THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NEGRO PLAYWRIGHT

Author(s): Waters E. Turpin

Source: CLA Journal , September, 1965, Vol. 9, No. 1 (September, 1965), pp. 12-24
Published by: College Language Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44328164

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 THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NEGRO
PLAYWRIGHT

By Waters E. Turpin

A selective survey of past efforts by Negro and white play-

wrights treating American Negro material reveals two distinc-
tive approaches, sometimes separate, sometimes blended:
namely, the primitivistic and the polemic.
The Twentieth Century fountainhead of primitivistic accent
in the depiction of the Negro on the American state might well
be traced to the spring of 1917 when Ridgely Torrence's Three
Plays for a Negro Theatre strategically appeared while Synge
and his compatriots were spearheading the revival of Irish folk
drama. The three plays were " The Rider of Dreams," " Simon
the Cyrenian," and " Granny Maumee." They were first per-
formed at the Garden Theatre just off-Broadway and were ac-
claimed by the critics. Robert Benchley set the key that was
to haunt playwrights dealing with the American Negro from
that time to the present; he wrote in the Herald Tribune:
In the Negro, there is a natural beauty of voice, a musical sense
of rhythm, a plasticity of pose and emotional richness which cannot
be equalled in any other race. It is on these qualities that Mr. Tor-
rence has tried to make his Three Plays depend. ... I saw one lithe
youth who was rehearsing the part of an Egyptian slave make an
obeisance before the King. ... It was a move which, if it were
being rehearsed by an average actor, would have to be done over
25 times and then probably abandoned as impossible. At the first
time this boy, out of his own intuitive sense of what was right,
made as perfect and complete a gesture as could have been drawn
with a pair of compasses and with infinitely more animation. . . .

As a director of a group of hard working collegiate actors, I

would embrace avidly any one with the attributes Mr. Benchley
ascribed to what must have been phenomenally endowed casts.
I have yet to meet such, but I suppose I should not abandon
all hope.
Mrs. Isaacs, whose The Negro in the American Theatre (New
York, 1947) supplied the quotation from the Tribune , in her
own comment on Torrence's fitness to depict the Negro dra-
12

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 The Contemporary American Negro Playwright 13
matically hints of an attitude that so many people were to
adopt in that era and afterward about white playwrights who
exploited Negro material:
Mr. Torrence remembers Negro boys in his class at high school,
Negro members of the presbyterián church to which he and his
family belonged, and he still carries in his mind and heart the
picture of the Negro hero of their sand-lot baseball team. The
rhythm of Negro movement, the background and foreground of
Negro history and religion, the music of Negro song and speech,
were familiar to him from early childhood and made a special appeal
to the poet within him. So when he started to write Three Plays
for a Negro Theatre , the situations and the characters were already
there in his mind and waiting to be released.

A brief look at these plays will reveal what Torrence did by

way of future influence in the projection of dramatic material
concerning the Negro.
" The Rider of Dreams " is termed a " folk comedy/' In it a
hardworking religious woman saves her money in order to buy
a home for which she has harbored a lifetime ambition. In
contrast to her is her lazy, minstrel-like husband, who, inci-
dentally, is the dream rider. The plot is knotted when Sparrow,
the " dream rider," steals his wife's hoard and then has it stolen
from himself. His recovery of the money sets him free to con-
tinue to ride his dreams. The dialogue is in what was then con-
sidered to be the necessary imitation of Paul Lawrence Dun-
bar's dialect poems that the American public had accepted as
standard Negro speech.
" Simon the Cyrenian " tells the story of Christ's helper on
the road to Golgotha. Of the three plays, it probably has most
universal appeal because of its Biblical origin.
" Granny Maumee " depicts a Negro grandam's hatred of
white men for the lynching of her innocent son and how that
hatred is subdued by the power of Christianity. It also is writ-
ten in dialect; its high point is reached as the titular heroine -
after what the author must have considered an atavistic orgy of
conjurism - dies and is left in dramatic solitude as her daughters
flee screaming into the night.
Now, if we relate (as well we may do) " Simon the Cyrenian "
to the religiosity that usually is depicted as the Negro's religion,
we have in it and the " Rider of Dreams " the chief facets of the
primitivistic approach that many playwrights were to use in

