Owen Dodson lecture, "Contemporary Black Playwrights: Ted Shine, Edgar White," at the University of Iowa, June 4, 1973

Speaker 1: The following is an address from the fifth annual Institute for Afro-American Culture, recorded at the University of Iowa, June 4th, 1973. The topic for the Institute was The Afro-American on Stage and Film. Speaking on Contemporary Black Playwrights Ted Shine, Edgar White, is Owen Dodson, poet, novelist, and playwright. Introducing Mr. Dodson is Darwin Turner, Director of the Institute for Afro-American Culture at the University of Iowa. Darwin Turner: He is the author of two novels and of several plays, including Bayou Legend, which you have on your list for mention during this institute. Mr. Dodson was a charter member of the Negro Playwrights Theater, has been a director and writer for the American Negro Theater, an artistic consultant, a worker with committees to improve the presentation of Black roles in films. This afternoon, Mr. Dodson will talk on the subject Playwrights in Light Shades. Owen Dodson: Well, it's nice to be here again in a more informal atmosphere. And my talk this morning will be informal, since it'll be entirely about playwrights who are talking to us, who are talking to an audience. I thought that I would begin by reading a statement, and then I would go into the playwrights that we want to discuss. There are three playwrights that Dr. Turner is going to discuss tonight. I will not go into them with any depth. I will skim over the surface. His view on one of them, at least, Mr. Bullins, is very different from my view, and I think it is a good idea for two people to have opposite points of view about a playwright who was so widely discussed and whom one of the occasional critics of The New York Times called "one of the greatest playwrights of our age." That's what Clayton Riley said. That means the whole world. Owen Dodson: Well, the second thing I want to say as introduction was that I talked about Black playwrights in North Carolina, and the girl I was engaged to once, 30 years ago, wrote to me and said, "One of my colleagues said that you had the dirtiest mouth on the East Coast." I wrote back to her, and I said, "Well, I was talking about the dirtiest plays that have been written on the East and West coast." Owen Dodson: So, since all of these words and expressions have been exposed to thousands of people and written in books, and since you are all adults, I'm sure that you won't mind listening to what the playwrights themselves had to say, and I will be very frank about the language. Because I gave one of the plays at Howard University before the whole wave of Blackness came over us, and I was afraid I was going to be fired because the playwright said, "A fine production, but he left some of my words out." So I said to myself, "Stop right there because we will all get it." He didn't stop right there. My mental telepathy didn't meet his, and he went on to recite the words, which I will recite to you later on. Owen Dodson: I asked LeRoi Jones what Dutchman meant. No one has ever questioned the title, Dutchman, of this book or wondered what it meant. And so I said, "Well, I know what the Flying Dutchman means. But I will go to Webster and see what Webster says. Then I will go to Harper's Dictionary and see what Dutchman means." Well, what I got from both of them was the Dutchman, "a piece or wedge inserted to hide the fault in a badly made joint, stop an opening." That's very simple. It's very easy, for a time, to stop the things. But what our playwrights... so many of them, especially the revolutionary ones... are trying to do is make a total destruction, even through violence, of the old order to build a Black world based in Black energy, Black thought, and Black culture. This will not be easy. This is almost impossible. Owen Dodson: Identification with Africa is avoiding the issues, because we are here, and we are not all going to Africa. So a dashiki doesn't make us into Africans. It is almost impossible for me to say what I want to say about Africa and the dream about Africa, about LeRoi Jones, for instance, in a picture I saw in Ebony Magazine. He was in African garb. Now, in the middle of winter. That African garb was made for a hot country because the air can get up in it. But LeRoi had on these African clothes, which is all right, but it was like a costume. And these Negroes were standing around in their African garbs, which is perfectly all right. They're very, very beautiful. And he had made himself into an African priest, and he was marrying a couple. Ain't that nice? Now, of course, we know that he's trying to run Newark, and it has become more of a sewer than ever. Owen Dodson: Well, the Jews handed their culture down from generation to generation, but the African traditions the slaves knew was beaten off their backs and out of their hearts. They never heard, after they got on the slave ship, their drums talking, giving them messages, sending out prayers, their tribal rituals, their songs, their ancient dignities and strength, so that even the surviving slaves remember nothing that their parents told them of what Africa was like or what their culture was like, so that the heritage of Africa is something that we could study like we might study Oriental culture. We can't go home again. We were brought up in American schools. Black and white is what they remember. Owen Dodson: There was an interview in The Washington Post which was fascinating, funny, and