Black Theater
ZEIGER, HENRY A.
ON STAGE By Henry A. Zeiger Black Theater If the present theater season possesses any single trend worth celebrating, it is the strong current of plays by and or about black Americans. I have...
...The same cannot be said for LeRoi Jones...
...The Negro in the United States is not yet solely a victim, entirely a political animal...
...Milner's play touches the matriarchal theme, but this is better sounded by Lonnie Elder III in his Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, which I have just seen in a new production at the Pocket Theater...
...Sidney Bechet's brother once remarked that black musicians all "killed themselves" when they played, exhibiting an energy few whites cared to produce...
...A number of white people, myself included, are not particularly entranced by certain manifestations of black racism, whether in or out of the theater...
...Still, his famous anger is always present (and may indeed account for part of the mess...
...A recent book by Doris E. Abramson, Negro Playwrights in the American Theater, 1925-1959 (Columbia University Press, 335 pp., $12.50), serves as a timely notice of the perils of rash generalization...
...It will be a bad day, and not only for the theater, if the mass of black men ever feel they all must sing one song...
...Perhaps there is a theatricality intrinsic to contemporary black life that accounts for this...
...Elder is not a formal innovator, and his theme has been dealt with by other black writers...
...His main distinction is that he has gone about his job with a certain basic honesty and a respect for the victims of society as individuals...
...Though the play verges on soap opera—the women seem to enjoy complaining —their griefs are both more unpleasant than those associated with Tide and Duz and recognizably similar to many a black woman's tale of woe: men absconding, drinking, unemployed, ashamed, and unmanned...
...Ed Bullins' The Gentleman Caller, a symbolic work, concerns the interrelations of a white American —a fluttery, teasing, high-toned blonde—a silent, disdainful mulatto caller, and a black maid, who plays at Aunt Jemima but has a few tricks up her sleeve...
...Many recent plays seem dramatized versions of the famous Moynihan report, dealing with the effects of the matriarchal family on the black psyche...
...Yet even this is an asset in the theater, for an actor familiar with this type of social demonstration has additional colors to work with...
...Elder treats in detail the debilitating effect on a man's self-respect of always being supported by a woman...
...Ibsenite problem plays (Langston Hughes' Mulatto, 1935...
...light comedy (Abram Hill's On Strivers Row, 1940...
...Many observers of the ghetto have noted an interest in verbal byplay, which provides an elan to otherwise routine occasions...
...Again, black performers traditionally give themselves wholly to their art...
...If his Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show) is not entirely clear, this is mainly because Jones does not seem able to control his creation...
...So when the eldest son proposes a bootlegging scheme in partnership with a neighborhood racketeer, there is no wrench in logic as the father, a decent man all his life, agrees...
...today, there must be press gangs scouring Bedford-Stuy-vesant, trying to uncover another black genius...
...The father spends a day "downtown," making the rounds of employment agencies...
...But it might also be wise to recall that other groups in the pangs of emerging racial consciousness have had their obnoxious moments: Read James Joyce on the multiple idiocies of Gaelic nationalism...
...It reminds us that black theater is not a recent phenomenon, and that black dramatists have produced an extremely diverse body of work...
...As the play opens, the only employed member of the family is the daughter, and she threatens to throw the male contingent out into the street unless they find jobs...
...Ronald Milner's The Warning—• A Theme for Linda is an unceasing lament of women about the wrongs done them by men...
...An evening of one-act plays presented last month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music by the Chelsea Theater Center offered a rough approximation of the strength and weakness of contemporary black theater...
...There are opportunities for black writers on and off Broadway, in regional theaters and in uniquely black institutions...
...Black actors put themselves on the line in the same manner, and while this sometimes results in an excessive performance, it is surely better to err that way than by being timid...
...Miss Abramson records past instances of black writers despairing to ever find a producer interested in their work...
...you sort of know what to expect from Jones, and you sort of get it...
...It has taken various sides of the questions that have haunted black Americans, from Joseph Cotter's espousal of Booker T. Washington's dream of self-improvement in Caleb, the Degenerate, to LeRoi Jones' diatribes...
...It is a measure of the awful truth of Elder's theme that when he returns and says he was humiliated by everyone he saw, we know he is not lying...
