THE NEW BLACK THEATER

...In this kind of drama, the idiomatic language, the natural expressiveness of voice and gesture, the gift of caricature can come to full bloom, and even weak scripts can prove effective...

...LeRoi Jones/Imamu Baraka draws the images for his revolutionary morality plays from his very own symbolism, concocted—rather powerfully, it must be said—out of sex, violence, and politics...

...And Bonnie accuses the consiprators: "Murder is your last resort, you throwers of paperbombs and exploding bullshit...

...To counter this political and artistic horror it is not sufficient for Bullins to end with a question mark: the man exiting with his gun, followed by offstage gunshots and a scream "No...

...It is the tender story of a 30-year-old wandering son, come home after nine years for a visit to his mother in Philadelphia, a hardworking, worn woman in her fifties, and it reflects Bullins's own loving attachment to his mother "who taught me to read & write/rite," as the dedication to his book Five Plays says...

...The success of the preceding phase of the Negro movement in the early 1960s, aimed at individual equality and a greatly expanded access to education, together with the nationalist impetus of Black Power, have for the first time created a substantial black audience for the theater...

...So far, the integrationist outlook has not produced anything substantial in dramatic art...

...This is particularly true for the work of Ed Bullins, undoubtedly the most important and prolific black playwright...

...setting fire and death to Witey's ass...

...After successfully facing the Mafia-extortionists, a corrupt judge, and assorted temperamental females, he finally succumbs on a dare to the gun of a light-colored weakling intellectual...

...By a notable irony, this black language is gradually being adopted in general use—in the eyes of black radicals a symptom of "cultural genocide...

...A substantial body of dramatic work has sprung up depicting it through raucous humor, bitter satire, and violent tragedy...

...NONE OF BULLINS'S PLAYS is more autobiographical than his A Son, Come Home, a short play that I would rank highest among his works...

...In a way, the old squalor was "safer" than the new "luxury...

...At a time when the American theater has been suffering from aesthetic sclerosis, the new black theater has shown considerable signs of vitality—so far, it is probably the most promising segment of the much-advertised black cultural renaissance...

...It is the story of an ambitious black operator who has taken over a Greenwich Village bar, trying to "make it" against all odds...

...For the sake of political expediency, Jones/Baraka has recently toned down his excesses, but there is no reason to suppose he has abandoned his devotion to racial apocalypse...

...His short play Dutchman signaled in 1962 the start of the new black theater—a scene set in a New York subway where a white woman first provokes a young black, and then stabs him to death...

...MUCH THE SAME applies to the numerous "agitprop" sketches written primarily for street theater groups, some of which are sponsored by semiofficial community organizations...

...The precariousness of this life becomes a central theme in his major plays, such as In the Wine Time, Goin' a' Bui9'alo, and In New England Winter...

...As long as he, and black theater in general, will refuse to allow political and mystical fantasies to interfere with this search, his work, though written and intended for the black community, is certain to reverberate well beyond the ghetto...

...Yet when a talented writer such as Ed Bullins—about whom more later—tries his hand at such "Dynamite Plays," the result, as in Death List, has a certain interest...

...Even where it does not want to be a mere "political weapon," it aims at "raising black consciousness...

...This brief scene, dedicated to "Al Fatah and its striking military wing," is little more than an enumeration of black signers to a pro-Israel statement...

...Ben Caldwell, a young playwright close to the Black Panthers, has the Whiteman/ Devil appear in various guises...

...No...

...Some themes are recurrent—the relation between man and woman, the Tom and the stoolpigeon, violence, addiction and alcohol, the hustler and the petty bourgeois, above all, manhood and self-assertion...

...When I tried to interpret his characters in terms of social types, he showed genuine surprise: "where you see types, I simply show people I know...

...Elder's Ceremonies in Dark Old Men deals with another attempt to break out of the black condition...

...In the end, his wish for sacrificial self-destruction overcomes his reluctance to kill...

...Their opportunity seems to come when Blue, a con man who is camouflaging his bootleg corn liquor business behind the political screen of a "Decolonization Committee," wants the barbershop as a front and recruits the thief for his gang...

...The strength of this kind of black theater lies in the way personal attitudes and conflicts are naturally grounded in social conditions...

...blaze up like napalm in the flash of the explosion and leave not an ash of me behind...

...Basically it is naturalistic theater with strong admixtures of symbolism...

...Though more a discussion than a dramatic action, the play touchingly expresses the doubts and loneliness of a young revolutionary...

...In In New England Winter, a very complex, many-layered play, we get Steve Benson, a studious fellow bringing off the well-planned payroll holdup that will permit him to settle somewhere with his girl and go on studying, only to find he has paid too dearly for his success by killing one of his friends on a misunderstanding, forsaking the love of his half-brother, and driving his girl into insanity...

