The Uses of Indignation
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The Uses of Indignation As the situation of the Negro in this country comes to its climacteric—possibly to the threatened conflagration—the theater,...
...The program proper begins with readings from Alexander Falconbridge's Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (1788...
...it is capped with a wicked one...
...proceedings from the Ku Klux Klan trials of 1871, with some first-hand evidence from Negroes that relates a story of brutality similar to those that came out of Mississippi in 1963...
...As he ends his harangue a knife is produced, there is a killing (I am straining not to give away the exact ending) and, as in an Ionesco play, the cycle begins afresh...
...This one-act play by LeRoi Jones now joins Beckett's chaste Play (reviewed earlier in these columns) and 'Arrabal's The Two Executioners, a negligible blob of talk about another of those poppaguzzling mommas, to make up a carefully ill-assorted evening at the Cherry Lane Theatre...
...Goaded at last into the reply for which the author has set up the plot, Clay gets to his feet and drowns the house in a concentrated dose of polemic...
...By turning his play outward during Clay's speech, instead of inward, Jones dissipates its momentum, substitutes violence for dramatic conviction, and makes Clay into a vague spokesman for the Negro as alienated hero, when he might have been a particular man with a particular set of grievances...
...and a grotesquely funny letter from Father Divine to one of his constituents...
...She moves and speaks with a simplicity that is resolved only after ardous preparation...
...For what he in fact does is to assault the spectators...
...But the majority of the 26 principal items were taken by Duberman from remote sources, some of them out of print...
...We want to get into the act, even if our applause is less appreciation than an effort to dispel our discomfort...
...Coquelin said of Talma that he did not fill his roles, he created them...
...Now and again she calms down in order to lure some confidence out of him and then shatter it...
...She throws back her head and screeches with laughter: "A black Baudelaire...
...Edward Parone's hysterical direction aggravates matters...
...Even the few interviews and other colloquies do not develop as scenes but as individual speeches...
...a placatory address by Booker T. Washington and a retort from W.E.B...
...Negro and white alike, we offer ourselves to the scourging and we have ourselves to blame when we meet up with a play like Dutchman, which is only too anxious to punish us...
...Her taunts rise in volume...
...Admittedly, they go out into Commerce Street afterward shaking more than a little and laughing with a catch in their throats...
...We audiences still respond with a mixture of unease and eagerness...
...when he refuses, she calls him an Uncle Tom...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The Uses of Indignation As the situation of the Negro in this country comes to its climacteric—possibly to the threatened conflagration—the theater, a conscience-stricken institution, does what it can in its limited way...
...At least, we are doing something...
...and a montage of sentences from recent magazines and newspapers opens and closes the evening...
...Since its meanings and continuity come out with disturbing clarity, nobody can accuse In White America of being theatrical tokenism...
...It ends with a description from a book by Daisy Bates of a 15-year-old schoolgirl's attempt to enter Central High in Little Rock...
...she can hold a pause that rings with what has gone before and announces what is to come, yet is total silence and immobility...
...Jones, a good poet, knows how to tear off a fine line...
...If there were no other excuse for greeting In White America warmly, Miss Foster would be reasons abundant...
...She reads his character with contempt, takes issue with him for wearing an innocent three-button suit, challenges his virility, and then fends it off...
...It puts an impossible weight on the surface effects, which crack open in places...
...A neat line...
...Dutchman takes place in a New York subway car...
...That being so, why doesn't Clay reply to her...
...What is the nature of Lula's outburst...
...Thomas Wentworth Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870), for example, has recently been reprinted in no less than three editions...
...She is only an artist...
...she invites Clay to come out of his white man's respectability and join her in a frenzied dance...
...a venomous speech by a Southern senator in defense of white maidenhood...
...But now other passengers have boarded the train, and their arrival unhinges Lula altogether...
...Sojourner Truth's speech in favor of women's suffrage, which must be one of the four or five peaks of American oratory...
...They must push them, hound them, confront them...
...She asks him what he hopes to be...
...Du Bois...
...There are honorable precedents for the drama that wants to force a spectator to become The Antagonist, and they go back beyond the angry young men in England and Odets and John Howard Lawson in the Group Theater of the '30s to Hauptmann, Zola, and the militant social drama of the 19th century...
...A few of them are familiar...
...The play's mode of presentation is again, for the most part, a direct address to the audience...
...The uptown machinery may click frantically over the arrival of personalities like Barbra Streisand, while Miss Foster comes in unobserved...
...But then she is not a "personality...
...The Confessions of Nat Turner, a Negro leader of the early 19th century...
...By way of contrast to LeRoi Jones' play, and as a series of historical footnotes to his rage, In White America moves at a measured speed yet does justice to its most impassioned moments...
...But I'd rather be insane...
...not make them see, but make them suffer...
...Three of the actors—Moses Gunn, Raymond Stough and Alek Primrose—enact their multiplicity of parts with relish and distinction...
...By the time we reach New Lots Avenue, Van Cortlandt Park or wherever the ride ends, a number of questions have arisen...
...In between, we are given such items as Thomas Jefferson's declaration of Negro inferiority (a moderate's view...
...a directive from the French military authorities in World War I, enjoining personnel not to associate with American Army Negroes for fear of offending white American soldiers...
...it remains to be seen whether he will use his indignation instead of serving it...
...The Negro hero, Clay, is sitting in a quiet corner and flicking through an Esquireshaped magazine when a floozy named Lula starts to bump, grind and smile a come-on at him over the top of a Macintosh apple...
...He tells her, "In college I thought I was Baudelaire but I've slowed down since...
...a surprisingly sour interview granted to two Negro representatives by Woodrow Wilson...
...Gloria Foster, a newcomer to OffBroadway, goes a great deal farther...
...Yes, he shouts, he could commit murder, and "murder would make us [meaning Negroes] all sane...
...As Clay, David Hooks begins with a promising characterization, but his opportunity of making something of it is denied when his big speech flies out into space...
...so does Jennifer West's shrieking portrayal of Lula...
...Yet the material is well endowed with drama and personification...
...Arranged as a staged reading with six actors, a singer-guitarist, sparse colonial furniture and an open three-quarter stage, it registers firmly with no awkward pressures from Harold Stone, the director...
...Within minutes she is a virulent Eve to his retreating Adam...
...Martin B. Duberman, a member of the history department at Princeton, has winnowed out speeches, reminiscences, diary extracts, letters, newspaper clippings, excerpts from the Congressional Record and other documents, and arranged them chronologically with the minimum of linking material...
...But at what...
...Its producer, Judith Rutherford Marechal, would be doing a public service if she could inveigle as many other producers and directors as possible into the Sheridan Square Playhouse to let them see for themselves that theater with a conscience can work without bulldozing, piledriving tactics...
...It comes unprovoked and we must assume, from what we have been told, that she represents merely herself, a narcissistic tease, and does not subtend some larger entity—say a portion of the white community...
...Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright-poet, did precisely this a few years ago when he came up with a sort of sequel to John Osborne's first play and called it Look Black in Anger...
...The same might be said of Miss Foster, even on this meager showing of three cameos: Sojourner Truth, as irrepressible as an incoming tide, the 15-year-old girl terrorized by the crowd gathered around the high school in Little Rock, and an old freed slave wandering among her memories...
...exchanges of letters between freedmen and their former masters...
...Playwrights, directors and actors tell themselves desperately that they must make their audiences feel the feelings of the Negro...
Vol. 47 • April 1964 • No. 9
