Darwin Turner lecture, "Black Drama Since 1953," 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 Black Drama Since 1953 is Darwin Turner Director of the Institute for Afro-American Culture at the University of Iowa. Professor Turner is introduced by Robert Corrigan, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Iowa. Robert Corrigan: I have promised to keep the introductory remarks quite brief, but it seemed to me that because this man was for those of you who are participants in the institute perhaps the pivotal individual that you might want to know more about him than a short introduction could allow. And I'll try to go through it very quickly and not indeed read everything that's on this rather massive data sheet. He did indeed graduate from the University of Cincinnati, did make Phi Beta Kappa while he was there at the age of 15. He was an English major, delayed a little bit after Cincinnati and was age 18 when he finally achieved an MA degree in English literature at the University of Cincinnati. A full seven years later, he received his PhD. I didn't know why it took Darwin so long to get a PhD, and then I discovered in so far as I can tell from the data sheet that he was teaching a thousand miles away from the University of Chicago full-time while he was working on the PhD, or at least what the record would seem to indicate. Robert Corrigan: His college teaching career is long and is varied. He's taught at Clark College in Atlanta, at Morgan State College in Baltimore at Florida A&M, at ANT College in Greensboro. North Carolina. Was a visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin, was a Professor of English at the University of Michigan, a visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii. While he was at the University in Greensboro, North Carolina, ANT, and I think I should point this out to you because there were some remarks made in extremely bad taste last night it seems to me. We should indicate that while he was at ANT, he also served as a Dean, Graduate Dean. He joined us at the University of Iowa last year as a visiting Professor of English and Afro-American studies. And this year, of course has been Professor of English and Director of our Afro-American studies program. Robert Corrigan: He belongs to a variety of professional and academic organizations, which represent not only the tremendous breadth of his interests but also a particular kind of relationship to groups within our community, which I think are quite interesting. In addition to being of some importance in organizations like the Modern Language Association of America and NCTE. He is the only person that I know of who serves on the editorial board of both the CLA Journal and what used to be called The Journal of Negro History. He is the only person that I know who seems to be able to get along as amazingly well as he does with those of us who tend to be conservatives in the profession and those who perhaps represent a more liberal to radical perspective. Robert Corrigan: His articles, his poetry, his other creative writing literally is, I know this is a gambit on the part of people who must introduce speakers, but the amount of his publications is quite impressive. I perhaps would indicate the kind of development that is represented here. He did indeed do a Master's Thesis on 20th century Black Fiction. And then of course, moved to a Doctoral Dissertation on 20th Century Drama. But then his early publications indicate I think in some ways the history of many of us in the profession paralleling Darwin Turner's career, such titles as Reflections of Life in Fiction, The Servants in Congreves Comedies, Jazz-Vaudeville Drama in the Twenties, A Re-Examination of King Lear, Dreams and Hallucinations in Drama of the Twenties. And then on to such titles as A Negro Scholar, America and Race Relations, The Negro Dramatist's Image of His Universe, and then onto such things as Melville's Piazza, Smoke from Melville's Chimney. Robert Corrigan: In this early period of his career, he co-edited a volume in 1965, which I think sort of proved to be a precursor of other interests that he would have. He was a co-editor of Images of the Negro in America. The publication career continues to be lengthy and quite intriguing. I note, for example, that between 1957 and 1965, he not only published at least a dozen poems, but put together in 1964 a volume of his own poetry Catharsis, which was published by the Wesley Press in Wesley, Massachusetts. He then went on in the period 1967 through 1969 to make that contribution to the developing study of the Afro-American culture, at least the resurgence of interest in Afro-American culture with such titles as Black Literature Essays, Black Literature Fiction, Black Literature Poetry. Moved on to such articles as The Negro Novelist and the South, Frank Yerby as Debunker, Jean Toomer's Cane, Daddy Joel Harris and His Old-Time Darkies, a favorite title of mine, CLA and the Language Teacher. Reviews of course extensive and too numerous to mention the poetry continues, the editorial work continues somehow. Robert Corrigan: He found himself one of those editors in the Arnold Press Afro-American culture series and managed of course to provide the introductions to a number