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14 Waters JE. Turņin
their dramatic exploitation of the Negro from T
to the present. In " Granny Maumee " we have
the primitivistic a further polemicism which futur
were to enlarge.
It was perhaps inevitable that these two app
primitivistic and the polemic - would develop in
of the Negro on the American stage. For so lon
considered a creature apart by the general Ame
and by himself, we might add. Then suddenly,
able dramatic auspices, he was discovered by a l
because Torrence was a lyric poet, these two ap
have greatest appeal to him, for they would giv
the impulses that drove him artistically. Like m
saw what he could use and used it. And within the framework
of his creations what he did with what he saw was valid. How-
ever, unfortunately for the future dramatic depiction of the
American Negro, Torrence 's success was to dictate the treat-
ment - and the choice - of dramatic material about the Negro.
And until the recent present, that dictation was bowed to by
most American playwrights.
For instead of taking these three plays for what they were -
the highly individual interpretation of a lyricist's brooding con-
templation of what to him was a peculiarly fascinating segment
of American life - the critics and the public took them to be the
archetypes of all other drama to be created about the American
Negro. Hence, the long line of Broadway and off-Broadway
productions that embroidered the primitive in the Negro's
nature. A roll-call of titles will suffice to refresh memory:
Eugene O'Neill's " The Emperor Jones " with its theme of what
the author considered atavistic reversion; the same author's
" The Dreamy Kid " (evidently Negroes are " such stuff as
dreams are made on . . .") ; Paul Green's " The No 'Count
Boy " and " The Chipwoman's Fortune Sheldon and Mac-
Arthur's "Lulu Belle"; and the numerous musicals, such as
Marc Connelly's "The Green Pastures" and Hall Johnson's
" Run Little Chillun," and the travesty, " Cabin in the Sky."
All are in the primitivistic motif. The Negro, in them, is an
exotic - and the roots of his exoticism are embedded in the loam
of Torrence's lyricism. And this exoticism - this " difference " -
became for the commercial stage the chief point of saleability

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 The Contemporary American Negro Playwright 15
for material about the Negro. One also might suspect that just
as slavery's favorite apologia was the concept of the " in-
human" Negro, so segregation's apologia became the concept
of the " primitive " Negro. Probably the climax of this primi-
tivism is what has come to be regarded internationally as
America's supreme gift to the musical stage, the Heyward-
Gershwin " Porgy and Bess." Is there an irony lurking in that
fact?
So completely did such vehicles dominate the stage of the
'twenties and early 'thirties that, when a Negro writer - novelist
or playwright - dared to attempt balancing the picture, he
might very well be informed with smiling condescension by an
editor or a producer: " But you don't really know your people."
Once this exotic vein had been mined ad nauseam (reflections
of which could be seen in the recent rash of off-Broadway pro-
ductions featuring dervish-like " gospel singers ") and the De-
pression of the 'thirties focused thinking on the impact of eco-
nomic determinism in molding individuals and groups, the
Negro as polemic material was seized upon by the playwright.
The " P " in what had come to be known euphemistically as
the PROBLEM which the Negro posed for American culture
became capitalized; whereupon, he became a symbol of all the
downtrodden masses crushed beneath an economic Juggernaut
controlled by the " ruthless privileged classes." It was the day
of the soap-box orator, and playwrights mounted available
stages to reflect the trend whenever they dealt with material
about the Negro. Again, a selected roll-call of titles will refresh
memory: " Our Lan' " by Theodore Ward; " Never No More "
by James Millen; "They Shall Not Die" dramatizing the
infamous Scottsboro Case, by John Wexley; " Turpentine " by
Smith and Morrell - all protesting the exploitation of and the
injustices suffered by the " black proletariat."
However, from the welter of these productions came those
plays that can stand on the dramaturgical merit of their con-
ception and execution. For all its turgid and melodramatic pas-
sion, "Mulatto" by Landston Hughes in 1935 (and incident-
ally the last performance by that magnificent actress, Rose
McClendon) had true dramatic power, even as it unconsciously
looked backward to Ridgely Torrence's " Granny Maumee "
through its heroine and the general circumstances of plot. In its

