On Stage

...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Out of Harlem Conflagrations and riots in American cities are no novelty The early pages of Loften Mitchell's Black Drama The Story of the American Negro in the Theater (Hawthorn Books, 248 pp , $5 95) tell us that in 17th-century New York, more than 150 years before Nat Turner's rebellion, "slave uprisings flared Negroes—often assisted by poor white semislaves and slaves—set fire to any and every place" (The author quietly adds, 'During this period the New York City Fire Department came into existence ' ) In John Leacock's play The Fall of British Tyranny, staged in the year of the Declaration of Independence, "Negro slaves agreed to kill their masters when freed And this is exactly what happened offstage as well as onstage" The book's humor and its nice way with an anecdote make for good reading But its purpose—to let us know that we have been gulled by American art into misreading the character ot the Negro—is passionately serious Mitchell, a playwright in his 40s with a considerable number of productions behind him (and one ahead in the fall), says that the black American has been a rebel against oppression from the beginning, and a firebrand when necessary Diama-tic and other literature has incessantly piesented him as the craven, comical, self-deprecatmg menial, an image adumbrated before the Civil War by the white minstrel in burnt-cork blackface, and perpetuated after the War by the Negro entertainer who could find almost no work outside the minstrel shows The stereotype has particularly beguiled and misled the white man who goes to the theater to get away from it all Even when the Negro character in a modern white play is allowed any spirit, any resistance, he is robbed of it at the last curtain by a reconciliation in which he reaches out to touch hands with Broadway's notion of its white liberal self, or listens gratefully to talk of brotherhood for the future, while a tear makes its careful way down his face For Mitchell the Negro resistance is expressed not only in periodic bouts of flame and bloodshed but less bluntly in, tor example, folk songs "Spirituals, like Negro speech generally, had a 'signifying' pattern —a sly one that said one thing to Negroes and another to their oppressors Lines such as 'Steal away to Jesus," "Swing low, sweet chariot," and "Let my people go" carried the two meanings "Old master would smile at the religiosity of his slaves What he didn't know is that one group of slaves was telling the other that the Underground Railroad was working that night" In much the same way, turn-of-the-century Negro artists tried to subvert the stereotype by pushing the minstrel show in the direction of satirical operetta In 1908 Bandanna Land by Bert Williams and George Walker had an edge that would cut today The two leading characters "decide on a quick way to make money They buy up land in a well-to-do white section and move into a house They proceed to give a number of parties, to raise hell, and the whites immediately agree to buy back the land at twice the amount the Negroes paid " Williams and Walker wrote prohfically and adventurously, starring in their own work Yet, as Mitchell reminds us, "there were no love scenes m their scripts because they did not believe whites would accept the idea that Negroes could mate romantically " If the white American is ever to understand that the black's rebellion is 350 years urgent, and not a temporary phenomenon of the 1960s, Mitchell argues, he must be exposed to accurate portrayals ot Negro life as it was and is, and not to the reassuring stereotype I support Mitchell's argument without a demur So do many people in the theater Yet relatively few plays by Negroes have appeared beyond Harlem, while scripts by white dramatists, from Lillian Hell-man and Paul Green to the perpetrators of the current vulgarity Hallelujah, Baby' continue to ring timid variations on the stereotype O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings get well winged by Mitchell The former was produced in Harlem during the '20s ' Langston Hughes tells us that when Jules Bledsoe [as Jones] ran through the jungle, Negroes shouted from the audience 'Man you come on outa that jungle' This is Harlem'"' Of All God's Chillim, a tinny melodrama about a Negro intellectual who "saves" a lower-class white woman by marrying her, Mitchell observes, "The heio of this play would have had trouble had he married a black woman on the level of the white he married O'Neill was talking about interracial marriage, and Negroes were fighting to be free, to eat regularly, live decently, and get white feet off their necks " But then the Negro has always been used as a topic or sub-topic in the American drama to assert the progressive credentials of the white playwright or, more crudely, as a source of "controversy"—that is sensationalism O'Neill, we are aware, rejoiced in the ruckus caused by All God's Chillun But for the Negro it was and remains an unreal situation with no bearing on his life If it did not exactly redraw