very pathetic. The oldest surviving slave in the area was interviewed. He was over a hundred years old. He told what slavery was like, what his massa was like, and then, the very last question the reporter asked, they said, "Mr. Jones, what do you think of the atomic bomb?" And Mr. Jones cupped his ear and said, "Eh?" Said, "What do you think of the atomic bomb?" And Mr. Jones said, "Is it colored or white?" What so many of the playwrights are trying to do, the new playwrights and the old playwrights, is divide the world into colored and white instead of fusing the world. Now, I'm getting a little bit off the subject, but all this will be tied together, I hope. Owen Dodson: Africa itself is turning westward for help, for teaching technology there, all the devices to compete and cultivate their natural resources. I met with one of the prime ministers, who was assassinated, at the Africa... He was not assassinated at the Africa House. I met him at the Africa House. And after he finished speaking, I said, "What is being done to preserve the culture of Africa, the dances, the music, and the tribal communes? How did they work? How are they recorded, the different languages of Africa?" He said, "Sir, we don't have time for that. We've got to work with our machines, and we've got to compete with the West." I thought it was an awfully pathetic thing that, in this great country, that they were not trying to get themselves together. And a girl like Pearl Primus goes over to try to record the dances, and she gets sleeping sickness. So that is an ironic comment. Owen Dodson: In the last article this prime minister wrote before he was assassinated... It was published in The New York Times... he said, "We don't want you, American Black men." And he counseled Black Americans not to look or seek to cultivate Africa. He said, "Seek and cultivate yourselves." In fact, he was saying, "You Blacks in America are American. We are Africans. No crossbreeding." I don't say I agree with all of this, but this is a statement that was made by one of the then great leaders of Africa. We have formed a culture of our own in a great deal of our art over here, in what the new playwrights are striving to do with the structure of drama, in exposing humanity, crushed and joyous, in this country. And I hope that that trend will continue, instead of trying to become Black priests and marrying Black couples. Owen Dodson: So many of our Black writers and leaders are confused. They murder without murder. They tear down the United States, but have no plan to build the ruins that they tear down. At a convention of young Black writers that was held in New York City, they invited the old writers and the general public. They invited Dr. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, the ghost of James Weldon Johnson, and all the writers who were around, who were published before, say, 1965. And they said, "We are going to erase you all." I was there. And Langston stood up and said, "What are you going to put in the place of what you erase?" They said, "We haven't thought of that yet, but we're going to erase." Owen Dodson: This is something that I think these playwrights that I have been reading conscientiously recently, especially the very, very young ones... This idea, like in We Righteous Bombers, plays like Malcolm X... These new playwrights, they have ignored the whole idea of what Malcolm X stood for at the end of his life, when he came back from Mecca. The whole idea of his life has become a farce in some of these plays. Because when he came back from facing the East, he said, "I was wrong. All these years, I was wrong." He said, "We have brothers in other countries. We have brothers in the Arab countries. We have brothers all over the world." And I read his autobiography very carefully. I'm writing an opera... libretto for an opera... about what he came to understand, about what he wanted to be his stand, his stance, in the world. And because he said, "Let us all join hands," he was murdered by his brothers. Owen Dodson: Well, I'd like to say a word about LeRoi Jones. I'm not infringing, I don't think, on what you're going to say tonight. I picked up Dutchman, and I read it through in just one sitting. And I said, "I have never read a play like this." This play is truly a revolution. It is dynamic as Büchner's Danton's Death. It is angry as Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. It is a whole revolution in itself. And what saves it from being a potentially dirty love affair between a white woman and a Black man who pretends to be an intellectual, is that he is not talking about Clay, the boy, nor Lula, the girl. He is talking about the whole world standing by. It is an allegory. It is symbolic. This whole subway stands by while she murders this man. And then she says, "Get him out of here." And they drag him off, and the train gets to the next stop, and another Black man comes in. And she starts the same thing over again. Owen Dodson: So, one of the saving graces, and the magnificence, of the early LeRoi Jones as a playwright is that even though he sprayed urine, or had urine sprayed... Maybe he did it himself... around the theater, so that you felt as though you were in a toilet, he lets us know by the end of that play that the toilet is the world that we live in, that it's not a toilet in a high school basement. And when those two boys, who have been fighting with surface hatred in their hearts, crawl toward each other and almost embrace in