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 16 Waters E . Turpin
newly edited form 1 recently published, it reache
and deserves re-staging, for its symbolic content
for our present time. And one of the most artist
plays about the Negro in the Western Hemi
during the Depression was the Federal Theatr
" Haiti " by William Du Bois at the old Lafa
Harlem. Its treatment of the revolution that
of Napoleon in the West was a signal milestone
of the Negro by an American playwright.
But perhaps the most significant event invo
in American theatre history to that time was
of Richard Wright and Paul Green in the d
Wright's Native Son. Like the novel, the pla
good deal of muddled sentimentality, wishful
downright ignorance about the urbanized, Nor
major achievement was its serving as a counter
American stage against the depiction of the N
vistically exotic terms, showing him, rather,
socio-economic determinism.
The period of World War II saw two productions which went
further than " Native Son " in breaking the accepted mold in
projecting the Negro on the American stage. They were " Jeb "
by Robert Ardrey and "Deep Are the Roots" by d'Usseau
and Gow. Both treat the problem of the returning Negro
veteran disenchanted. But unlike the polemic plays before
them, their emphases have more universal significance; their
characters rise above stereotyping and become humanly indi-
vidual and believable. This is true especially in " Deep Are the
Roots," with its tender relationship between its hero and a
white girl that tosses aside taboo and makes a great leap toward
treating bi-raciality with honesty and without camouflage.
Against the foregoing background, it should prove rewarding
to examine in more detail the work of the Negro playwright
within the immediate present; and restriction to playwrights
whose works stand as significant links with the past and point
to trends in the future should lead to some logical view of their
prospect in the American theatre.
In the early 1950's the theatre received an excellent first
1 Five Plays by Langston Hunhes , Edited by Webster Smalley (Bloomington,
Indiana, 1963).

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 The Contemporary American Negro Playwright 17
effort by a young playwright, Louis Peterson, whose " Take a
Giant Step " had a substantial run on Broadway. Detailed
examination of this work is warranted, because time should
reveal Mr. Peterson's play to be of historical significance to
the Negro playwright and the Negro artist in the American
theatre.
" Take a Giant Step " depicts the bungling efforts of an
adolescent boy to find himself at the height of the painful sensi-
tivity which characterizes the " awkward age." Hence, the
author is on firm ground at the outset, for he is attempting to
mold his material in the thematic structure of the " apprentice-
ship-to-life " motif; thereby, he strikes immediately a universal
chord. (Significantly, the title is taken from a childhood game.)
But to the turmoil of puberty - and rightly so, not forcibly -
Peterson has added the ingredient of American bi-racialism,
which serves to augment and make more poignant the universal
experience that young Spence, the hero, is agonizing through.
Briefly, the plot-line is as follows: Spence, a Negro boy, has
lived for most of his life in a neighborhood apart from other
colored people - a deliberate choice made by his proud, middle-
class parents. Until he reaches puberty, this situation has been
normal for Spence. Then, imperceptibly at first, then enexor-
ably, his boyhood white " friends " begin to withdraw from him,
and he runs afoul of the strongest of all American bi-racial
taboos, the sexual, just when his urge to love and be loved is
most acute. Consequently, he is lost. He is lost as all adoles-
cents are lost, but his lostness is made sharper by his Pro-
crustean position in the American social structure. His rebel-
lion against parental authority in the runaway episode of the
play might be the rebellion of any adolescent in any other time
or culture. But Spence's venture in rebellion is fused with his
resentment of what to him is a pariah-ship unwarranted. Fur-
thermore, during this episode of his search " across the tracks "
- the Negro ghetto - for some tie of group-identity, his being a
Negro adolescent in the American social scheme of things
thrusts him into a humiliating Walpurgisnacht of bar-flies and
prostitutes.
All these things on the heels of the death of his beloved
grandmother, who is the only one who understands his sensi-
tive nature, result in Spence's illness, which ironically affords

