Jim Crow Doesn't Crow Over Broadway

...The point la that here we ne longer have dominant while* entertained by a specifically Negro art, with much of the amusement rising from the peculiarities of the Negro, aa in the exaggerated black face and large white Up* of earlier comics...

...it was a study of persons in life, presented as » social drama—not an inter-racial problem play, but a stuay of universal- forces, of education, greed, decency, passions, as they affect a family...

...neither the metropolitan baseball leagues nor the Metropolitan Opera House has Negro performers on the rolls...

...Rarely, for example, does a single dancer engage a theatre for more than a few successive Sunday...

...In the eyes of that three-quarters of the world whose skin wears other hues, the United States is the standard by which the white races will be judged...

...And the test of our land is its treatment of other than white folks...

...It has wakened In th* spirit of playwrights, performers, audiences—folks...

...Stowe's novel might win sympathy for the Negoo...

...A few Of the Negroes themselves, by their manner of performance or their asm** "The InkspoU," "Brown Habi**'—m*y still be trading on that sense of difference...

...Paul Robeson may look natural as Othello, since that noble is a Moor...

...but, as often, ho grows befogged in the psychological depths of individual problems, and lifts to no suggestion of a general attitude or universal mood...

...Through trial and strain that crew has been welded into a unit, a fighting unit but also a unit of fellowship and love...

...but ethers, aad increasingly...

...A similar receptivity is apparent, In other -fields of the art world...

...Beholding The Green Pastures, w* may smile in enjoyment...

...but the appearance of Canada Lee as Caliban in The Tempett, by the very excellence of his playing, may give prejudice scope for distortion: he represents the subhuman rebelling against the good in man...

...Among the two dozen dancers And the score of singers in this show, the tover^NOgroe* {take part entirely without* distinction, just as though Jim Crow had never ' caw'd...

...It has not pervaded the theatre, much leas th* world beyond...

...but there is not likely to be much sense of fellow-feeling (among the city theatregoers who have never been to a "fish-fry" in their lives) with the naive Negroes who dress up to attend a fish-fry in Heaven...

...There is no pressing of a problem...

...Negroes have protested his playing the part) One Negro, however, does not Create an attitude...

...We are told that the the-six* holds a mirror up to ear selves, but to our conservative selves, for it is the comfortable bourgeois that supports the theatre...

...Men to the Sea may have failings ss a drama, but in its handling of the Negro situation, it comes close to America as we might wish it to be...

...Just go ahead and do a goad job...

...The entertainment is nothing new...

...Stop looking for differences, and they disappear...

...There is no suggestion (ss in earlier all-Negro plays) that only Negroes would behave like this...

...the Negro brings his wife to join the others...

...The same apartness lies like a faint breath over the dwellers in Catfish Row, such folk as Sportin' Life and Porgy...

...Cabin la the classical example out of slavery days: the crude characterisations of the many stage versions of Mrs...

...What is important in South Pacific—despite its various flaws—is that the Negro, without disregarding the attitudes his life amid prejudice has produced, that is, without sentimentalizing the relation of black and white, thinks and acts'as a man, on a par with all the other humans in the play...

...And the Museum of Modern Art has, this season, hung its first one-man show by a Negro painter, Jacob Lawrence...

...there is no change to be looked for until we consider the mixed cast The first dramas in which whites and Negroes appeared together, it would be safe to guess, were plays on the problems of their mutual adjustment...

...indeed, the play is an adaptation of a drama about Poles...

...The dramatisation of Native Son is in the orthodox line: a sharp contrast of blacks and whites, with a resentful Negro breaking through to a frightened murder, and political overtones clouding the social theme...

...It is even more notable in the present sesson's Men to the Sea...

...but even more frequently the singers, the comics, and the dancers, from the early minstrels—from the very dance, Jump Jim Crew, that gives discrimination a name—to the current crooners and swift adepts of jtngle and jive...

...This hamanness, as opposed to action in racial patterns, is a new note in plays about Negroes...

...They do not merely present, they increase, the problem...

...INDIVIDUAL stars, as well as all-Negro companies, have long been well received...

...The remainder of the play treats equally naturally, simply, all moments where a "situation" might develop...

...And their work la seen, aad accepted, on precisely the same basis aa the goad work of any ether artist...

...Plays with an all-Negro cast have not been infrequent Usually, however, the theme or the treatment has been such aa to leave the audience comfortably aware of its difference...

...A similar comfortable sense of superiority gathers.about such a drama as Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jonet, that vivid study of a Negro's sliding back from civilization to primitive superstitions and fears...

...Uncle Tom...

...Even further advance, a thankful innovation, came with the delightful musical Wnedy On the Town...