death, we feel as though he's saying the same thing that James Baldwin says in The Amen Corner, that love, if we find it and hold it soon enough, can save us. So that this is not a dirty play, as so many people have implied, but it is a play about love that is found too late. Owen Dodson: The Baptism is another experiment of his. It's full of ritual. It has style. It has the terrifying idea that the little boy, Jesus, is a pervert, that the priest is one, too, and that the whole church has become perverted. And he's really trying to say that the church itself has become irresponsible. Owen Dodson: Well, I think you all know Dutchman. How many have read Dutchman? All right. So you all know Dutchman. I want to not end with LeRoi Jones, but I want to say that in that last speech, when he says, "Up yours," says, "Kiss my Black ass," and goes on and on, that he, of all the playwrights who use those words, has made poetry out of them, not sensation, because they occur as refrains, recurrent ideas, variations on the same theme of hatred, so that they become fresh and new to us. Owen Dodson: Now, another way that this has been done, this use of violence of language, is in James Baldwin. James Baldwin, as you know, wrote Blues for Mister Charlie. Young lady back there said, "Why do you say Blues to Mister Charlie is a bad play but has magnificence?" Well, it has. And if you have read that last, great speech of Juanita's, when she says, after her lover has been murdered, and she hopes that she is going to have a child, she says, "Let me be pregnant. Let me have sons that I can bring up." And she says, "If ever I meet God on this fearful planet, I will spit in his face. I will spit in God's face." This is monumental. This whole speech, and many parts of it, is like Greek drama. In so many short phrases, he is able to embrace a whole idea. Owen Dodson: Like Sophocles said, "Who was a slayer? Who was the slain? Speak." Or Medea saying, "Anyone running between me and my justice will reap what no man wants." And so James Baldwin, in this badly constructed play that has so much that is great in it, has found a way to use language so that it becomes memorable. She could've said, "You're a son of a bitch, God." Oh, no. It's deeper than that. To spit in God's face is something else. And then that you will never see the face of God is more horrible still, because you are talking about a phantom. There may be a spirit around that he can spit at. Owen Dodson: Ed Bullins, very shortly... I called his plays "witchcraft in Harlem." Ed Bullins has raked in a lot of garbage... language garbage, garbage people, garbage ideas, without motivation, without style... without saying why. I don't care if you bring in prostitutes, whores, alcoholics into a play. That's all right. But why? Why have they become this way? There is no indication, in all of Ed Bullins' plays that I have read so far, that society has made these dope addicts, these prostitutes and alcoholics. He just presents them. Well, presenting is not enough. The playwright must motivate, and say why and who. Like that little girl I told you about. We know what she may become because of her parents, and her parents are what they are because of society, and their ignorance and indolence. Owen Dodson: So that I don't see any reason for a play that I saw at the New Lafayette Theatre, which was later transferred to Lincoln Center. First of all, I had two English friends, and I thought that, instead of taking them to see a Broadway play, I would take them to see some Black theater because that would be fresh and new to them. And I was saying this over the phone, and a friend of mine tapped me on the shoulder. Said, "You'd better call that box office and ask whether they'll be let in, because all the white critics were chased out the opening night of the theater." Owen Dodson: So I called the box office, and they said, "Well, just a moment." They didn't say "sir" or anything. They went into consultation, I guess, for about three minutes, on my telephone time. In New York, it's not like Washington, where you can talk forever, and it's the same amount. And I said, "Well, will my friends be let in?" She said, "Okeydokey" and hung up. No. I'm not trying to run down anybody or run down anything. Owen Dodson: Anyway, these are words you will read in all of these books, and some of you have read them already. We waited 40 minutes. I was on two canes, and no place to sit in the lobby. And I said, "Can I just go in and sit down?" Said, "No, not yet." Well, anyway, when we finally got in there, there were about seven people. And then a troop of little kids came in. They gathered them off the streets, I later learned. They were from, I would say, seven to about 13. And so they helped fill the void. The music came on, along with some lurid blue lights. And a voice that had vinegar and pebbles in it said, "I got hot pussy. Sock it to me, mama. Papa. Anybody." I said to Louise... I said, "This is not happening. You know that. This is not going on in this theater." Well, it did go on in the theater. Owen Dodson: Well, then the play started. I have never smoked marijuana, but I know the smell of it. They were smoking real marijuana on the stage, which, of course, is défendu. I mean, you don't drink real liquor on the stage, except a glass of champagne as Lynn Fontanne did in The Visit. They were drinking real beer and chasing it with whiskey. And then there came a point when they were playing cards. You know how people