VIOLENCE ON STAGE

...Who is the girl named Grace Waters he says he is going from house to house in search of...

...But he recognizes the other side (which, in fact, benefits from many of the author's best lines...

...VIOLENCE ON STAGE CATHARINE HUGHES Charles Manson, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dag Hammarskjold, and Patrice Lumumba—all of them have been represented (or misrepresented) on New York stages during the first half of the season...

...It is a bitterness and a scorn that the family itself cannot comprehend—and it is one of the play's major weaknesses that Rabe never really makes it rational or comprehensible to the audience either...

...The questions arise when he refuses to kill a moderate black leader who has denounced violence and terrorism, and Keusi is suspended from the organization...

...Although the play ends with M'Bahlia's father sprawled dead in his study, the headquarters of the movement raided, rioting in the streets, and the lines, "If it's madness we're into, then it's madness that will change the world," it is a more multifaceted, and, in its way, more balanced, presentation of the varying views within the black community than any I have seen...

...The Negro Ensemble Company has known both triumphs and troubles in its first four seasons...

...the priest he drives off with it...

...In the course of the planning, he lives with M'Bahlia, who has broken away from her middle-class black background in favor of a career as a revolutionary...

...It has an exceptionally convincing cast and a strong production—acting always has been the NEC's most consistent element—and an often uncertain play...

...It is a question you somehow don't expect to hear these days, not in a play by a young black writer, with a black director and an all-black cast...

...The voice of Martin Luther King Jr...

...Running parallel to David's torment is his father's...

...Isn't it better to "offer our people life and not more death...

...For the Warrens, mother and daughter, living in a clean but threadbare apartment on the south side of Chicago, making it involved not the development of black consciousness but the attempt to emulate the lifestyles and success standards of white America...

...That he was not apprehended he takes as a matter of course: "There ain't any punishment for killin' a nigger woman on Saturday night...

...Keusi, recently returned from Vietnam, where he has become a proficient killer, is assigned the job of assassinating the police chief...

...Most of the plays have come and deservedly gone—Conor Cruise O'Brien's Hammarskjold-Lumum-ba saga, Murderous Angels, among them—so I would like to concentrate instead on others, avowedly fictional, which probably have more of genuine import to say than all the others put together...

...Who is he...

...The most obvious way is by going to bed with Alberta...

...The family he finds means nothing to him...

...If they can see only that he is "troubled, deeply troubled"—as his mother tells a priest she calls upon for advice—the audience, too, is left only fragments of the reasons and an absent core...

...If they were not happy—and they were not—at least they were reconciled: Alberta to her life as a maid who drank a little too much on the side...

...where he killed a woman who left his chest scarred with knife wounds...

...But in Sticks and Bones he is not fully in control of his material and some of the maudlin philosophizing he assigns to the father clearly belonged in another play...

...But her mother will not permit it to continue: "My eye commenced to jump the minute I saw you, and when my eye commence to jump, they's danger afoot...

...She sends him packing, but not before he can deliver a long, overly symbolic monologue on the Sty of the Blind Pig, the brothel where he was bom...

...Inevitably, Rabe was in one of those what'll-you-do-for-an-encore situations...

...I doubt it will leave anyone completely satisfied and that, I believe, is a testament to its impact...

...The massive demonstrations and most of the violence were yet to come...

...And, beginning its fifth, Philip Hayes Dean's The Sty of the Blind Pig suggests some of the reasons for each...

...The volatile Black Terror shows how much they have changed...

...And, if you want to add Jesus Christ (in his Superstar incarnation), it makes for a diversified assortment, to say the least...

...At least it's the way they were...

...Although Keusi has committed his assassination, he remains disturbed about the organization's emphasis on killing and the quality of its leadership...

...But, unlike Pavlo, its focus is erratic, its style uncertain—a mixture of menace and melodrama, satirized soap opera and savage insistence...

...It is quieter—a quiet desperation, if you will—and he has been able to suppress it until now, to live with the fact that he "grew too old too quickly" and that there is "no evidence in the world of me...

...David Rabe's Sticks and Bones, also at the Public Theater, is far inferior to the thirty-one-year-old playwright's The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel...

