Review

Author(s): Lynn F. Miller

Review by: Lynn F. Miller
Source: Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 29, No. 2 (May, 1977), pp. 262-263
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3206230
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262 / ETJ, May 1977
the army in Act I. In Act II, ten years later, the
bar - now festooned with hot dogs - becomes the
setting for Horse's forty-first birthday celebration;
a meat patty shaped as a butcher's block serves
as birthday cake. The act ends with the father, furious
at his son's marriage proposal to his own mistress,
chasing the sixteen-year-old boy while brandishing his
birthday present, new meat cleavers, not understand-
ing that Richard's offer to remove Faye Precious from
the scene is his gallant attempt to bring his parents
together. In Act III, four years later, Richard, an
established country-and-western singer, returns to
what he still considers an intolerable situation to
persuade his mother to leave with him. But father
and mother understand their Lawrentian ties if their
son does not. Horse nearly chokes the life out of
Richard, only letting go when he promises to depart
alone.
Who's Happy Now?, like TheFarm, ends as itbegan
with an uneasy accommodation and the departure of
a spiritually wounded son making himself whole
again by means of his art. Just as Arthur recites his
verses for his mother in The Farm, Richard sings his
songs throughout Who's Happy Now? Comically and
significantly, they are full of words recalling his
father's occupation, "My life's on the block/My
heart's at the stake," as Hailey indulges in animal
images as profuse as those in The Farm.
What weakens Hailey's play, an autobiographical
metadrama about the emerging artist, is the always
vexing problem of form. Two years later with Father's
Day (1971), Hailey was to demonstrate that he can
slice life as naturalistically as any, but in Who's
Happy Now ? he employs Richard as the writer-nar-
rator who opens the play by escorting an actress
portraying his real mother to a seat in the auditorium.
He speaks directly to her from time to time, ex-
plaining that he has disguised the details of their
lives so that she need not be embarrassed by the
play. Most daring of all, late in the play the young
man explains to the woman in the audience that he
has changed the outcome. Man and wife stay together
in the play because the upbeat ending works on
stage. But the narrator asks his mother's forgiveness
for what supposedly actually occurred. At her son's
urging, the woman had left the man she loved. The
mother rises from her seat, pauses to give her son a
reproachful look, and rushes out of the theatre.
Curiously, Hailey attempts to wring poignancy from
the frame rather than the body of the play, which
remains an amusing but awkward burlesque of family
life.
Late in the third act Hailey offers a scene which
suggests the power the situation might have evoked
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had the dramatist not attempted a merging of incom-
patible styles. Learning that his son receives royalties
from every record, Horse orders Richard to leave but
tells him to remember that at least once he did offer
him his support. He proves his words in inserting
a nickel in the jukebox and selecting his son's hit
song. It is an incisive moment of painful honesty but
out of key with such earlier shenanigans as the slap-
stick meat-cleaver chase.
The ambitious Body Politic production comes close
to reconciling the disparate elements of a difficult
play, but in the central role Jack Wallace is more
playful pony than Horse as he attempts to win his
audience with coy readings and arch mugging. Per-
haps the actor is finally the victim of the author who
wrongheadedly tries to transform Sons and Lovers
into screwball comedy.
Storey's failure in Mother's Day and Hailey's par-
tial failure in Who's Happy Now ? suggest that drama-
tists sometimes defeat themselves in a frantic search
for cleverly original, often unrewarding forms. Yet
Storey's The Farm is convincing evidence that the
jealousies, antagonisms, and ambivalent relationships
to be found in Oedipus' family circle can still make
viable drama when handled with accurate observa-
tion, clarity, and intelligence.
ALBERT E. KALSON
Purdue University
FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CON-
SIDERED SUICIDE WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF.
By Ntozake Shange.
Booth Theatre, New York. October 30, 1976.
Joseph Papp has developed a system for moving
talented new playwrights, directors, and actors from
workshop beginnings through Off-Broadway produc-
tions to Broadway. For Colored Girls has successfully
followed the Papp program: from its beginnings as
a workshop production at the Henry Street Settle-
ment Playhouse, to an Off-Broadway production at
the Public, and on to the Booth.
For Colored Girls has a wider appeal than its title
suggests; it is not for black women only, although
the experiences culled and given life on the Booth
stage are directly related to the lives of many black
women. Ming Cho Lee's huge red paper peony up
center, placed in front of the deep purple backdrop,
is the only scenic element; it is all that is needed,
standing as it does for the unified heart, brain, gut,
womb, and center of being not only of the "colored
girls" in the title but of all women. The purity, in-
263 / THEATRE IN REVIEW

cisiveness, and truth of the writing reaches into the

red flower at the center of all women; universal
truths, drawn in detail, spill out in well-controlled
poem-monologues from the actresses on stage directly
into the emotional receivers in the guts of the audi-
ence. It is the directness of the emotional communi-
cation that electrifies the audience.

By means of his arrangement of Ntozake Shange's

autobiographical poetry pieces, each an investigation
into a particular aspect of private black womanhood,
the director, Oz Scott, has created a form resonant
of a rite of passage. The passage is from girlhood and
innocence, through adolescence and the beginnings
of self-discovery, into adult suffering through love,
and finally to self-acceptance. The action of the piece
- finding and accepting oneself - has been created
by structuring the poems into a pattern as sensitive
as flowers arranged by an Ikebana artist.

While not a traditional play, For Colored Girls is

essentially theatrical, rooted in rite, ceremony, and
mythology. The characters experience deep conflicts,
i:i:ii:l'iiiii
iii::

and a resolution is achieved. In structure the work i::!:;: '::::::: :!:::::;

is musical, resembling jazz riffs, once improvisation- `:::iii:%i?:riii!: ::iii::iiiii

??::~??;::
:!;:::::

ally emerging directly from street experience, now

structured like Ellington's music into notations that
record and codify joyfulness, melancholy, or a sense
of tragic despair. With choreography by Paula
Moss (also one of the actresses), the poems insist on :::I:!:::::

being danced as well as acted.

Judy Dearing's costumes confirm the importance ?::::;~::::

of movement in the piece; they are really dance

costumes that free the actresses' bodies for any move-
ment. The most superb moments are in the poem :;:;:

"Sechita," evoking African goddesses of the distant

past through the recreation of a cabaret dancer in
New Orleans. The poem is expertly spoken by Rise
Collins and danced by Paula Moss.

There are elements of comedy, tragedy, and biting

satire in the production. The most vividly tragic piece,
"Nite with Beau Willie Brown," produces near-hys-
terical laughter culminating in tears. A crazed black
war veteran beats his abused lover with a highchair
in which their baby still sits, an unfamiliar, savage
image, offbeat and almost surreal, as are many of the
images in this piece.
Ntozake Shange has served up slices of her world.
For some people this reality is intolerable, requiring
the defense of laughter. Even for Shange, reality is too
much sometimes. In "I Used to Lix e in the World (But
then I Moved to Harlem)," the poet lashes out with
bitterness at the shrunken existence in such a con-
stricted universe.
Rites of initiation traditionally culminate in a vision
of the godhead. For Colored Girls, structured as an
initiation rite into full adult womanhood - passing
through the stages of life in concretely remembered
specific experiences - culminates in the joyous af-
firmation of the beauty and integrity of the black
woman's self. It is a rousing yet delicate, strongly
felt spiritual dedicated to the earthy reality of the
great goddess/mother/source-of-all-life, sincerely
perceived by Shange to be a woman, probably a
black woman.
LYNN F. MILLER
Rutgers University

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