get excited playing cards, and they slap one down when they got a good card? And then sometimes there's a silence while they study it. Owen Dodson: And during one of the silences, we heard a sound. It went... Someone said, "Someone done laid a fart." And the fellow who laid it said, "Who? Who?" So he said, "Who? I want to know." So the fellow sitting next to him came over and smelled his behind, and smelled the chair, said, "You did it, man." Then I said to Louise again, I said, "This is really not happening." Said, "Don't you go back to England and say this is happening." Now, the kids have been exposed to all of this. They enjoyed it. So, the company, because the marijuana... And I'm talking about company now, not Ed Bullins. It got good to them, the applause and the laughter, so they repeated the same joke. Owen Dodson: The whole play lasted five hours. I stayed two and a half hours. At the end of the first act, there were three couples on the stage. The men were bare to the waist, but there was a blanket covering their lower parts, so you assumed they were... Three couples were naked in three parts of the stage, and they were pumping away at each other. And that same voice came over. I said, "This cannot be." And then the white establishment was so threatened that they took this play to Lincoln Center, which appalled me. I wish I could stay the night. Owen Dodson: Mr. Bullins has written some forceful plays. Certainly his dialogue is almost an exact copy of what you can hear on the streets. Surely in Clara's Ole Man, he's got a forceful drama, as forceful about lesbianism as Dutchman is about an affair between two races. But he is shoveling. He shoveled, at least, because the theater has closed. He shoveled the garbage of the streets that the kids played in right into their faces in the theater. And that's what I resent, that the theater should have some spiral of hope, even in the midst of degradation and vileness. There must be something that saves us. So we get the dregs of humanity without the dream of what humanity could be and is capable of. Owen Dodson: Well, those are three of the... They're not the old school. They are the new breed, but they are the first of the new breed. LeRoi Jones' latest plays, Four Dynamite Plays by Ed Bullins are just that, dynamite plays. "Blow it all up. The hell with it." And he eats well. Because every time I see his picture on the front of Black Digest, that April issue, he's getting fatter and fatter. I mean, seems to grow year by year. So he's living right well, doing nicely. And now he's joining the ranks of Broadway. You see, they started off... he started off... trying to bring theater to Black people in a Black community. And now he wants to be with the regular playwrights who are commercial, want to make money, and his idealism seems to have fled. He's writing now with sensationalism. Owen Dodson: But now this new breed, these people who have light shades on. There's one young man. We produced his play at the Harlem School of the Arts, smack in the midst of Harlem. He's called Norman Riley. He is the brother of Clayton Riley, who wrote that Ed Bullins was one of the mightiest, the greatest in the world. He wouldn't even come to see his brother's play, wouldn't take the time out, because he knew the kind of play his brother was trying to write. It was the opposite of the kind of play that he approved of. Owen Dodson: Norman Riley, in this play called Runaway People, sets these people in a small house, a boy and a girl, and a sick mother downstairs. They're in the midst of a tenement. He says it's Danbury, Connecticut. It could be almost any city in this country. And all during the play, we have a chorus offstage, and they are arguing and fighting. The man would say to his wife offstage, "I'm going to piss in your face." Said, "I'm going to piss all over you." And then the other people, off stage, would say, "Ha ha ha ha. I bet you won't do it, man." And this young couple, who are quivering and sensitive, and have been protected by their mother... The girl gets hysterical. She says, "I can't stand it any longer." She says, "We have got to get out. We have got to get out." And then offstage begins again. Owen Dodson: And finally the mother is singing, "Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you," the song that is a song of getting away, of wanting to get some fresh air, some decency. Finally, a man who has been crippled in an accident calls for help, saying that he has been thrown out of a hallway where he slept with a cat. They let him in, and they say, "Wouldn't you like some soda pop or something?" The boy says, "Go downstairs, and get some soda pop for him." There's an old drunken woman on there, and as soon as he begins to drink, he said, "You'd be surprised how little piss can sweeten up some pineapple pop." And he won't drink. And so finally the man takes it and drinks a little bit, and he drinks some. Owen Dodson: And he gets to love these people because he has no friends, and these people, who have nothing, take him in, and he's so happy. And they sing a song called Rise Up, and he's able to stand for the first time in months. It's amazing. And they are happy, and they sing louder, and then, offstage, "I told you I'd piss in your face, didn't I? Well, I did. Ah ha ha ha." And he falls down. The little man who had the accident said, "We've got to get away." He said, "Don't go away." Said, "You my friends." Said, "You the only friends I have. Don't go