...King says that white homosexuals and white critics of ethnic descent, once the oppressed, have become the oppressors...

...A second problem had to do with the response of the gay audience...

...The Coopers have weathered their storms...

...Women in the audience, judging by occasional bursts of applause for Laura's speeches, might have suspected that he was threatened by her insistence on her place as a woman in a no longer male-dominated society...

...Nor should they...

...This is made plain in Sylvester's attack on Laura's idea of self, which he sees as a product of her reading of both black and white women's magazines...

...Yet, dialogue in the theater not only serves characterization, but has a more general use...

...It was a friendly piece, but Milner responded to it in a letter (Times, August 7) in which he insisted that Dennis Watlingon had misheard him, that he wanted to say his say in his own voice...

...If Laura and Sylvester are going to get back together, they are going to have to do it without the help of the Coopers or Cosmopolitan...

...It neither needs nor deserves to be considered controversial...

...The Williamses, neither of them able to understand the intensity of the pressures on the other, come apart at the end of the play...

...Although the couples seem very different, sepa-rated by years and by attitudes toward work, success, and family, they are facing or have faced the same disruptive crises-primarily infidelity and the difficulty of making their way in an essentially white business world...

...We learn about them by watching them in combat and in embrace and-unhappily-by listening to them talk too much on the telephone...

...Sylvester is often confused and frequently angry, but he is essentially likable, particularly as played by Denzel Washington, which means that a kind of acceptability attaches to the label...

...Laura has a kitchen table chat with Mattie, and Sylvester, when he is most in need of help, turns to Frank...

...Miner's distaste for Watlingon's description of Checkmates as "theater whose players happen to be black" is understandable if the phrase suggests accident rather than artistic decision and if it implies some kind of sellout...

...The suggestion is that the Coopers made it because they had to find their own way, and the young people's problems are aggravated by current society's fondness for the overexamined life...

...But this is a Broadway comedy: although the ending for the young couple is tentatively unhappy, there are lines of self-discovery exchanged just before they part and the chance, even the promise, that a little value-shifting might bring them back together...

...It might be argued that a man who made his way out of the Detroit slum would carry his street vocabulary with him and use it within his own home, particularly if the word could be a weapon in a marital quarrel...

...Milner, as playwright and as theorist, has long insisted that black playwrights should write black plays for black audiences, for which they should have an educational function (see What the Wine-Sellers Buy and Season's Reasons), and the white audience is a secondary concern...

...But if you have a taste for the kind of problem comedy that was once a Broadway staple, check out Checkmates (Closed at the 46th Street Theater) GERALD WEALESLD WEALES...

...The older couple, the Coopers, have made their way from the poverty of the rural South to Detroit, where Frank...

...It is very well-acted (I was particularly taken with Ruby Dee's Mattie...

...Here, they are funny, revealing, touching, but they have no noticeable effect on the developing quarrel between the Williamses...

...It concerns two couples living in the same house...

...To understand the response to the reiteration of fag, imagine the couple white, the designer black, and the epithet nigger...

...The play, like most of Milner's work, is lively, perceptive about the physical and emotional details of daily life, overextended, and given to pushing its ideas more forcefully than they need...

...Much of the play is conventional, both in its techniques and its critiques of this gimme decade...