of those volumes. Found the time to also put on tape lectures on such topics as Richard Wright's Outsider, Jean Toomer's Cane, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Then almost simultaneously, he edited Black Drama in America: An Anthology published by Fawcett Books in 1971. And then the very perceptive, very challenging, In a Minor Chord, three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity. In his spare time, he has been collecting the as yet uncollected writings of Jean Toomer, has been putting together a handbook for the study of Afro-American Literature, is in the midst of what I consider to be a pioneering study of the work of Frank Yerby. Robert Corrigan: Somehow between all of these publishing obligations, he manages to teach a full load at the University of Iowa. He manages to direct the Afro-American studies program here at the University of Iowa, and indeed of course is the guiding force behind this institute that you are participating in tonight. As his colleague, I wish to give you an idea of the multifaceted career that he has led. To go beyond that, I think would be undue chauvinism. I will let you discover in the next two weeks the kind of individual that we are dealing with this evening. The topic of his lecture is one that I think should be of great interest to most of the participants, to most of the audience that is here this evening, but particularly to those individuals who have been following our debate over the last day and a half. This evening, Darwin Turner will speak on Black Drama Since 1953. Darwin Turner. Darwin Turner: Thank you Professor Corrigan for that very kind introduction. Someone once said that the major difference between an introduction to a speech and an obituary is that the corpse doesn't have to listen. At present, two theories of drama are being discussed in the Black community of America. One theory is called Black arts drama, the other has not been named in the context of Afro-American culture. For convenience, I label it traditional drama, not to imply that it is static or archaic either in style or substance, certainly no one would call Adrienne Kennedy's absurdist dramas old fashioned, even though they are traditional in the sense in which I'm using the term. I use the term traditional merely to emphasize the Afro-American playwrights' tendency to emulate the practices of Americans theater as a whole rather than to follow practices specifically identified with Black culture. Darwin Turner: Simplified distinctions have been made between these two forms of drama, Black arts drama, and I include such variations as Black revolutionary drama, drama of Black experience, and ritual drama. Black arts drama, it is said is written about Black people, is intended to educate a Black audience to its needs for liberation and should derive a style or technique from the culture of the Black world. Undoubtedly, some people also contend that Black arts theater is racist because it focuses on the problems of Black people, that the language is obscene, that the conditions of the characters is squalid, and that the tone is militant hatred. Such a derogatory delimitation however I believe to be unfair for two reasons. Despite its present honor in the history of American theater, tobacco Road for its time I think was as vulgar in language and morality as anything ever written by a Black American dramatist. What does one say about Last Tango, about Hair, about, Oh, Calcutta. What would be said if these were to be produced by Black dramatists? Darwin Turner: The fact that overt castigation of Blacks in American drama is not fashionable today should not obscure the fact that less than 60 years ago American theater on stage and in film staged Thomas Dixon's vilification of Black people with no apparent concern about the fact that these were derogatory racist presentations all of a group of significant Americans. And I'm certain that Mr. Tennessee Williams did not care and does not care whether Black people feel that his examination of Southern belles in the Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire is sufficiently universal to include matters of concern to Black people. Now, do not misunderstand. I am not suggesting that racism, obscenity, and vulgarity however defined and hatred are desirable or necessary characteristics of drama. I merely insist that because such qualities have already existed in the work of Americans applauded by the public and of the critics. Darwin Turner: I do not believe that plays by Blacks should be demeaned merely because such elements exist. Furthermore, as I will suggest later in this paper, not all of these characteristics can be discovered in the work of dramatists who may be identified as Black arts dramatists. A simplified description of traditional drama by Black playwrights is that in contrast to Black arts drama, although it is written about Black people, it does not insist upon the education of a Black audience as its major purpose. It may also seek merely to entertain in the sense in which the term has been used throughout the centuries, the sense in which Owen Dodson was using the term in his presentations, merely to entertain in a very broad definition of that term, which includes the creation of