On Stage

...Apparently this olio's special appeal is that it presents black suffering inflicted by blacks as well as whites, notably by black men on their women...

...Yet look at the pathetic nonsense of it: Why should black girls, or anyone else, be saved from suicide by a rainbow, whatever that tired symbol is supposed to stand for...

...Out of enraptured pens pour white tributes to the supreme visibility of black art that is often no more visible than the Emperor's new clothes...

...That this has happened, with unfortunate results, to several black authors should by now be obvious to all...

...Stitt has set this forth honestly and competently, even if less than compellingly...

...Or simply tripe...

...It is based on a 1911 rural Michigan case in which a priest was on trial for the alleged murder of a nun...

...be that as it may, he frequently attracts more attention to his juggling with people and events than to the events and people themselves...

...Janet League is, but she cannot act...

...On Stage 'ENUF' IS NOT ENOUGH BY JOHN SIMON The fuss that is being made over For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, now at Joseph Papp's Public Theater, is both ludicrous and pitiful...

...Katina Commings, the director's wife, gives an obvious performance in a minor role...

...Is there anything more platitudinous than the image of looking into oneself to discover God, even if that God is a she, as has long been the case in a hoary homosexual joke...

...Milan stitt's The Runner Stumbles is a worthy effort by a young playwright whose play, however, manages to stumble while merely trotting...

...indeed, these random snatches of writing were not even intended for the stage...

...For a long time, the Negro was, shockingly, the "invisible man" in our society...

...Generally, though, it is one woman speaking her monologue, while one or two others-or, sometimes, all six-react in the hackneyed way typical of such events: with expressions of staged approval, horror, sympathy, etc., and with little smiles, laughs, clucking sounds, and the like...

...Is this poetry...

...By a chain of circumstances, she is obliged to lodge at the rectory...

...Every reviewer I have read has hurled superlatives at the event, much as sentimental tourists toss coins into the fountains of Rome...

...The Runner Stumbles is very adequately directed by Austin Pendleton on a bare (maybe too bare) stage, and acted, on the whole, acceptably...

...In addition, there is the very questionableness of courtroom drama as a valid art form...

...A young nun, Sister Rita, who has known equally little joy in her early life, but who has a less gloomy view of her faith and her vocation of helping others, is transferred to Father Rivard's parish school as a teacher...

...Significantly, the stage here is bare except for a large cutout of a badly painted flower (called "mural by Ifa Iyaun" in the program, although it is not part of any wall), and the seven actresses, bare of leg and foot, wear the identical short dress, each in a different color...

...From conversations in his cell with his lawyer, the hero launches into reminiscences and confessions that take us backward into his tribulations and forward into his trial...

...Now let him produce the slenderest work of quasi-art and the critics will carry on like disheveled maenads, vying to be first to perceive, proclaim and panegyrize the work and its maker...

...And what makes Miss Shange's work so alluring to white guilt feelings is that she is not only black but also a woman, so that a superlative flung at her is like a quarter dropped into the hat of a beggar who is blind, allowing the donor to feel doubly pious...

...Could anything be drearier than watching an evening's worth of fragments about a girl upbraiding her worthless lover, or about a woman looking on helplessly while her common-law husband throws their children out of the window, when all of it adds up to a clear admission that the prestige of the stage is being usurped...

...He has made his principals largely believable and intermittently moving, with only one or two scenes far-fetched and melodramatic...

...Then consider that the evening ends with the seven women performers chanting in chorus, "I found God in myself/And 1 loved Her fearlessly...

...A "totally extraordinary and wonderful evening," began Clive Barnes' breathless encomium in the New York Times...

...Spare as it is," wrote Walter Kerr in his Sunday column for the same newspaper, "it has drama hidden and boiling just beyond an apparently controlled surface, ready to be mysteriously unleashed somewhere between the arrogant head and the infuriated stomp of a bare foot...

...albeit loosely and flexibly treated...

...or, a little better, "I subsist on intimacy and tomorrow...

...frenziedly as he fights against this love, Father Rivard succumbs to it...

...And simply because it is about black women??not just blacks and not just women??it is a very humbling but inspiring thing for a white man to experience," Barnes gushed on with inspired humility or humble inspiration...