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18 Waters E. Turpin
him a first exploration of love with a hired g
of bitter bravado in giving his childhood to
white " friends " is one of the finest bits o
American drama and is faintly reminiscent o
divestment of Lear's kingly garments. For th
Spence the putting away of childish things s
the giant step toward the manhood he must
can society. To climax his task as a dramatist
observer of his scene, Peterson has Spence's f
what he has done by his identifying himself w
who has also begun to feel the withdrawal of
hood " friends." Spence's realization of his n
this thoroughly human - no matter how inf
ment is the apex in the arc of the giant step
audience should know then that when the s
his foot will be on firm, if craggy, ground.
As I sat and watched the play, I could no
comparison between its portrayal of Negr
that given it in " Member of the Wedding." P
unobtrusive fashion, Miss McCullers purpos
tragic growing up of a Negro boy with that
heroine. Perhaps Miss McCullers contrive
counterpoint in her Southern setting as subtl
haps within the perspective of her play the
fate has its proper handling. Nevertheless, it
Peterson's depiction, adverse critics to the c
standing, rings with just as much (if not m
and verisimilitude as that of Miss McCullers.
To repeat even a portion of the plot of " A Raisin in the Sun "
here would be superfluous. This rendering of the vicissitudes of
the Younger family by the late Lorraine Hansberry must be
given a permanent niche among the significant plays dealing
with the American Negro. For one thing, it made interesting
the life of middle-class Negroes in a Northern urban setting,
thereby exorcising the ghosts of exoticism and primitivism.
Some critics, with vestiges of these ghosts clinging to their
minds, and the theatre-goer who considers himself a sophisticate
may be inclined to be snide about this play - " soap opera " is
one of the darts flung at it by such. But whatever may be said
about Miss Hansberry's play, this much is true: she was able

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 The Contemporary American Negro Playwright 19
to capture the mood of a time and of a group, giving all dra-
matically symbolic structuring which proved effective theatre.
Further, in utilizing the universal group-survival motif " A
Raisin in the Sun " joined " Take a Giant Step " in approach-
ing that maturity of conception which the playwright must
develop if he is to satisfy the exacting requirements of his craft.
It is unfortunate that Miss Hansberry died at the moment in
her career when it seemed she was attempting to slough off the
constraints of racial preoccupation and emerge as a playwright
concerned with the verities that cut across all boundaries. Her
" The Sign in Sidney Brunstein's Window," even in the awkward
preview that I saw - in which the major character had to be
enacted from a script - was still an eloquent, if somewhat fum-
bling statement for integrity of values. Miss Hansberry 's death
becomes more tragic in view of the fact that this splendid
failure obviously was the harbinger of better things to come.
It remained for a seasoned performer to take the ultimate
step to maturity as a playwright: Ossie Davis, author of " Pur-
lie Victorious."
On the surface, this play seems to be utter farce - and it is.
But it is more than that. Anyone with a sense of the history
of the Western theatre should have no difficulty in recognizing
the dramatic lineage of this work. Though removed from each
other by the centuries, Mr. Davis and Aristophanes are yet
spiritual brothers. For just as the Fifth Century, B. C. satirist,
disgusted with the horror of war and in revulsion against the
feminine cry of Euripides's " The Trojan Women " (one long
wail!) reduced war to absurdity in his " Lysistrata," so also
has Ossie Davis, just as disgusted with American bi-racialism
(and one is tempted to surmise, with its emasculation of the
Negro male) reduced it to absurdity through the gross exagger-
ation which is the legitimate weapon of the satirist. For the
intelligent theatre-goer, Davis has laughed out of countenance
every shibboleth in the catalogue of American bi-racial inanity.
This is why so many clichés appear in the play and why all
the characters and situations are deliberately stero typed. It is
as though, beneath his wry hilarity, Davis is saying to the
audience: "Take a last, long look at these ridiculous things
and purge them from your minds! " It is therapeutic laughter
he desires, and to his credit Davis has fulfilled this difficult
assignment as nearly to perfection as possible.

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 20 Waters E. Turpin
But whereas Davis rises to the laughter of
surveys the American scene, his younger co
in their wrath. They are the sepia " angry
America: namely, James Baldwin and LeRoi
Let me state at the outset that I do not a
critics who leap upon the obscenity and the s
these two as justification for adverse critici
they are artists of high ability. I believe, fur
the critics who would discredit these two are demonstrative of
a kind of myopia which seems to inflict Lillian Smith in the
following statement, by way of an interview in the Negro
Digest :
I don't know of a single Negro writer who can write about white
people. They don't understand them. Neither hate nor fear gives
understanding, only love does. But white people have written truly
of Negroes because they loved them, respected them, and believed
in them as persons. That's the greatest trouble the Negro artist
has today: his feelings against white people make it impossible to
create a white character real and whole. Thirty years ago white
writers had the same trouble, and wrote of Negroes only in stereo-
types. And valid literary creation takes love.2

