SOFTENED VOICES IN THE BLACK THEATER

...The dramatic climax comes in a deathbed scene between grandmother and grandson: she reveals to him her own youthful escapades and failures (previously sketched out in interspersed brief scenes), and forces him to realize that, try as he may, he cannot escape his black origins and can only hope to rise with his black brothers, not against them...

...Then there was silence, an occasional rehash of old characters and situations, and some embarrassing outbursts of egomania...

...Not until winter 1974 did Bullins reenter the New York stage with a new play, first mounted by Woodie King, Jr., at the Henry Street Playhouse, then transferred to Joseph Papp's now defunct experimental stage at Lincoln Center...

...He has transferred his ambitions on to his son's career in the Navy, but these collapse when the son, unwilling to endure racial degradations, throws up his chance to become an officer...

...An older black man who had started as Marxist, complete with a white woman, goes all the way to become a fervent Black Muslim preaching against the White Devil...

...And the tenor of the plays Ward produced reflected indeed the changing mood of the black community, including its radicalization...

...He strains to get away from confinement in blackness, on to college and higher things...

...The years of growing frustration build up toward the rape that frames the play, Bullins's symbol for the relation between the races...

...A black co-ed, for a while "Macho" Monty's woman and carrying his child, lands—after drugs, Lesbos, liquor—in the feminist movement...

...In Joseph Walker's River Niger, the imposing father, symbolized in the title, has had his literary ambitions shattered...

...Ill IN the black theater, Ed Bullins was Black Power's foremost and most articulate representative...

...This does not mean ceasing to be social critics or to work toward major changes in the way men and women, blacks and whites, live...

...We blew it...

...Lee, one of nine children of a black family in a small Pennsylvania town (but collegeeducated and supported by grants in his dramatic efforts), brings us into the world of small-town respectability and family cohesion...

...One of the more complex characters is a Jewish anarchist beat-poet-become-addict, abjectly begging for a fix, at last taunting the black former friend into murderous rage: "We too marched in Alabama...

...Papp also produced Shakespeare adaptations (e.g., Two Gentlemen of Verona) with a black cast...

...their pamphlet plays, street theater, and Afrocult were short-lived...

...But her lament speaks for a whole generation: "We were into America...

...A second, adopted son has become a successful smooth doctor-politician-operator...

...In his own words, "the theme of the play is the destruction of illusion...

...More and more black plays were cultivated in the general, "white" theater, notably by the American Place Theatre, the Chelsea Theatre Group, and in Joseph Papp's widening theater empire...

...The Taking of Miss Janie is an ambitious work...

...Their group involves him, much against his wish, one last time in a foredoomed coup during which, in a last sacrificial gesture, the old man finds both his lost greatness and his destruction...

...Free"man ends up corrupted and destroyed by his unrealistic ambition, saved from a worse fate by commitment to a psychiatric ward—and in the process tears his parents' world down with him...

...Trapped by the needs of his family, he becomes a house painter—escaping his fate periodically in an alcoholic binge...

...The complexities of this process, which might be called "cold integration," and the conflicts it is likely to produce among the people exposed to it, ought to provide a great deal of rich material for black dramatists in the coming years...

...His audience had gradually changed over the years from predominantly white to predominantly black...

...In the '60s there was, for a brief moment, the hope of breaking out of it—first the ecstatic hope of black/white solidarity in the civil rights movement, then the desperate hope of Black Power and militant self-assertion...

...Bullins may not have fully succeeded in dramatic terms, yet that does not diminish his achievement...

...We too were killed in Mississippi...

...That time of high drama and visions of revolution, cultural autonomy and attempts to revive an African heritage has become a thing of the past...

...Black Power, physical and sexual, is now exercised over nasty white gangsters by the black outsider or cop, with a thin Hollywood veneer of moral rectitude, justified no longer by the higher law of revolution but by some sort of "law and order...

...Vicarious gratification is provided for a young black ghetto audience getting back at Whitey...

...A recent interview quotes him: I guess that name just shows my stubbornness...

...Still, the financial rewards remained modest...

...Both the neglect and the advances created new areas and types of conflict (soon to be exacerbated by a deep recession), notably through the spread of an increasingly hopeless urban underclass—and, also, through the simultaneous growth of a new black middle class: college-bred, working in public service, the academy, communications, even the corporate sector...

...He is attracted by her, yet feels he is "kept as a pet slave" (hence the insulting address "Miss Janie...

...Between 1965 and 1970 he created a score of highly dramatic plays—from the very personal and touching A Son, Come Home to the powerful In the Wine Time, Goin A'Buffalo, Duplex, and In New England Winter...

...The company owes its survival in part to the strong personality of its leader, the actor-playwright-director Douglas Turner Ward, a true and dynamic, if 3 06 NOTEBOOK somewhat hammy, man of the theater...

...II AMONG THE NEWER BLACK PLAYS there is a discernible trend to fall back on old virtues—honesty, self-respect, family solidarity, caring...

...The central figures are Monty, student/poet and somewhat autobiographical, and his white fellow-student Janie, full of ignorant goodwill and eager to befriend him in a rather platonic way...

...He always seemed to keep close to the mainstream of black thought in the choice of his material, and he maintained a respectable level of competence in acting and direction...

...You can't do without us, you can't even do without our Jesus...