work which is intended to elicit aesthetic pleasure. Darwin Turner: Furthermore, such drama is written it is said for an audience which is raceless or perhaps predominantly white. These, as I have said, are simplified but popular definitions of the two concepts. The question I wish to pose is whether such distinctions can be made as easily as some proponents and critics of the concepts would suggest. Is Black arts drama the only type which is good for and relevant to Black people? Are the divisions of the playwrights irreparably different? Is there such an obvious wall between Black arts drama and the traditional that one form can never be mistaken for the other? Such questions I believe must be answered if one is to describe intelligently the state of Black drama today. In order to focus the discussion on specific examples within the all too brief hour afforded for this lecture, I shall restrict myself to the work of the best known contemporary playwrights. And these I would identify as nine, Louis Peterson, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Lonne Elder, Charles Gordone, and Melvin Van Peebles. Darwin Turner: Do not pin mate out afterwards to insist that I said these are the best, I said merely these are the best known. Each of these has earned significant critical attention in professional theater for work which purports to examine Black life seriously. As a group, they span the last two decades, both Peterson and Hansberry represent the 50s, Baldwin and Baraka in his early work reflect the early 60s. For those of you who are not familiar, I probably will use the names Jones, Baraka interchangeably. I'll try to remember to use the name Jones for the work which preceded 1965 and to use the name Baraka for the work which followed 1965, but I may forget. Bullins, Elder, and Gordone all achieved recognition in the late 60s, and van Peebles is the center of attention and controversy today. The dramatists also represent the variation in concept, which I have stated. Peterson and Hansberry had been clearly identified with traditional drama, whereas Baraka, Bullins, Van Peebles have been advocates of Black arts drama. Darwin Turner: To provide even more specific focus, I wish to examine the dramatist in relation to three major questions or issues. One, what is the good life? Two, what is love? And three, if the women in the audience will forgive me, what is manhood? I do not propose to evaluate the plays as Owen Dodson was doing or to evaluate the answers to these questions. I hope in the course of the institute we will have opportunity to evaluate. But this evening, I wish to examine the position of the dramatists with respect to these issues, which must be considered universal. That is, these questions I suspect were first raised when man crawled from his layer to stalk a tiger or a woman. Prophets, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists since then have sanctioned these questions as universal questions. Surely these questions do not cease to be universal when the answers are drawn from the experiences of Black Americans. To label them non universal merely because they're answered in respect to the experience of Black American would presume that the Black American is a phenomenon whose life experience, judgments, values are outside the human experience. Darwin Turner: Please notice that I said outside the human experience, not merely different from the white experience for if Black experiences, values, and judgments are merely different from those of whites, then any definition of universality must be sufficiently broad to include both Black and white modifications and variations from an idealistic norm. Black values are meaningless as universal values only if Black people are non-human. What then are the responses of the best known Black dramatist of the past two decades to the definition of the good life, love, and manliness? Is it possible to discern trends or patterns which would blur the fundamental distinctions between the concepts of Black drama? If you wish a convenient title for this presentation, call it visions of love and manliness in a Blackening world, drama of Black life since 1953. Darwin Turner: You may notice Owen Dodson and I did not get together to do a Frankie and Johnny act. Owen Dodson's presentation however, I learned just this morning was playwrights in light shades, this, a Blackening world. In drama of the 1950s, both Louis Peterson in Take a Giant Step, 1953 and Lorraine Hansberry in Raisin in the Sun, 1959 focused on middle-class families in Northern settings. I'm not using the term middle-class pejoratively, nor am I equating middle-class with a particular professional status. In Black social structure, middle-class status generally has been presumed for many individuals whose economic and occupational status puts them outside the limits, which are generally set for the middle-class of white America. For example, both Richard Wright and Imamu Amiri Baraka identified Black postal clerks as middle-class. Jesse Fawcett and Chester Himes identify seamstresses and educated factory workers as middle-class. Darwin Turner: The identifying characteristics, which I shall use then are that the individual has a stable job above the level of day