Black Heroics

...He grasps the murder weapon and instructs the young men to pin the killing on him...

...and by holding imaginary debates about art with Nijinsky and sundry characters out of fiction...

...The playwright piles on him woe after woe: Williams' wife develops cancer...

...One involves Williams' father-in-law who, after being shot, grabbed his assailant by the throat and would not let go until he had strangled him and could die satisfied...

...Wedding Band by Alice Childress (Public Theater) creates a black heroine...

...Yet the black hero is not merely a duplication of his white elders...

...Unlike the advanced dramatists of the past century, who undercut their protagonists by showing them to be incapable of achieving their grandiose aspirations, the contemporary black playwright wants to raise his audience to the level of his hero...

...The prototype remains the glorified Warner Brothers mobster of the '30s (resuscitated in The Godfather), and the slow-voiced, potently unthinking centaur of the John Wayne and Gary Cooper variety...

...Len Pearson is an Air Force recruit stationed in the Caribbean...

...They shame the vehement 20-year-olds by the sheer weight of suffering they have undergone and transcended...

...This last man's daughter, now in the United States, is going to marry Williams' son...

...I mention furies because the play, for all its overt realism, is bent on making a contribution to the new black mythology...

...On Stage BLACK HEROICS BY ALBERT BERMEL As more and more black American plays have emerged in the past 12-15 years, white critics have repeatedly pointed out that they seem wedded to outdated forms, the authors turning for their inspiration to the realistic plays and films of the '50s and earlier...

...It is as if she fell in love with a hopeless ideal of interracial devotion...

...The tableau is not quite preposterous, for Baraka has built up to it ingeniously and director Irving Vincent, as well as the actors, have given him their all...

...Yet another poet crops up in Joseph A. Walker's The River Niger (Negro Ensemble Company...

...If these conservatively shaped dramas (so different from those of Adrienne Kennedy, Edgar White, and China Clark) are most of what we know as black theater, the cause is not financial caution-or else they would have smaller casts...

...Playwrights like Walker (and Ed Bullins) select their heroic models, not from among the young revolutionaries who spout hatred and defiance, but from the older generations who endured, who clung to their ambitions...

...This gesture of renunciation jumps out of a welter of violent incidents...

...As fast with his jaw as with his fists and pistol, he can talk his way to greatness...

...They are intelligent...

...And the commercial format lends itself to this objective, since it tends to glamorize and enlarge the ordinary guy who fights his way to greatness, the man who gets things done, however much grit it takes...

...Julia is a woman of passion who pays heavily for the gift of being able to love...

...Ward has also directed the long, generally fast-paced drama without denying it the necessary moments of stillness...

...Henceforth, he will not adjust to reality...

...But at the climax, when Baraka is hinting at "a new reality" and needs to be most convincing, he drops smack into a Hollywood fantasy of one man facing down a horde of opponents...

...But the violence never seems artificially piped in...

...Commercial productions are another story...

...Herman, a kind and utterly sincere fellow (finely interpreted by Robert Loggia) realizes that Julia must save her sanity by leaving right away...

...As the star-crossed Julia, Ruby Dee does not succeed in keeping a few driblets of schmaltz from bubbling to the surface and boiling over...

...The play's early freewheeling scenes of Len's visions are real and persuasive...

...The other concerns a South African black put away in jail for nine years because he confessed to owning an illegal printing press that actually belonged to his sons...

...And there is a further, equally attractive quality these three have in common that lifts them out of the rut of literalism...

...Anybody can slam a foe up against a wall or fill him with bullets...

...his son, for whom he had immense hopes, becomes implicated with a gang of youths who commit a murder and take refuge in the brownstone...

...Like Job, he has reason to feel that God is picking on him...

...Yet circumstances-South Carolina in 1918...

...In contrast, experimentation seems an excuse for private and self-centered, if not decadent, complaints...

...For years Johnny Williams has worked as a house-painter to support his wife and son, his wife's two sisters, their husbands, and his mother-in-law, and also to pay the mortgage on his brownstone in "this syphilitic asshole called Harlem...