...His older son has joined him out of filial duty, sacrificing his own plans for a teaching career...

...Her cynical husband makes it from slick radical intellectual to successful businessman...

...Some, like Barbara Ann Teer's National Black Theatre, subsisted in Harlem as a sectarian cult...

...We thought we could make it over...

...With First Breeze of Summer a new black author, Leslie Lee, entered the New York stage in 1975, NOTEBOOK 307 first at the Negro Ensemble Company, then on Broadway...

...Local black theater groups were reduced in scope and means...

...A harsh and bitter judgment indeed, coming from within...

...It attempts no less than to draw the balance sheet of the turbulent '60s, and with almost sadistic (and perhaps masochistic) pleasure Bullins records the failures of those who had set out with high hope and purpose...

...His reaction may or may not be representative, but I wonder whether we have not become too sophisticated and/or cynical to appreciate the deep need for a moral satisfaction derived from maintaining one's integrity in adversity—an attitude perhaps still far more prevalent in the black community than the much more talked about spirit of "rip-off...

...We are nothing but a bunch of freaks, of fuck-offs...

...Philip Hayes Dean's Freeman, for example, set in a Midwestern industrial city, confronts an impatient half-educated son, anxious to "make it fast" through a series of high-flying rip-off projects, with his Southern-born parents—a practical nurse and her husband who, in decades of hard work in a metal forge, has achieved a stable existence while destroying his health on the job...

...The black community now has entered a rocky period of readjustment, of malign neglect by a cynical national leadership—but also of at least partial consolidation of the economic, social, and political gains of the 1960s...

...This has been most noticeable in the Blaxploitation films (Shaft, etc...

...The demise of a separate black theater, as that of separatist politics, was also hastened by ''cooptation," the growing opportunities within the "Establishment...

...It does mean an end to the posturing and violence-mongering that flourished a few years ago...

...One of these is the Broadway musical—such as Wiz, the black Wizard of Oz, or Raisin, the musical version of Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun —both praised by white critics and popular with black audiences...

...q 3 08 NOTEBOOK...

...Next, there are the soap-opera types of black theater...

...I like "black"—it makes a positive statement about what we are—but I loathed the posturing and attitudinizing that went with the total put-down of the word "Negro...

...There is, first, the switch from romantic revolution to romantic violence...

...The only black theater group in New York to survive with undiminished vigor was the oldest and least "radical,"the Negro Ensemble Company...

...But the two key poles of the play are an old devout grandmother revered by all, and her favorite grandchild, the rebellious younger son, a teenager searching for identity...

...The black rebels of the '60s, like their white counterparts, have in one way or another learned to live within "the system...

...Around the central conflict between Monty and Janie—she gradually getting ready to surrender, he biding his time for the brutal "taking"—Bullins develops the path of the other characters: Janie's boyfriend, the lowly token white guy in a black jazz band, winds up in a Buddhist group...

...It helped his company and acting school that he was able to retain much of his financial backing, notably from the Ford Foundation, at a time when grants were severely cut...

...His shocking prison drama Short Eyes, born of his own prison experience and acted by a group of exconvicts, was very impressive offBroadway, but did not thrive on the oversized stage of Lincoln Center's Beaumont Theater...

...For a while, the street theater in New York seemed to be taken over by Puerto Rican theater groups, and in Manuel Pinero they produced a writer of talent...

...Unfortunately, the white audience for black plays has remained rather limited...

...Instead he plans to study law in order to serve his people, having recognized the futility of the revolutionary games of his former pals...

...Together with the "radical" black political groups, much of the new black theater fell by the wayside: many of the playwrights had spent their ardor...

...Compared to his portrayal of black/white youth experience of the '60s, the few attempts by white playwrights (e.g., Michael Waller) remain insipid and superficial...

...Elder's Hollywood work is essentially a return to the old sharecropper South, a celebration of the Negro's endurance, ultimate assertion, and self-respect under adverse circumstances...

...By now, however, the new educated young and relatively affluent black middle class has formed a substantial black audience nucleus for the black theater...

...It is significant that he held on to the ' ` Negro" in the name of his company...

...Its characters are a group of young people, black and white students at a California college, a musician, an agitator...

...Here the family head is a small painting contractor, solid but underpaid, and a paradigm of middle-class virtues...

...A Jewish nymphomaniac ends as the obedient wife of a dominating black, pushing her black baby through the supermarket...

...A new radical consciousness was struggling for expression, and though many of these youthful voices were stronger in intent than content, some genuine, talented dramatists and vivid performers were developing in those years (see "The New Black Theater," Dissent, Winter 1973...

...Thus different authors, in different locales, through changing generations and milieus, reveal the enduring core of the black condition...

...One might think this sort of approach would have limited meaning for big-city youth, but a young black whom I asked about Sounder felt elated by the film's lesson that "you shouldn't give up despite difficulties...

...Another, perhaps more significant version is the "quality" film or TV drama—Sounder and Jane Pittman, both written by Lonnie Elder III, whose earlier play Ceremonies in Dark Old Men is a stark Harlem tragedy...

...We all failed, failed ourselves in the sixties, in the test of times...

...Some disappeared altogether, most notably Robert Macbeth's and Ed Bullins's New Lafayette Theatre and their magazine Black Theater...

...The word "Negro" has a long, honored history...

...The black theater has changed during recent years...