labor or menial or peon. He has had formal education and respect the value of education, and he aspires to the values traditionally identified with the middle-class, for example, marriage, morality, and property. I don't know whether these are identified with middle-class anymore, but they were once. In Take a Giant Step, the father is a bank clerk who's moved his family from a Black ghetto in order to find better living conditions for his children. One son is in college, the other is preparing to attend. Similarly, even though Youngers in Raisin in the Sun proudly identified themselves as descendants of working people. And even though Walter Lee Younger is a chauffer and his mother is a servant, Benita the daughter of the family attends college and is studying to be a doctor and Walter Lee's son is attending school probably to prepare himself for a job better than his father's. Darwin Turner: Walter Lee himself frets about his role as chauffer. He wants to own a business and define himself as middle-class according to the values of white American society. Even though both Dramatists of the 1950s demonstrated that the characters and values of Blacks are identical to those of American whites, the dramatists are ambivalent about social interrelationships. Take a Giant Step is the story of teenage Spencer Scott's search for maturity in a predominantly white society. Angered and embarrassed by white teachers description of slaves as morons, Scott who is the only Black in the class rebels against authority by challenging her. When he continues his defiance of convention and authority, that is his movement toward manhood by smoking a cigar, he is expelled from school. Feeling betrayed by his former white friends who did not defend him and who do not invite him to their parties now that they are inviting girls to their parties, Scott seeks companionship and maturity in an idealistic romantic or a sexually physical relationship with a Black woman. Darwin Turner: But again, he fails to prove his manhood. One woman rejects him because she wants a man on whom she can lean, and an experience with a prostitute produces a humiliating panic. Returning home. Scott is further repressed by his parents who advise him that because he is a Negro he can never be a man. His mother says that he has no right to talk back to white women, "No matter what they say or do. If you were in the South, you could be lynched for that and your father and I couldn't do anything about it. So from now on my advice to you is to try and remember your place." Citing his own humiliations as a lone Negro who ignores insults in order to retain his job, Spencer's father also demands that he apologize. Spence however has gained a new awareness of manhood. Darwin Turner: Comforted by Christine, an older woman who initiate him into the sexual experience, which he identifies as one evidence of manhood, Scott decides to be a man. He will accept isolation from white companionship as a reality. He will give up all interest in childhood games, he will return to school, and he will prepare himself for college. But the question which Louis Peterson does not answer is what is the good of all that effort when at best Scott can merely duplicate the experience of his father who daily surrenders his manhood in order to retain his job? Peterson had no positive answers about maturity or the good life. Writing during a decade which emphasized the importance of integration, he suggested that Scott would never be integrated socially, except perhaps, and this is only a vague possibility, there may be a relationship with a male Jew who also is an outsider. Darwin Turner: But to free himself from the horrors of ghetto housing, Spence in his maturity may live in a white neighborhood to pay for the house and other comforts. He may work at a white job, but he will be alone as his parents were alone. Visions of law were slightly more positive. Certainly, Spencer's mother and father love each other, even though the father occasionally bullies his family in a feudal effort to reaffirm his eroded manhood. The rest of the Black world in the play generally seems populated by prostitutes and young wives seeking escape from the restrictions imposed by poverty. But there is at least a Christine who compassionately can offer and receive love. Notice, except for his skin color, Spence is typically, conventionally American boy. He plays baseball, he collects stamps. He experiences conventional difficulties with sexual maturing. His problem is not according to Peterson, that he is different from white Americans, but that white Americans reject him. Darwin Turner: His definition of the good life and of his manhood must be phrased in terms of this rejection. If his definition is not universal, whatever that may imply, the fault is not Scott's but that of a society which refuses to see him as a person capable of universality. Spence's society, Peterson concludes is a separate society not because Spencer Scott wants it that way, but because that is the way of life in America. In Raisin in the Sun six years later, Lorraine Hansberry even more consciously emphasized the correspondences between whites and Blacks. Even though she to assumed an ambivalent stance in regard to the social