...7, May 1972), where you will come across fantasies, disquisitory and descriptive narratives, poetic excursions, and abstract exercises that fly off at so many tangents they are not a bit less adventurous than the farthest-out works by American whites or Europeans...

...Nevertheless, she shows herself to be one of our most commanding actresses during her stronger scenes, such as a slanging match with Herman's mother, after which she throws away all her bed-sheets because they are white...

...The action defines Len's conversion...

...But by then it is too late...

...reality itself must be changed...

...For evidence you can check out the published material in, say, back issues of Scripts (particularly No...

...He is sick and will die...

...With rare exceptions, black plays that get staged stay close to accurately drawn living rooms, bars and sidewalks populated by tough, plausible types who pride themselves on using only the latest vernacular...

...Douglas Turner Ward plays the varying moods of Williams as affectionately as a musician proving his instrument...

...Baraka gives us a splendid talker in A Recent Killing (New Federal Theater), a play that looks and sounds as if it were written before Dutchman and The Slave, although, like them, it features a poet...

...they have minds to speak...

...He lightens his boredom by reading...

...Their work has to be accessible to an audience of middle-class and poor people, for they set out to he-roize blacks as part of a program to exalt their history, "raise black consciousness" and promote solidarity between the classes...

...Realism of the literal kind is now spurned by "serious" white writers, though it continues to be a money mill for Broadway confectioners and the deans of television drama...

...In Dutchman Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) composed a pitiless portrait of a young blacK poet trying to meet modernist white norms as an artist and even fancying himself a "black Baudelaire" (Baudelaire here serving as the supposed skid of literature into personal mannerism...

...Making a gallant effort to pitch them out, Williams is shot...

...Marks Playhouse...

...what is prized in the black protagonist is his eloquence...

...he even refuses to eat meat because "it makes you too animal-like...

...Julia's luck is no better than that of Johnny Williams...

...The action typically has plenty of confrontations, verbal and physical, at least one heartfelt declamation from each main character, and a roaring climax that permits the author to whip out a couple of surprises and maybe a cartload of guns...

...Julia Augustine has loved and been loved by a white man, Herman, for 10 years...

...Indeed, he rarely comes into his own until his big tirade...

...The forging of a blood-bond between America and Africa refers back to the play's title, also the title of a poem by Williams that opens: "I am the River Niger: hear my waters," and goes on, verse by verse, to imply that the Mississippi is the Niger transplanted with its people on a new continent...

...As he lies dying, Williams can only sustain the role God has foisted upon him, that of scapegoat...

...Not only do they speak their minds...

...Rather, it reminds us how fragile life is in the black ghetto, how conditions there breed a blindly virulent strain of furies...

...In this, she is at one with Johnny Williams and Len Pearson, who sacrifice themselves for others...

...In The River Niger the theme of enduring older blacks echoes in the stories of two other men...

...he will join her later...

...The playwrights, striving to reach a specifically black public, must find that the conventional structures make artistic and propagandistic sense...

...Williams lives, and will die, a martyr...

...by masturbating while dreaming up a girl named Cynthia-who crosses the stage under a red spotlight to stretch out obligingly on Len's bunk...

...the enmity of Herman's sister and mother, the disapproval of Julia's black neighbors-shut out every possibility of a marriage, except one: The couple could go north together...

...He begins as a gentle, voluble, apologetic soul who wants to do nothing but write poetry...

...His oppressive obligations to his family forced him to leave college early, but he still loves literature and writes poems on scraps of paper that he keeps in his shirt pocket...

...But most plays written by blacks do not, as a matter of fact, toe the conventional lines...

...The heroism of Johnny Williams belongs to a history that extends back into African myth...

...Baraka pursued the same idea in The Slave: The mature poet Walker Vessels, who is organizing a black revolution, assails a white poet who spent his Iifetime writing "tired elliptical little descriptions of what he could see out the window...

...He ends as a yelling rebel who holds prison guards at bay with a gun in one hand as he taps out a new creed on a typewriter with the other...