Black Actors Off Broadway
Cohn, Ruby
PETER WEISS WRITES at the edge of the bearable. Marat/Sade, his best-known play, assaults us mainly through the perpetual motion and emotion of a background of actors imprisoned in lunacy....
...when they are brutally murdered, rebellion grows...
...Weiss has often announced his debt to Brecht, and the play begins by hammering us with Brecht's estrangement techniques—harsh lighting, cool music, "epic" narration, and the songs themselves...
...the voices are varied, and each one has range...
...The group has not yet existed long enough to have achieved this by training...
...Later this season, the Negro Ensemble Company will perform a play by Wole Soyinka, and Soyinka is now in a Nigerian prison...
...The Investigation, an oratorio, rivets us to a dry recitative for the fiendish routine at the concentration camp...
...a black hick from the sticks of Angola comes to the capital...
...The diction is precise without being prissy...
...Marat/Sade, his best-known play, assaults us mainly through the perpetual motion and emotion of a background of actors imprisoned in lunacy...
...Then, as Act I moved from the general to the specific, Act II moves outward from the individual to the general—to a general revolution of black against white...
...Weiss' scenic directions emphasize their shock function: "Their presence must set the atmosphere behind the acting area...
...Mark's Playhouse...
...After a litany of white repressive measures, the actors break out into a frenzy of revolutionary joy--singing, dancing, and dismantling the bogey...
...the bogey attempts to make its sanctimonious sounds as each Negro actor transfixes a member of the white audience in his still, hostile gaze...
...But their joy has been earned through torment...
...In The Song Weiss abandons the dazzling theatricality of Marat/Sade...
...Like Professor Esther Jackson, a noted Negro theater scholar, I feared that separate facilities would mean inferior facilities...
...The company has chosen a propitious opener, bending Weiss to their need...
...The first act closes on two separate scenes of white brutality against single blacks...
...the nine actors—five men and four women—wear slacks and jerseys...
...Though the play is staged as a trial, it is accurately entitled Investigation—into the way detention routine develops into inventive sadism, into the way maps and statistics burst into barbarism...
...The play has not yet been published (even in German), and I suspect it will make dull reading...
...The St...
...Mark's Playhouse was also the scene of Leroi Jones's plays, and Jones has been harshly sentenced to an American jail...
...except for the bogey, the stage is bare...
...in the final scene, Anna, a pregnant black servant in the big house, is beaten and kicked so that she loses the child...
...But the Negro Ensemble Company moves in and around Weiss' words...
...But as in Brecht's plays, there is involvement in spite of all the estranging techniques...
...And the nine actors of the Negro Ensemble Company emphasize the rhythms, blend them into the narrative pace, and dance rings around them, on the level stage-floor of the old St...
...But the epic narrator describes the growth of the revolution...
...Weiss' play consists of a series of songs and scenes about this bogey, a mechanical monster...
...in the first, a black "criminal" is hunted down by bloodhounds...
...On the other hand, Ford and Rockefeller are pouring money into so many regional theater groups (not restricted to geographic regions) that it would be criminal to deny funds to a Negro company made up of actors who want to perform together...
...Lee Baxandall's English captures the characteristic German of Weiss—from the staccato rhythms of documentary evidence to the obvious rhymes of imperialist satire...
...Lusitania, wearing masks of fox and eagle, attempts to defend its empire, and receives help from other white powers, one of whom wears a cowboy hat with a red, white, and blue ribbon...
...The cumulative effect of a play about Portuguese Africa written by a German-Swedish Marxist is—celebration of the Negro Ensemble Company...
...They make habitual movements, turn in circles, hop, mutter to themselves, wail, scream, and so on...
...The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey may not actually dismantle that bogey, but it will help break down white supremacy in the American theater...
...Staged as a trial, the oratorio divides into the testimony of Nazi defendants, who have names, and their plaintiff victims, who have numbers...
...the bodies are beautifully disciplined and free...
...But black suffering at white hands has been so ubiquitous that we must all rejoice when blacks break through to joy...
...Like many DISSENT readers, I would guess, I am integrationist by temperament and training, and was therefore reluctant to see the formation of an exclusively Negro theater group...
...their words and movements are accompanied by the playing of four musicians...
...ACT Two OPENS comically...
...It might even make dull theater if played as conventionally realistic agit-prop...
...instead, individual Negro actors must have come—did come, one sees from the program— from all over the country to celebrate with their histrionic gifts and professional competence the creation of the Negro Ensemble Company...
...The Negro Ensemble Company turns the patronizing white cliche to tremendous theatrical effect—these darkies have rhythm, and use it for pathos and farce, satire and revolt...
...This series constitutes an investigation into the persecution and assassination of black by white in the land of the blacks...
...Assembled on stage by the actors, the Bogey symbolizes Lusitania or Portugal, whose African empire has lasted for 500 years...
...rebellion swells into revolution on March 15, 1961...
...But not knowing his place in this white-ruled city, he soon incurs white wrath, and is shot to death before he loses his admiration of all that surrounds him...
...PETER WEISS WRITES at the edge of the bearable...
...As with Brecht, the purpose is didactic—to teach us about Lusitanian oppression in African colonies...
...Weiss' morality is of course simplistic...
...In The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey the center is neither lunacy nor death-camp, but a pop-sculpture, scrap-iron bogey...
...Particularly in that small theater (less than 150 seats), you want to jump and rock into their revolution, but of course you haven't the right...
...WITH ITS FIRST PRODUCTION, the Negro Ensemble Company shows itself the most skilled group performing in New York City—on or off Broadway...
...both blacks and whites practice injustice...
...Weiss may have in SCREEN AND STAGE tended this involvement, moving as he does from the general statistic to the individual black victim...
...And we can all take joy in the joy of the Negro Ensemble Company...
...First a group of blacks ask for schools for their children...
Vol. 15 • March 1968 • No. 2