the stereotype, it wandered away from the question of how the Negro might attain his rightful place in our society, and found itself in the never-never land of miscegenation already inhabited by dozens of 19th-century plays about quadroons and octoroons The play also anticipated many of today's essays and pronouncements by self-appointed authorities like Norman Podhoretz who have divined that the American Negro will be better off when he has sexual integration In movies the intermarriage bit recurred not long ago in One Potato, Two Potato and, under homosexual cover, m The Defiant Ones, in which Stanley Kramer had Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier sharing a handcuff in heu of a ring When Genet's The Blacks ran lengthily m New York several years back most people took it to be a civil rights document It was something altogether different Genet puts Negroes into his plays—Death-watch is another instance—as criminals, as forces of evil The color of their skins and the privations they have been subjected to are their qualifications for criminality Or, in Genet's vocabulary, for sainthood For Genet black equals evil, as it did for Rimbaud The Blacks is not about a Negro revolution but a revolution by the forces of overt, pure evil against the forces of impure or disguised evil (the blacks in whiteface) I did not read one review at the time that noticed this But evidently some Negro writers noticed it Mitchell quotes a devastating passage from John Oliver Killens' Black Man's Burden "The underlying statements of The Blacks and The Balcony are the same, that all civilization stmks, period 'When the have-nots overthrow the haves, nothing will really change except the relative positions of the adversaries There is no revolution ever It's the same merry-go-round, so stop the world, I want to get off Sure, don't worry how you treat the blacks The blacks will do the same to you when they seize Power' This is Genet's message as far as I'm concerned Actually, the so-called avant-garde is really a rear-guard action in disguise It is neither revolutionary, anti-bourgeois, as it sometimes makes pretensions of being, nor anti-white supremacy, it is not even anti-Establishment It is essentially anti-people 'The West is humanity, humanity is the West, we're all sick to the guts, so let's, man, like all of us get into this here Western style pigsty, and have one final everlasting orgy' " In discussing Negro characters in white Amencan plays Mitchell might have mentioned that the American drama defies a comic tradition that comes down from Plautus and from Terence, who was apparently a freedman The slave, later the valet or chambeimaid, is often the fulcrum of the plot and its wittiest personality In some of Mohere, Goldoni and Beaumaichais the servants aie the story, the masters are clods Mascanlle, who apes a master in Les Pieaeuses ridicules, is one of Moliere's most brutal portraits It is a sad irony that a nation that is, electorally at least, the most populous democracy in history has been more guarded and prim in its comedy than aristocratic Rome and France But as a historian Mitchell takes little time out from his mam theme, and misses some worthwhile opportunities He alludes briefly to such actors as James Hewlett and Ira Aldridge, but makes no attempt to describe or analyze their respective styles of performance Aldridge must be reckoned as one of the three or four most accomplished tragedians this country has produced Mitchell says he was "acclaimed by European royalty" and "particularly hailed for his Othello, his Macbeth, Lear and Shylock Today his chair sits m the fourth row of the stalls at the Shakespearean Memorial Theater, Stratford-on-Avon Such ghbness is little better than a dismissal of Aldndge's contribution to the theater The same criticism applies to Mitchell's picture of the modern period He has been personally acquainted with everybody who was anybody m Harlem during the past 30 years, from Richard Campbell and Muriel Rahn, founders of the Rose McClendon Players, to Frederick O'Neal, the present head of Equity, Langston Hughes, Poitier, and Alice Childress He writes well in a general fashion about Harlem's ferment of artistic activities and its string of theater companies that arose and declined over the years With the exception of some short and illuminating comments about LeRoi Jones, however, this portion of the book is more of a swift tour through Harlem's culture spots than a definitive treatment, detailed and critical Mitchell does not think much ot critics, though, especially of the white species His irritation, an understandable one, is provoked by their habit of using a review or a public forum to make large statements about the condition of Negro drama and to suggest what the Negro playwright ought to devote himself to if he knows what is good for him and good for art They prescribe and advise They want sympathy for the faltering white liberal and universality of thesis whatever that is They look for the instant diffusion of hope They are so intent on proving to the Negro