away." He said, "I fix them. I fix them. You won't have to leave." And he goes out and shoots up the tenement next door. And he comes back. "Said I'd fix them." Owen Dodson: And finally the boy says, "Give me the gun. Give me the gun." And he battles with the little man and gets the gun but is shot. And the little man doesn't understand, really, what has happened. And he says, "I got to find me another cat. I got to find me some friends." And the girl leans over her lover, and she said, "Don't go away." And the mother downstairs is singing, "Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you." And all the girl can say is, "Mama. Mama, come get me. Mama, come get me." And the curtain falls. Owen Dodson: But in the midst of all of that degradation, there is the dream of at least attempting, wanting, to get away, and the naivete of the young, who have not been educated to what life is really like. When the girl says, "I've got to get away," he said, "We'll get away." Said, "I got money in the bank." Said, "We'll go to New York." He said, "I've got $43." $43 in New York. Can you imagine that? Subway fare is going up 60 cents in the beginning of the New Year. Owen Dodson: Well, then, on the same program, he had a monologue on dope addiction, but it is about the poetry of what addiction can do and how you can be redeemed. He doesn't condemn the person he's talking to for smoking, for shooting, popping, whatever. There are three or four stages. He just says what it can do, and how easily death can come, and how shockingly violent it can be. But he gives you a sense that people can be saved, can be redeemed. That it's not the health department. It is not God, surely. It is not your mother or your father. It is you who can help yourself. And so it seems to me that this is very, very different from just showing degradation. And he's not propagandizing, either. He's taking, as these other two playwrights that I'm going to talk about, the way out without propaganda. He's not condemning. Ed Bullins doesn't even condemn. He just shows that life is just one big bed were anybody can climb in and exchange partners. Owen Dodson: Well, one of the... I call him one of the most brilliant young playwrights that I know in America because I haven't seen many playwrights abroad. Ted Shine. He's got a whole different point of view. He is Grand Guignol. Bloodletting. Poison. Arson. It's amazing. First of all, his sense of craftsmanship is beautiful. His plays follow... not the rules. He's made his own rules, but at least they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They have a climax. They have a denouement. His characters are real, and are motivated, and are rich in their scope of life and what they want. Owen Dodson: His themes are not really, truly race. His greatest theme, I suppose, is greed, the greed of man, so that he's not establishing himself in Houston, Texas, or in Harlem, as Ed Bullins has established himself. He establishes himself and his characters in the universe, that these plays could be done in Japan, in England, in Oakland, California, in New Guinea. Owen Dodson: One of the plays is Idabel's Fortune. Well, when I gave it the first time, the audience, they just stood up in a kind of humorous and scared ecstasy. Because he was talking about a woman who once had a fine house, and as her servant says... He said, "Your life has just been one big martini." Now she is paralyzed, can just about move a little bit, and she can't talk, but she can hear. And she can, "..." every once in a while. She's a white lady. She still wants to be made up, and this Negro servant makes her up, even rouge. No one uses rouge now, but she wants that rouge on. And she has to dress up in a kimona, a negligee. This servant is the only one who has taken care of her. But before she became paralyzed, she made a pact. She said, "I get all of the household effects, the antique furniture, the silver, the linen, the whole works. Sign." But what can she do? She signs. And that paper is deposited in a safe deposit vault. Owen Dodson: And so she said also, at the time of the signing, "I will stay with you until your relatives come." Well, finally the relatives arrive. And oh, they think that she's rich, and they bring her all kinds of gifts. They have stolen money so that they could bring her and impress her. They bring her champagne. And she, "..." They open her mouth and pour it down her throat, and she chokes on it. It gets really funny after a while. And they lift her up and put that kimona on, and tell her how nice she looks in it. And then, little by little, they discover that there is no money, that there is nothing. And they say, "Well, we'll take as much as we can." And the Negro housekeeper says, "Put that ashtray down. That's solid silver. It belongs to me." Said, "I'll have the court on you." Owen Dodson: And so that this older cousin, who is married to a young man, finally make their getaway. And the housekeeper puts on her fur coat that she has bought. She's also bought a $24,000 house that she's going to retire to. And she says to the old lady... She said, "Goodbye." And she leaves, and we hear the train whistle outside. And then three moving men come in. He said, "We's the men from [Shrevesport]. Shrevesport. We moving from Shrevesport." And they begin taking things out so that they can be sold to this antique dealer. And finally there's just the old woman, and the wheelchair, and the three men. And they say, "Sorry, ma'am. Sorry." "..." And