...Negroes have always contributed largely in our entertainment world...

...Such plays inflame the passions, make both whites and Negroes more conscious of the social sore, and more resentful...

...Similarly, in the Federal Theatre production of Macbeth, transported to a Negro settlement in Haiti, or in the "swing version" of A Mid-lummrr Nighl't Dream, it is the "primitive rouse," the almost savage (we tell'ourselves) love of rhythm, }h* nearness to black magic, to voodoo, to sinister spells, that captures the imagination of the white beholder but holds him still apart...

...The whites are here in the minority—as also in last season's Corkey, at the Blsckfriars Theatre, which pictured a white servant in a Negro home...

...But there is still something of a stunt in the presence of one Negro in an otherwise all-white cast— h'ke the star that spoke Italian in an otherwise English troupe...

...but equality, mutual respect were beyond the concerns of her period...

...hence, one might almost any", there is no problem...

...Of the gun crew of four sailors, one is a Negro...

...And in the growth of this fellow-feeling the essence of democracy is astir...

...The Negro is being presented, and is being accepted, not as of a race apart, but in aspects we all commonly share...

...This is a play of anger, hatred...

...Jest as the tern petit— has faded with the crinoline, and a competent woman fox the field la now just a poet without reference te SOX, SO the Negro artist i* being accepted a* aa actor, a singer—a* a naroaa, without color in mention or thought This may, of course, be a temporary flourishing, to be followed by several seasons of dearth...

...Their gift of rhythm has woven song into our life...

...Here is the story of two Americans, one a Negro, stranded on a Jap-held Pacific isle...

...There is the same essential aloofness even in the most recent hit of this sort, Carmen Jones...

...Anna Lueatta was first produced in Harlem...

...it flares with threat of the riots our land has recently known...

...notably, of the Negro...

...the difference is in the underlying spirit For a long time—and still by many today, for the growth is gradual and even, in some cases, unconscious —the Negro was accepted as an entertainer, but considered a distinct species, apart As Gilbert and Sullivan sing of the buffoon's troubles, so the audience thought of the Negro's color: "They don't mind it, so long as you're funny...

...In plays with an all-Negro cast, we have a current indication that the same human treatment is broadening...

...In our own day, Eugene O'Neill posed the problem of racial intermingling in our large cities, In hU All Ooef* Chillun Got Wing* (in 18*3...

...Pacific, in the same season...

...It has, bow-ever, none of the earmarks of a fad...

...But it hat ihown that our moet teriout concern* can—in Broadway'* effort* to interpret our life, whether feeble or imaih hit*—6* faced honestly and decently, a* all men together mutt face them for the world'* good...

...It is accompanied by no precious Van Vechten attitudes, by no fashionable "slumming" trips to Harlem hot spots or to sea "bow the darker half lives.' It is a workaday manifestation of a matter-of-fact, of a decidedly serious, world...

...Not so, however, such a drama as South...

...It has not prevailed...

...It takes a contemplative spirit, looking back after the performance, to discern the universal qualities within the colorful but colored episodes...

...Brought to Broadway, and presented by Negroes for anyone that wishes to attend (and a hit with white audiences), it is still a serious study of universal forces playing upon and within human souls...

...The wives of the crew are boarding together near the • Navy Yard...

...In the past two seasons, for perhaps the Aral time in theatre history, there have been three eon* tinuous runs of a fortnight or more: two of the three were by Negroes, Katharine Dunham in two engage, ments, and Pearl Primus...

...A new attitude, in a most pressing problem of our time, has come before us...

...The theatre is growing up in democracy...

...Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson are still active in our midst...

...Josephine Baker and Bill Robinson are still in many minds...

...The spectator may congratulate himself on his more favorable background, complacently unaware of the implications within the remark of Sir James G. Fraser, the great student of races: "Scratch a gentleman and you find a barbarian...

...it has caught us into its lively sway aad surge, in our own dancing...

...Perhaps the serious artists, like these last two, have a harder time than those whose offering is sheer entertainment...

...It is in the past two seasons that the change has come...

...When (he landlady objects, the women, taking their cue naturally from the men, declare that all will stay, or none...

...And we have watched many Negro performers: the pathetic but noble slaves of Vrtrh Tom'* Cabin, of coarse...

...Merely reversing the proportions of the color mixture, of course, while it may throw new aspects into bright light, does not essentially alter the situstion—lickspittle and bully are two sides of the one person...

...All stay...

...In this mirror is now revealed a picture, not of tolerance (which implies superior virtue in the one that tolerates) but of growing harmony and mutual taspect...

...Once started, such treatment cannot but continue, and grow...