One must reply (gently, of course) that, on the contrary, if

there is any one who does understand the American white man,
it is a Negro. Through centuries of study the Negro has had to
understand the white man, in order to survive him! And as for
love - ample evidence points to the Negro's capacity to love
white people. So, according to Miss Smith's specification, the
Negro writer, of all persons, should be able to write about white
people. We must remember, of course, that a very thin line
exists between love and hate, or so the psychologists tell us.
But to the authors and their plays.
When I read the reviews of " Blues for Mr. Charlie," I was
tempted to squelch the desire to see it. The chief objection of
the critics was that it was " badly written." When with mis-
givings I finally did see the play, I had my skepticism about
critics further justified, for the reason the reviewers tagged the
play " badly written " is that they did not know (or didn't
care to discover) what the playwright's purpose was, nor did
they recognize the manner of its projection.
2 April, 1965, p. 35.

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 The Contemporary American Negro Playwright 21
The play has no direct plot-line; rather, its scenes weave in
and out of one another like the segments of a nightmare from
which one awakes screaming, yet which seizes one immediately
as he attempts to recapture sleep. Or again, these scenes flow
like the turgid, repetitive rhythms of a syncopated blues that
has no end. What other way - authentically - could Baldwin
have conceived his piece, considering the material he had
chosen? For it is not only a dramatic use of the Emmett Till
lynching, but it is also a distillation of all the maimed and
lynched, all the brutish sadism of three centuries of the Negro's
American experience. It had to be a nightmare to be authentic,
and it had to be a blues, a " Blues for Mr. Charlie."
Baldwin's good fortune was two-fold in this production. He
had a cast sparked by Diana Sands and Al Freeman as Juanita
and Richard respectively - Juanita, who in the trial scene as-
sumes the symbolism of all Negro women here in America who
have suffered the loss of their men to the lynchers; Juanita who
cries aloud in anguished hate: " I hope I'm pregnant. I hope I
am! One more illegitimate black baby - that's right, you jive
mothers! And I'm going to raise my baby to be a man. A man,
you dig? " - and Richard, the Emmett Till-like rebel who
screams his defiance at his murderer even as the gun spits death
into him during the lynch scene. Baldwin also had a sensitive,
imaginative director, Burgess Meredith, who must have sensed
the phantasmagoria that the playwright had striven to weave.
And Meredith also must have been able to realize that for the
Negro, life in America has to assume the fantastic. So for me,
" Blues for Mr. Charlie " is what its author had to contrive -
an expressionistic outcry that captures the distilled agony of
this racially tormented, mid-twentieth century America.
The expressionism found in Baldwin's " Blues for Mr.
Charlie " is compounded with symbolism in LeRoi Jones's three
one-act plays. This compounding is perhaps most strongly seen
in " The Dutchman." It has two major characters, Clay, a
young Negro intellectual, and Lula, a white, trampish woman.
Four supernumeraries, who for the most part are mute, com-
plete the cast. The setting is a portion of a subway car, and
the action is a dialogue between Clay and Lulu, climaxed in
the final scene by the woman's stabbing Clay to death after he
has blasted her with a hate-filled tirade.

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22 Waters E€ Turpin
Now, on the surface, this dialogue and action
between two individuals. But as one witnesse
folding, one senses that these two are more t
They give off overtones of meaning, and at t
the bidding of Lula the other passengers - wh
cantly, have been indifferent witnesses to their m
- toss Clay's body from the car, one realizes t
Jones's statement of the middle-class Negro's
the American scheme of things. For Lula then
bitch-goddess beckoning with offers of the mater
can Dream " but capriciously withholding its
the Negro. And Clay, under her sadistic prodd
ings, emerges as the synthetic black-white man
view, is the American black bourgeois eternal
the " promise " of America. The indifference o
sengers is Jones's rendering of the comparativ
which the average American, black and whi
the horror of lynching and all the inequitie
Negro. Thus, at the end, upon reflection, on
and Clay broaden into a symbolism that ma
guardian of white supremacy and him the rebe
must be destroyed. It is at this point that Jo
become one in their attitude.
Jones's " The Slave," using a prologue and flash-back, pro-
jects the race problem into the future. The play proper opens
with avenging black guerillas, under the command of a cynical,
disillusioned Negro ex-husband of a white liberal-intellectual,
smashing their way into one of the last strongholds of the be-
leaguered whites. In the prologue, however, we see this same
victorious Negro leader in old age and attired as a slave, mut-
tering almost unintelligible bitterness about man and his illu-
sions. Since the play proper is a flashback, the audience is led
to know that the seeming victor ultimately suffered defeat.
The three characters are Walker Vessels, the Negro ex-
husband and father of two half-white daughters not seen but
heard from the bedroom above; Grace Easely, the white ex- wife
of Walker, married to Bradford Easely, one-time liberal but
now disillusioned white university professor. The setting is the
Easely home where the two daughters are asleep in mid-evening.
Under intermittent bombardment the three exchange hatred