they lift her up, and they put her on the floor, and one of them sits in the wheelchair, and they say, "We the three men from Shrevesport. Shrevesport." They wheel each other out. And she's there. "..." on the floor. It is hilarious, and so pathetic, and so moving. Owen Dodson: My doctor was there, and I said, "Well, how'd you like the plays?" He said, "Well, I'm a doctor. And I don't care what people have done or how they get their wounds. I'm there to cure. I'm not there to ask why or to tell them." Ted doesn't. All he says is how she became this way. And so the theme of greed, the housekeeper's greed, and false values. All her life, this woman had false values, and spent her money on dresses, parties, champagne, a private car, all of this. Owen Dodson: The next, and most moving, of all of his plays, which was done off-Broadway to excellent reviews, is Shoes. And if you can get a copy of Contribution... It's very cheap. Dramatists Play Service. It's called Contributions. It has two plays in it. One is called Shoes. It's about boys, young boys, who are working in the summer so that they can have a little change to go back to school, buy their books. But there's one of them who is crazy about clothes. Somehow or other, he can't help it. And there's a certain breed of young man, especially in Harlem. Their shoes, they shine those shoes to a T. And their hair, the top and the bottom. The middle takes care of itself. Owen Dodson: Well, in Shoes, this young man is waiting for his kind of foster guardian to bring him the $150 that he has saved. "Man," he says to one of the boys. He said, "I'm going to get me some Stacy Adams shoes." Says, "$75." He said, "I got them on the layaway plan. Today's the last day. I'm getting those shoes." Said, "And then I'm going to get me," and he goes on with the hat and the rest of the regalia. He said, "I'm going to wear it to school." Said, "I'm going to be clean, man. Clean." Owen Dodson: So the man comes, and he says, "I've got the money." He said, "Well, aren't you going to give it to me?" He said, "Do you mean to tell me you want $150 all at once?" He said, "What are you going to do with it?" So one of his partners says, "He says it's already been spent." Said, "What do you mean, it's been spent?" He said, "Well, he's got to pay $60 on the Stacy Adams shoes in pure alligator green." And he goes down the list, and I think there's about $5 left. So he said, "You can't do that, son." He said, "This is the last day for my layaway." But he said, "Give me my money." Owen Dodson: Said, "No." He said, "When you were sick," he said, "my wife and I nursed you to life, when your mother was drunk." He said, "I've taken care of you ever since you were a little boy." He said, "Now, pay attention to me." He said, "I want my money." He said, "I didn't ask you to save me or to bring me up." And finally the man says, "No." And so one of them has bought a gun, and he gets the gun, and he said, "Give me my money." The older man is aghast. He said, "You might kill me?" One of them said, "Look in his eyes, man." He said, "You can see he got hatred in his eyes." Said, "He's going to kill you, man." Said, "You'd better give him the money." Owen Dodson: So the man takes the money out and throws it on the floor. And then he's got to grab around on the floor to get his money together. And finally the last lecture, and his guardian goes out, and he is left there. The others... He says, "Aren't you going down with me to show you the Stacy Adams shoes?" Said, "No, man." He said, "I got something else to do." They all walk out on him, and he's left alone. And he grabs up the rest of his belongings, and he goes up the stairs and says, "Shit." And that's the end of the play. But it's a play, there again, about false values, so that it is not about race relations, particularly, but it's false values. These fellows happen to be Negroes, but they could be almost from any place. Speaker 4: Death of a Salesman? Owen Dodson: That's right, false values. Yes. I remember speaking to Earle Hyman about Death of a Salesman after he saw it. And he said, "They're talking about..." Said, "Someone should feel sorry for him." Earle said, "Why? Why?" So, of course, Death of a Salesman, to me, it's not a tragedy at all. He put all of his values in the wrong place, and he was grown enough to know better than that. Owen Dodson: Contribution is... It is about race relations, but it's about the generation gap, which is a larger issue than race relations. The generation gap. This boy is talking to his grandmother. And he's going out on the sit-ins. That's going to be his contribution to race relations. And he berates her. He said, "Old..." I don't know what he calls her. "Old woman." Said, "There you sit." He said, "You sending around all these cakes and pies to the white people in the neighborhood." He said, "The old sheriff said you keep sending him some." Said, "Even this morning, you said sent him his cornbread so he could have a nice breakfast." And he said, "You keep sending these folks and spending your own money," says, "trying to take care of the white folks by long distance," or whatever the lines are. Owen Dodson: She said, "Well, go on." She said, "Just go on and sit in." She said, "Now," said, "I want you to put on a nice, clean shirt, and a tie so that, in case they take your picture," says, "you'll be all right. You look nice. You'll be representative." And so finally he comes back, triumphant, with the banner. I forget what it