...or the description of Harlem as "six blocks of cruelty piled up on itself...

...Still, the sad thing about For Colored Girls is that it is no more theater than it is poetry...

...This is a sampling from a collection of prose and verse bits by a young black woman, Ntozake Shange, who also acts in this potpourri...

...Take these lines, singled out for praise by Barnes: "I couldn't stand being colored and sorry at the same time??it seems redundant in the modern world...

...Set this beside any decent young poet of today, and it becomes invisible...

...There is a lot of genuine misery and relatively controlled anger about the show...

...What accounts for the production and inordinate praise of too many black plays is not so much black talent as white guilt...

...their hastily concocted encores promptly failed...

...Would it have been staged if written by a white...

...For Barnes, "this is ensemble acting of great quality...

...gradually, close collaboration at the school and (nonsexual) cohabitation at the rectory lead this lonely but cheerful young woman to falling in love with the priest...

...The author who, histrionically, is a pure amateur, is nevertheless no worse than most of the other performers...

...The remaining parts??and especially that of the housekeeper, played by Sloane Shelton??are as well interpreted as they are conceived...

...Rightly so, because they take turns delivering monologues arbitrarily distributed among them, except when they go into undistinguished bits of song, or one of them does a dance she unimaginatively choreographed by herself...

...These would be curious stomping grounds for the drama, if drama there were...

...if that is a better-quality anger, it does not necessarily make for quality playwriting...

...This doesn't work, for it is fairly obvious from the outset that the benighted, passionate, repressed housekeeper, herself secretly in love with the priest, can easily provide the solution of the mystery...

...and, as Sister Rita, Nancy Donohue acts and sounds too contemporary, New Yorkerish and actressy...

...but what is lost in coherence by this elaborate scheme, ingenious as it often is, is not made up for by some Proustian sense of the past recaptured, or a Jamesian sense of the seamless continuum of time...

...Stitt gives us a tormented man, Father Rivard, his fanatical Catholicism the consequence of a deprived, loveless childhood, now stranded in a dour, Protestant hamlet where Catholics are viewed with intense hostility...

...Stephen Joyce rather overdoes Father Rivard's unlovableness...

...Yet Alan Rich of New York magazine, for example, calls For Colored Girls "an enthralling play," despite the fact that this ragbag of pieces could as readily be called an opera...

...But look at her very title, complete with that simplified spelling...

...That she is not called on to testify till the end of the trial and the play smacks of manifest manipulativeness, and diminishes the credibility of the enterprise...

...As directed by Oz Scott, it strikes me as amateur night in Harlem...

...Drama...

...Perhaps if Stitt had more art, we would be less aware of his artifice...

...For example, Melvin Van Peebles and Micki Grant both had such medleys of nondramatic stuff lauded to the skies...

...as the framework of the play, and writing what is essentially a courtroom suspense drama...

...Among these, Rise Collins is noteworthy for her excellent diction, and Trazana Beverley for her dramatic power, although she is no looker...

...Can you imagine this being published in a serious poetry journal...

...For a first produced play, there is enough intelligence, passion and skill here to permit us to look forward hopefully to Milan Stitt's future offerings...

...A second trap Stitt has fallen into is the scrambling of the time sequence...

...over and over again...

...it is, I am afraid, indicative of the sensibility at work here...

...But he has fallen into the trap of choosing the priest's trial...

...Even as nontheatrical poetry this is feeble stuff, what used to be called wit-writing a couple of centuries ago...

...Miss Shange's poetry is better than that of, say, Rod McKuen, and her prose is probably better than her verse...

...The trial is a theatrical equivalent of the artists' ready-made, and should, for serious purposes, be avoided like other objets trouves: It does too much of the artist's work for him, and does it superficially...

...there have been times when this was so popular that it looked as if modern drama, having risen from church ritual, would sink irretrievably into courtroom proceedings...

...Let me make myself clear: Playwrights, black or white, will not be helped by overpraise from critics, white or black...

...At most, this is clever...

...more often it is merely Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters transposed and slightly updated, as in such outright banalities as "I will tell all of your secrets into your face" or "I was missing something promised," both duly held up by the reverent Barnes...