...leaving his woman and us with the question of who has been killed and by whom...

...An old Harlem barber, his crony, his two sons—one a would-be artist, the other a petty thief—all live on the earnings of a hard-working daughter/ sister...

...THERE HAVE BEEN a number of serious black theater groups, some lasting for several years: besides the New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem there is the Negro Ensemble Company (NET) under author-director Douglas Turner Ward on Off-Broadway and the more recent Cornbread Players with author-director Walter Jones attached to the Public Theater...

...And from the Negro church service it has inherited a ritual, a combination of word, music, and body movement, as well as a rapport with the audience that is enhanced when the happenings on the stage can be experienced as a direct part of one's own life...

...He comes down with heavy irony on the "bourgeois Neegro," rather gently on the earnest civil rights girl or the religious-style political preacher, and savagely on the pretentious black nouveaux-riches imitating Hollywood living...

...Many are more sincere efforts than artistic accomplishments, not surprising in view of the youth of the authors...

...The same surprise answered my compliment on the honesty with which he portrays the destructive and self-destructive side of ghetto life: "I only want to reflect the truth, the inner reality...

...New playwrights, new productions, new companies have appeared in the black theater, all meriting respectful though not uncritical attention...

...In addition, according to surveys published in the magazine Black Theatre, there exist a number of amorphous groups in New York, Watts, and the Bay area in California, in New Orleans, Houston, and Columbus—the most notable among them apparently the National Black Theatre in Harlem...

...Among the more substantial works should be mentioned Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody, Lonne Elder III's Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, and Ronald Milner's The Warning, a Theme for Linda...

...BUT THE BLACK RADICAL, after all, is only a minor aspect of black life in America...

...One reason for such "benign neglect" is, of course, the fact that the new black theater does not address itself primarily to whites...

...A white spectator at the black theater faces obvious pitfalls: he is apt to miss some of the finer points, to be turned off by insults, or to lean over backward in the wish to be fair toward a groping art...

...As Robert Macbeth, director of the New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, says: its task is "to show Black people who they are, where they are, and what condition they are in...

...The author underscores the interchangeability of violence by having the same actors play the parts of revolutionists and officials...

...NOTEBOOK...

...No one is spared, neither Shirley Chisholm ("Super nigger woman traitor .. . Goldberg lover") nor Richard Hatcher ("maybe you could have been something to black people"), A. Philip Randolph ("one of the shining colored hopes of the Left...

...Weakly evoked in Death List, the basic contradiction of revolution—humane ends and violent means—forms the dramatic motive in quite a few black plays...

...Black theater has received its major impulses from the black cultural revolution and from the dramatic quality of confrontation politics...

...Born and raised on the Philadelphia North Side ("not a bad place for blacks 20 years ago, until Temple U. came in"), he joined the Navy and then, in his mid- and late twenties, there followed some college and various jobs in California...

...Steve is torn between a longing to learn and the pull of street vitality...

...Their fling at high life comes to an abrupt end—the young thief is killed during a robbery, the daughter turns streetwalker, and the old man remains, his life broken, reduced to "a time when all he can do is act out the ceremony of a game" and die...

...Not all black theater is on such a simplistic level...

...In this play, as in the best of the others, Bullins genuinely dramatizes his search for truth, for the "inner reality...

...The most successful of these, Gordone's rather old-fashioned play, is for some reason (which may have less to do with its content than the author's politics) despised by the more radical blacks...

...In The King of Soul he comes as fatal tempter, from recordcompany lawyer to aircraft mechanic, while in an equally simplistic joke called Prayer Meeting a burglar, surprised by an Uncle Tom-like minister, impersonates God who transforms the minister into a leader of black revolt...

...Hence the appeal of playwrights that are essentially entertainers like Marvin Van Peebles (Ain't Suppose' to Die a Natural Death...

...Behind the words of his cool revolutionist companions, Jackson senses "the threat of another sort of oppression which, if ever it comes into power, will make of me a murderer...

...Above all, on a vivid and vigorous language that makes up in imagery what it lacks in precision, a language at its best when spoken rather than written...

...The author seems to speak through Jackson, a young poet, and Bonnie, the girl of one of the conspirators...

...I never done too well with bourgeois values" he says, with an instinctive insight into the nature of many a revolutionary...

...Around 1965 he found his vocation in the drama, briefly serving the Black Panthers as their Minister of Culture...

...The reasons for their proposed "elimination" are uttered by a young `Blackman" while cleaning his high-powered rifle, alternating with rather weak remonstrations from his "Black woman" who begs him, "do not fear and distrust [the brothers...

...But does this justify the indifference one detects among white liberals and radicals...

...To survive, this new black theater depends on subsidies from the white establishment— foundations, corporations, and government...