...And, of course—since it did not require Harold Pinter to invent the tactic— how is he going to affect or alter their lives...

...As an answer, Sticks and Bones—which I have a nagging suspicion may have been written earlier—is only partially satisfactory...

...In other words, not what anyone would call "bad" people, perhaps only painfully average in their desire for security, happiness, and continuity...

...When the lights go down for the last time, Blind Jordan has been sent out into the streets and Alberta has begun to take on her mother's life and attitudes as her own...

...But then, Pavlo was not only the best Off Broadway play of last season...

...Not over his blindness, but over what he has seen and especially over what he has left behind: a girl he loved and wanted to bring back home with him, but who is there only in his dreams and fantasies...

...For her, killing is a perfectly acceptable, even an admirable weapon in the struggle...

...her mother, deserted by her husband, to being "respectable," to going to church, to attending the annual convocation back home in Montgomery, Alabama...

...They are Middle America personified...

...I'm a black terrorist, sex isn't a thing with me," she tells Keusi, who anything but shares the feeling...

...Who is to decide who is a revolutionary and who is simply "an angry brother with a gun...

...With Robert Montgomery (whose Subject to Fits was produced at the Public Theater about a year ago), Rabe is one of the two or three most interesting— and at times exciting—young playwrights to emerge in recent years...

...It is August, 1968, and the family of a young soldier has just learned that he is about to return home from Vietnam...

...This year, however, she is starting to wonder, "Why can't folks leave things alone...

...It refuses to simplify...

...concerned with their possessions, the wife an avid churchgoer, the husband at least mildly frustrated with the course his life has taken, the son a guitar-toting extrovert with sex on his mind...

...The Black Terror is set in what the program describes as "the very near future given the nature of American society...

...Catharine Hughes is a free lance writer and critic...

...Besides, they are still around and likely to be for some time...

...Should blacks kill other blacks...

...Always trying to change things...

...That's the way things are...

...The Sty of the Blind Pig takes place in the 1950s, a time of transition for the Negro American...

...The play is more one of atmosphere than of action— a sort of remembrance of things past, things reluctant or afraid to become the future...

...David's appearance shatters their complacency, for David is not only blind, he is embittered...

...All the while, a white-gowned Vietnamese girl moves back and forth from upstairs bedroom to living room: the "yellow whore" of his parents' racist fears and accusations, the girl he loved and left behind...

...was just beginning to be heard in the South, and those seats in the back of the bus were just beginning to be protested...

...Late in The Black Terror, at the New York Shakespeare Festival's Public Theater, a member of a guerrilla black terrorist organization challenges his leader: "Suppose the people don't want a revolution...

...Even so, one can't deny the play's erratic power and black humor or its ability to evoke a sense of moral outrage...

...in fact, it epitomizes all he has come to hate and scorn...

...And, of course, he tells them, forces them to listen to, things they do not not want to hear, tales of massacres ("they were all just hunks of meat...

...It displays many of the same concerns as Pavlo, especially with Vietnam and what it has done to the participants and what it reflects of their values and sensibilities, and much of the same power...

...But, then, there are many things you—whether you are black or white— don't expect to hear in twenty-seven-year-old Richard Wesley's powerful and unstereotyped new play...

...In his place, M'Bahlia is given the assignment...

...Who, after all, is to decide who's to live and who's to die...

...Perhaps it is merely ungrateful to ask of it anything more...

...David will not permit him to submerge his wounds any longer, not any more than he will let his well-meaning if rather vapid mother attempt to talk to him, or the hearty priest—a caricature, not a character-to counsel him...

...You just "go to church Sunday morning and pray...

...Although he has doubts about murder as a revolutionary weapon, he carries it out to the organization's satisfaction, if not his own...

...His mother he accosts with his cane...

...The house (in this case the apartment building) will soon be coming down around them, but life is not really going to change...

...it is the best running there today...

...Playwright Wesley's heart is with the revolution and with its violent pursuit if it is only through violence that it can succeed...

...I admit that I can write only as a white critic...

...Even when, as it turns out, the victim is to be her own father...

...One day there is a knock at the door and Blind Jordan, a street singer, enters...