how much they care that they pay no attention to him Mitchell said to his wife after one of those symposia that drag on to nowhere, "I am still not antiwhite but I wish our friends would listen to what we are saying and not tell us what they want us to say " To claim, then, as some critics have done, that no Negro playwright compares as an artist with Ralph Ellison 01 Chestei Himes or Duke Ellington or Ornette Coleman (or Cassius Clay) is pointless, a journalistic gimmick In the American theater at large, not only does the best not always rise to the top, it sometimes does not rise into view Most critics, as Mitchell indicates, know little about Negro drama produced in Harlem, they certainly don't put themselves out to see it About the overall quality of Negro plays we had better admit our ignorance and reserve judgment Still, plays by Negro authors that have opened downtown in recent seasons include The Sign m Sidney Biuitein's Window, the late Lorraine Hansberry's call for integrity in public and private life, The Toilet, LeRoi lones' beautifully staged metaphor about treachery in racial relationships, and Ronald Milner's Who's Got His Own, an eloquent argument on the anger of the young Negro generation These are exhibits to set beside any trio of white American plays produced in the past decade, and they are a small fraction of what has been produced, let alone written Nevertheless, a gap yawns between the taste of the black and of the white spectator I for one do not see that it will be closed in the neai future White plays about Negroes will probably continue to offend Negro audiences (and some whites) Plays that revile whites will be enjoyed by Negroes and regarded by whites (except for the masochists) as offering stereotypes of the white villain This gap is the price of having minority groups in the first place It will give rise to much oratory about the need for integration and have, I feel, little consequence The more Negro plays we are shown, the more good plays there are likely to be among them But on the matter of integrating the Negro actor into white casts there is not, and never has been, any reason for hedging A director who does not hold open auditions is a segregationist, whatever his excuses—the stage directions ask for a pale, unhealthy complexion or shitty blue eyes, or the guy for God's sake is a top executive in a banking firm and we all know about banks Theater is an act of impersonation, not of color photography If Orson Welles can play Lear m a wheelchair, Paul Robeson can play Iago According to Howard Taubman in the New York Times, a lady named Esther M Jackson, who teaches dramatic literature and is a Negro, recently piotested the Ford Foundation's grant of $434,000 to the Negro Ensemble Company The Company has since rented a playhouse on Second Avenue for three seasons and will produce plays that "deal with Negro life " Taubman explained that Miss Jackson had written to McGeorge Bundy accusing the Foundation of sponsoring "cultural separatism " Taubman effectively defended the Foundation's action (as Mitchell certainly would do, too), and asked, "Isn't there something to be gained when any group attempts to search out the truths and emotions of its unique background and experience and shares them with the rest of us7 The result need not be separatism " To this I would attach three addenda First, production money allocated to any organization?black, white, or zebra—for the purpose of doing new American plays is a helpful gesture, second, the Negro Ensemble Company may prove broader-minded than white Ford-assisted groups and eventually get around to demonstrating on the side how good plays by white writers should be done, third, if the plays do give us a truer view of Negro life, the benefits to our theater and society are potentially enormous On the other hand, I am as unwilling as Miss Jackson to sanction any movement toward "cultural separatism But my motives are less honorable than hers I am thinking of a number of Negro actors whom the white theater cannot afford to lose, among them Roscoe Lee Browne, Jane White, Earle Hyman, Harold Scott, James Earl Jones Gloria Foster, Glynn Turman and Clarence Williams III By the grace of Joseph Papp, who has maintained the most resolutely integrated troupe in the countiy in Central Park, we have seen Browne's Autolycus, Miss White's Princess of Fiance in Love's Labor's Lost, and Jones' Othello Elsewhere, we have seen Miss Foster's Medea and Yerma, Miss White's Helen in The Trojan Women, and Scott's little cameo of Alonzo glittering out of the muik of Eha Kazan's The Changeling If all of them give their services...

...to a Negro company, the white-theater will be almost bereft of classical actors And then a national' council on the pei forming arts will not be enough More desperately than ever the theater will need its own anti-poverty bill Let's be greedy We want plays about Negroes that do not patronize white audiences, and we want Negro actors because they are irreplaceable The decision is now up to the white theater Can we have both7...