says. I think, "We could set my people free," or, "We want to sit down where you sat," or something like that. And he said, "Well, we just about did it." Said, "Now even you," said, "Even you can go down and have your favorite soda." Owen Dodson: And she gets him told. She tells about her life, the degradation of it, and everything. And finally she said, "Was Sheriff there?" Said, "Yeah, Sheriff was there." He said, "He watched us from across the street." And he said, "When we came out, he had dropped dead." She said, "From one of my pieces of cornbread." Shine is capable of mixing this Grand Guignol, murder in high style. You never know what's happened. Owen Dodson: And his largest play so far was called Morning, Noon, and Night. It hasn't been published yet. This theme is a theme of greed and a theme of, if you sin, there will be retribution. It's a very small cast. There's an old grandmother who has a wooden leg. The cornerstone of a church dropped on her foot, and so they had to amputate [crosstalk] wooden leg. She stomps around. And then there is her daughter-in-law. Her son has died. And then there is their little son. Well, the little boy is very, very precocious. She keeps saying, said, "What you going to do with that money that you got in the bank? Give it to me," she says, "and I'll save it for you." She said, "That 3% interest," she says, "is enough for me." Owen Dodson: And so the play develops. And the daughter-in-law comes in, and she said, "I fix a nice dinner for you." Said, "A very nice dinner." Said, "Some stew." And the little boy said, "I tell you, that stew is poison." Said, "She poisoned Grandpa." Because earlier in the play, he said, "Grandma, did you poison Grandpa with some of that stew, and he died?" She said, "Oh, death ain't no big thing." Well, anyway, the end of it is that the girl eats the stew, little by little, over months. The grandmother has been feeding her arsenic. This is all within the race, now. And this is the last day. Say, "Ain't it good?" Said, "Eat some more." So she said, "Yes, I'll eat some more," said, "but I feel real weak." Said, "Oh." Said, "Don't worry about that." Said, "You just need some rest. You've been working too hard." Owen Dodson: And finally she said, "You're dying." She said, "I've been putting arsenic in your food for months." She said, "You're going to be dead in a minute." Said, "Oh, no, you couldn't. You couldn't've done it." She said, "Oh, couldn't I, though? Couldn't I?" She said, "But I saw you taste the stew." "Huh," she said, "I just made believe I put the spoon in there and had some of that stew." She said, "Now go on in the other room and die." She said, "No." And she's holding on to things, trying to get to her bed. She knows it's not true. She collapses as she gets to the bedroom door. And the grandmother says, "Get up from there." She said, "You ain't dead yet." Said, "A few more minutes, but you got to get on that bed," said, "so it'll look natural." Owen Dodson: So finally, with all of her old strength, she pulls her up and begins to drag her. And then, in the midst of this thing where the audience is horrified, the old woman says, "Child," said, "you is heavy as a hippo-pop-a-pop-opotamus," and drags her in. Well, of course, we all burst into laughter there. And the little boy comes in and asks where she is, and the grandma said, "Well, I don't know." So he goes into the room, finds out that she is dead, and he said, "You couldn't have done it. You couldn't have done it." And she said, "Oh, couldn't I, though?" She said, "Bring me that bottle of whiskey." Said, "I ain't had a drink in 40 years." And she begins to drink. Owen Dodson: And pretty soon she said, "Light me a fire. I'm cold." So he brings in wood and lights the fire. And then she kind of goes off and gets number and number. And he gets some kerosene and sprinkles it on her wooden leg and all around the room. And the kerosene catches fire, and he says, "Old lady." She's all... Said, "Old lady." He said, "Your leg is on fire." Said, "Wake up. Your leg is on fire." And the stage, we fixed it so we had this artificial fire coming up. Owen Dodson: And he runs out, and he said, "I'm going to run to Sister" whatever her name is. And he said, "I ain't even going to look back at the flames." This is an old evangelist. She's not old. She's about 30 years old. And he's about 13. And she embraces him. The first thing she says... This is earlier in the play. She said, "Boy." She said, "Let me see your teeth. Oh," she said. "They is beautiful." She said, "Now, you just wait for me." She said, "You just wait." Said, "You wait for about two years. Oh," she said, "that very first time. The very first time." And that who he's going to. Owen Dodson: It's terrifying. Because he is satisfied now, not only with the theme of greed, but with telling a story. Just a story that embraces us, that fascinates us, that holds our attention wholly, fully. And there are very few playwrights now who really write a play that has a story to it, and where there's real suspense, and where the characters are motivated. Why did this old woman want security? Why would she move in on her daughter-in-law? Why would she try to destroy her and possess the son so that she would have security when she got older? But the storyline is there. Owen Dodson: Well, the last playwright I want to talk about is Edgar White. Edgar White is one of the most symbolic, richest in content and in development of character. Unlike Shine, his plays have