...I have previously devoted little space to this great outpouring because some specific examples seemed mediocre...
...There is no honorable work in this society for the average 50-year-old black man...
...writers like Bullins and Adrienne Kennedy have, in contrast, created imposing formal structures to contain their experience...
...He has talent, but his plays seem carelessly tossed off, with one abortive effect canceling another...
...From Tim Escape by William Wells Brown, a former slave who toured the 19th-century lecture circuit reading his play, to Archie Shepp's black power fantasy, June Bug Graduates Tonight, black theater has embraced every theatrical form: conventional melodrama (Garland Anderson's Appearances, 1925...
...At present, black theater is not limited in either design or ideology, perhaps because the black community has not yet settled on any one dogma to explain its condition...
...American Negroes, moreover, are not as inhibited as some of us in displaying emotion...
...True, there are frequently undetected depths to this seemingly easy release of feeling, and blacks often indicate only what they know others think they are supposed to feel...
...Among the writers, certain new themes have emerged...
...almost in spite of himself, he creates drama with such fascinating texture that his propaganda is nearly overlooked...
...and historical drama (Theodore Ward's Our Lari, 1945...
...For one thing, the sheer volume of black theater is impressive...
...Bullins is one of the more gifted black dramatists: His Clara's Ole Man is a harrowing ghetto Lower Depths, written with great economy and intensity...
...There will undoubtedly be a slackening of activity when the discovery that black Americans, too, lead lives suitable to dramatic investigation is absorbed—and producers begin to notice that the subject has resulted in few socko commercial smashes...
...The three men of the house, a father and his two sons, were previously maintained by the mother, who worked herself to death in the process...
...Aside from its quantity, another notable feature of this renaissance has been the virtuosity of many black actors, all the more remarkable when one remembers that until very lately they have had little chance to work on any but stock roles...
...The Gentleman Caller ends rather predictably with a plea for black unity and struggle against the oppressor, but prior to this, the deliberately stereotyped figures and plot take on an intriguing richness that belies their allegorical nature...
...At present, many black plays are not particularly distinguished, and even the moderately interesting ones often substitute novel subject matter for finely wrought craftsmanship...
...The stylish production of director Allie Woods and the bravura acting by Sylvia Soares as Madame kept me more interested in the humor and physical design of the situation than what it all meant...
...The playwright has performed the naturalistic dramatist's task of showing us a part of the world we know exists, and resist understanding...
...But looking back, I think the mass of material has certain discernible qualities that merit comment...
...if we hear this proposition stated in the theater, all we can do is nod in agreement...
...Here a fashionable ideology is used simply to cloak an old joke about tricking a superstitious reverend...
...Even though reading Miss Abramson's book suggests that there is nothing novel in the current outburst of black theatrical activity, there are signs that much has changed in the 10 years she does not cover...
...Yet, since New York has suffered decades of garment district comedies without undue complaint, we should be able to stand a few meretricious black plays while the fad lasts...
...While the play is minor, Bullins' sense of theatrical form is quite strong...
...The remainder of the play recounts the family's misfortunes once the son's dream of easy money comes true...
...I think some of the more dogmatic propagandists are telling black people lies about their past, present and future...
...The sons and the father are ordinary people, yet Elder knows that even the meanest hustlers deserve to be explained on their own terms...
...Black actors appear in everything from integrated commercial comedies to ghetto-based agitprop...
...The aggressive racial pride of a James Baldwin or a LeRoi Jones is symptomatic of a general concern with manhood in today's blacks...
...Prayer Meeting or the First Militant Minister by Ben Caldwell is a rather trifling black power farce, dealing with a burglar, surprised in a minister's apartment, who cons the minister into thinking he is the voice of God...
...It is honorable work, but not the whole black theater story...
...Any underlying unity is difficult to discover...
...Of course, the most current intellectual modes have always flourished in the theater...
...He still has a life of his own that cannot be contained by slogans...
...It would be well if the options remained open, for while the situation of the black man is uniquely dramatic, underscoring all the ironies of the American dream, it is not wholly homogeneous...
Vol. 52 • May 1969 • No. 9