...Bullins's life reflects the path of the new black authors who have arisen in the Northern ghettos...

...The prolific Black Muslim Marvin X, in his child's fable The Black Bird, also makes the White Devil appear in various shapes—President, teacher, storekeeper...

...They have, however, one advantage over their Communist predecessors of the 1930s: they NOTEBOOK appeal to potent group passions rather than to social ideology...

...If they seem different, it is only because they are getting closer to our Blackness...

...This theater uses music, dance, and symbolism freely, but otherwise there is little experimentation...

...Precisely the absence of "aesthetic distance" makes black theater seem so vital to its eager audiences...

...One of its most painful problems is that it must feed from the hand the biting of which is a major reason for its existence...

...I shall not strike my brothers and sisters in the face for the sake of some far-off city which may not exist...

...Toward this end, black theater draws both on natural gifts and a fertile tradition...

...In his plays Bullins shows sympathy with the "street nigger," the hustler who outsmarts the system, both as the old flashy pimp or the new type of smooth scholarship student or "poverty" employee...

...Now in his mid thirties, he has already achieved a solid body of work in less than seven years—some 40 plays, many of them short, but including a number of full-length plays...

...The figure of Steve Benson, a character reappearing in several of Bullins's plays, has obvious autobiographical elements...

...Black theater can also draw on a talent for expressive body movement that makes acting seem to come easy...

...Like all propaganda, they demand to be judged on their effectiveness rather than on their—frequently invisible—artistic merits...

...Hence, the various dreams of escape...

...With few aberra tions—such as Death List—he has stuck to NOTEBOOK 112 what in an interview he explained to me as his aim: to create real people of the real black world...

...of my own" together with his sensuous black woman...

...it can't be...

...In his more recent Madheart, the Black Man attempts to cleanse his Mother and Sister of their white contamination with a firehose in order to avoid having to kill them, while the White Devil appears as a whore "with a picture of Christ pasted over her pussy space...

...In A Black Mass he has three Black Muslim magicians trying to exorcise the Whiteman's obsession with Time, and one of them tries in vain to tame a white monster by teaching him kindness, only to see the monster turn loose, killing, onto the world...

...These characters and their tribulations make even his lesser plays full of life: Duplex, The Fabulous Miss Marie, The Electronic Nigger...

...The favored mode is a primitive morality play in many variations...

...In his case, the Black God is Allah, and the Black Bird of the title, grown used to his cage where he makes a fortune for his white owner, is freed against his will during the burning of the White House...

...Jones/Baraka's language and imagery are extremely violent...

...This contradiction is, of course, not limited to the cultural sphere...

...Both as artist and as black culturalist he was bound to come into conflict with their pseudoMarxist doctrines, and when Robert Macbeth invited him to his New Lafayette Theatre, he came to New York to become its resident playwright and co-director, as well as editor of Black Theatre...

...his plays, like his poems, want to be "dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-jews...

...He clearly prefers the hustler ("I know him better") to the preacher, revolutionary or otherwise...

...But the conflict remains unresolved...

...The cult element is heavily stressed in some of the more bizzare outpourings of the new black theater—except that traditional Old Testament imagery is replaced by would-be African and Muslim mysticism...

...It is expressly written for a black audience, in a black idiom, and frequently has shocking things to say about whites—and Jews in particular...

...This life in itself provides more important dramatic material...

...he accepts the assignment to murder because he'd "like to die...

...This conflict is most succinctly expressed in his big speech in Duplex, where he speaks of thoughts that make him "see the flames of hell that we all live in," and where he therefore wants to renounce his career "in this whiteman's land" in favor of "giving a last ditch try to save my balls to build [a land...

...now a tool of the CIA, Zionism and Nixon"), Bayard Rustin ("I can see the pain and fear of the recognition of your betrayal of black people in your eyes") and Roy Wilkins ("I am going to enjoy takin' you off, ole Roy...

...Their inventiveness makes this language all the more appalling in their racist hatred...

...The people, the community, the culture itself is the only entity that can cure its ills...

...In one play, We Righteous Bombers, Kingsley Bass, Jr., a young black killed in the Detroit riots by the police at age 24, shows the problem of the limits of violence hashed out among a group of guerrillas in a future America of Apartheid, with most blacks in concentration camps, controlled by black guards and black administrators...

...In a few evocative scenes, partly acted out by an anonymous Boy and Girl, it sketches the young man's life and his growing up, from the Philadelphia ghetto through his experiences in California to this reunion, half-missed, halfmisunderstood— each reaching out for the other, each holding back so as not to hurt, and sadly realizing that they have parted ways, she into the consolation of a religious cult, he into Jazz and radicalism...

...a language serving as a code for the oppressed and therefore at times difficult for the uninitiated...