no story. The first play in this book, if you would like it, La Crucificado. It can be done in Spanish or as... I mean, as Spanish people or by American people. In here it takes place somewhere in New England. It's about a man who completely loses his identity. And at the end of the play, he doesn't even know his name. He said, "Maybe if I could remember my name..." He's in a sanitarium. "...they would understand." Understand. Owen Dodson: And he has been pushed to this point, not of insanity but of a trance-like state, because, number one, he has been working in a Southern, Negro school, where the principal, Dr. [Karma]... The names are symbolic. Dr. Karma says, "I think you are well educated. You come from New England. You went all those high-class schools, and we wanted somebody like you down here. But we want to be parents. And," he said, "you want to teach. So," he said, "we don't have any use for you down here." It gets more terrifying. His wife wants him to be a high-class citizen, a cocktail partygoer. His mistress gives him syphilis. His best friend, the only one who understands him, dies in prison. Owen Dodson: And when he gets the news that his friend is dying... who's been working on this five-volume book, history. When he gets the news, he said, "Now, listen." He's just walking around the room, talking to nobody. He said, "Now, listen, Robert." He said, "You can't be dead." Said, "You know we got two more volumes to go." Said, "You can't be dead." And so, with all these series of circumstances, and with his trying to be, shall we say, dicty... He's trying to seem like he lives on Beacon Hill in Boston, and of course he doesn't live on Beacon Hill in Boston. He lives exactly where he lives, with his wife, Joyce, and his mistress, Margery. He is not allowed his scholarship. Owen Dodson: He substitutes words for affection, words for deeds. He's very much like Richard II. When he's in prison, instead of saying, "Let me out of here," he said, "I have been studying how I can make this little room wherein I live unto the world." He said, "Let's sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings," when he should be gathering the army together. Well, J. Walter Smithers doesn't gather any army together, not even in his mind. He's in a trance-like state almost all the time, in his rocker, with his books and his foolishness, because we know what he is writing can't be of any significance because he hasn't lived anything, and he hasn't been true to anybody, not even to his own dream. So we leave him. We leave him in that rocker. Owen Dodson: We need time for discussion. I won't talk about Crucificado. It's put out by Morrow. It has just come out. Edgar White is his name. He has another book of plays, just called Four Plays. They are very different from these two plays. He's shown and advanced in the right kind of experimentation. One of them is The Mummer's Play, which, if you get the book, if your library can send for it... Four Plays by Edgar White, William Morrow & Company. Read the other three plays, but especially The Mummer's Play. This is a play about defeat and rise, a man who is defeated by a shrill wife, by drinking, by friends who jive him into thinking that he is somebody. And, finally, at the end, he lands up in a dreamlike heaven. And at the end of that scene, it is Nietzsche who has to empty the chamber pot of Saint Peter's because he downgraded God. He's full of humor. And as Saint Peter goes out, he turns toward this sculptor, and he's talking gibberish, but then one line comes out. He said, "Poetry makes life full of grace. Hmm. Full of grace." And he goes off, mumbling. Owen Dodson: And the man comes back into his room, and he takes up his instrument and begins to sculpt this statue that he had started in clay some time ago. And his wife calls out, with her shrillness, and said something foolish. He said, "Shut up, woman!" He's never answered her back before. He said, "I'm working." And that's the end of the play. Owen Dodson: Edgar White has faults. He hasn't mastered the technique. He has, for instance, in this play, The Mummer's Play... It ends with one scene in his house. And the next scene has to follow right away because the scenes are very short. He says, "Now the four men appear in tuxedos in heaven." Well, now, when are they going to change? You going to have a five, 10-minute break? He hasn't learned the obligation that a playwright has to an audience. Sometimes you end a scene before the audience is satisfied even a little bit. Not always, because, as you know, in real life there is always something left unsaid. But he leaves too much unsaid, and so the scenes kind of dangle so that, in a way, so many of his plays are directors' and actors' plays. The director has got to find a scheme to make the play flow. Owen Dodson: Shakespeare's got a lot of scenes, but if one character goes off, another scene begins, and they do the scene. Then the other character comes in, in his change of costume. He's had time to do it. But Edgar White hasn't learned that technique yet, unless he wants the actor to... He said, "The next time we see him, he is unshaven" and some other foolishness. And there's darkness, and the next scene follows. Now, what are you going to do with that? Well, you see, the actor has just got to do something with himself, with his face, with his feeling, something to indicate that he's unshaven. And so when I see Mr. Edgar White the next time, I will talk to him about these things.