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 The Contemporary American Negro Playwright 23
drenched sardonicism, personal and racial, until Walker kills
Easely, fleeing the house as it crashes upon Grace beneath a
final barrage of guerilla fire.
Like Genet's " The Blacks," Jones's vehicle obliquely implies
that black chauvinism is no better than white chauvinism and
that hate, which is the root of both, destroys. On another level
of symbolism, the play reveals Jones's sense of the ambivalent
love-hate relationship in an inter-racial marriage and in bi-
racialism itself.
This love-hate ambivalence in Negro-white relationships is
also the subject of Jones's "The Toilet." The extremely natural-
istic setting of the play - it is the boy's toilet in a city school,
replete with chest-high urinals and a water-closet stool - is
evidence of Jones's so-called " shock technique." But para-
doxically, the realism of the setting, as the play progresses,
becomes expressionistic, for expressionistic technique demands
that setting, among all the other considerations of production,
must lend itself to achieving the subjective ends of the play-
wright. In this case the toilet becomes symbolic of the socio-
economic depths from which Jones's characters spring. To the
crass, literalistic mind they would appear to be a kind of excre-
ment, and therefore they are in their proper setting. But the
deeper mind might stop to inquire: Who and what have made
them excrement?
It is significant that within this setting Jones, despite the flow
of typically adolescent obscenity from his characters, is able
to create a sense of humanity that crosses the barrier of race
more convincingly than all the so-called liberalism that this
playwright looks at with a jaundiced eye.
The plot is fragile - involving a highly intelligent Negro boy,
who is looked to as a leader by his teen-aged gang, and a homo-
sexual white teen-ager of Latin origin. The climax is a fight
between the two boys demanded by the Negro boy's gang,
who have already beaten the white boy to the point of his
barely being able to stand. It is obvious that the Negro boy
feigns defeat at the hands of the white boy in order to spare
him, but to no avail. The Negro gang pounce on their victim
and leave him unconscious on the floor as they drag their fellow
out with them. But as the lights dim on the prone white boy,
the door opens slowly and the Negro boy returns to comfort the
victim.

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24 Waters E . Turpin
" The Toilet " is the latest production of LeR
ously high theatrical talent, and it poses a
anger which poured forth his " The Dutchm
Slave " on its way to sublimation in " The T
well be, for in " The Toilet " we see a tacit ad
author of the love-hate tie that binds black and white in the
total American complex - and much more so than it is evinced
in " The Slave." It will be interesting to see whether or not in
his projected full-length plays Mr. Jones follows this vein. If
he does he will have taken a path which will lead toward that
universality of vision that marks the true and lasting in all art.
In summary, then, we have in the foregoing playwrights of
the contemporary scene two major achievements: (1) long
strides toward maturity of conception and execution for their
chosen medium evidenced by their suiting of form to their
material, and (2) an approach toward self- and group-realiza-
tion within the American social order. Therefore, their vistas
seem broad and extensive, if they will but continue to strive
toward an urbane honesty which will enable them to look in-
ward as well as outward with candor, even as they experience
the drives of passion. Surely the emergent middle-class among
contemporary Negroes needs a penetrating eye to pierce its
outward show, needs a steady mirror of truth held before its
masked face. And surely the winds of change which have been
blowing without let-up during the past decades will have un-
earthed fresh material for the contemporary Negro playwright
to mold significantly. A veritable plethora of competent acting
talent is available - such as Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Diana
Sands, Godfrey Cambridge, Roscoe Lee Browne, Claudia Mc-
Neill, Fred O'Neal, Brock Peters, Al Freeman, Bea Richards,
Gloria Foster, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones and his father,
to name a few. Perhaps Frank Silvera and LeRoi Jones have
the cue: a theatre which will really give expression to the
Negro's true experience in this land. Then, perhaps again, the
" fabulous invalid " American will feel a flow of vital blood in
its veins to quicken it to universal significance.
Morgan State College
Baltimore, Maryland

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