integration of the two groups, although he can respond to African rhythms, at least when he's intoxicated, Walter Lee Younger is a typical American. I'm not certain that Americans will appreciate this, but he honors ruthless capitalism. He castigates Blacks for lack of shrewdness in business. He democratically detests wealthy people if they consider themselves superior and he is willing to fond before the wealthy if they will assist him. And he desires to provide his son with a life better than his own, how American can one be? Darwin Turner: His wife Ruth is almost a stereotyped American heroine of a soap opera. And his sister, despite her current interest in African culture has previously exhibited the frivolous values and activities frequently identified with immature and pampered American college students. Like her children, the mother, Lena Younger believes in traditionally affirmed American values. Hers are identified with the Puritan ethic, decency, Christianity, and hard work, significantly and ironically. When Mr. Lindner a quite representative of the community in which the Youngers are planning to move, when Mr. Lindner describes the attitudes of whites in the neighborhood, he is merely describing white skinned Youngers. He says, "That they're hardworking, honest people who don't really have much but those little homes and a dream of the kind of community they want to raise their children in." Darwin Turner: Despite their similarities to whites, the Youngers however do not seek social integration. Lena has made a down payment on a home in a white community not because she wants to live among whites, but because this is a wise investment in her effort to improve the lives of her children. And as Walter Lee says when he affirms the Youngers determination to enter the Clybourne Park community, "We don't want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes, but we will try to be good neighbors." During the play, Walter Lee struggles to define himself as a man. Resenting his economic dependence upon his white employer and upon his mother, he defines manhood as the ability to support a family and to provide luxuries for that family, a concept which surely is identified with America as a whole. And though his mother's definition of manhood is different from his, it nevertheless falls within the American ideology. She believes that a man must make the correct moral decisions for the family and that he must have the strike to require the family to accept those decisions. Darwin Turner: The conclusion of the play suggests that Walter Lee is beginning to accept his mother's definition at least to the extent of refusing to surrender self-respect in order to gain money. But an ironic question, which I can not resist asking must be, is Walter Lee actually gaining maturity or may he begin to believe that he is merely submitting to his mother's will? Love seems almost taken for granted in the play. Despite whatever quarrels may ensue, members of the family love each other even though mama sometimes must affect harmony between Walter and his wife or between Walter and his sister. The attitudes of Peterson and Hansberry seem characteristic of Black literature as well as Black drama of the 1950s. Because the decade emphasized integration, Black writers and politicians generally stress the similarities between Blacks and whites almost as self-consciously as Charles Chesnutt and Paula Dunbar had during the 1890s and as Jesse Fawcett had during the 1920s. Darwin Turner: Consequently, the good life and drama of the 1950s was that defined for white America differing from that standard only to the extent to which Black efforts were modified by whites. On the other hand, to dispel the notion that Black sought integration merely because they desire to live with whites, Black writers emphasized their desire for freedom of opportunity, rather than for social relationships. Now, it could have been expected that the new political stances adopted by Blacks during the 1960s would produce new visions in drama. By 1964, when James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie and LeRoi Jones's Dutchman appeared, the passive boycotts of the late 50s had been supplanted by the still nonviolent but much more aggressive settings of the 1960s. Although Black power was not yet a household slogan, a more militant rhetoric of confrontation was apparent. And these new attitudes are reflected in the best known plays of Baldwin and Jones in the early 60s. Darwin Turner: Like the plays of Peterson and Hansberry, Blues for Mister Charlie and Dutchman are written for white audiences hence according to my definition, they must be considered traditional drama, moving towards Black arts perhaps, nevertheless traditional. In both plays, the Black characters are more willing to challenge white characters verbally than are the characters of the 50s, more willing to challenge them verbally, but they passively reject physical confrontation. It is the white characters who initiate the violence. Isn't that ironic in plays that have been judged as expressive of the violence of Blacks in America? Scott's parents, recall, had insisted that he should not challenge white authority. And Walter Lee Youngers verbal rejoinders had been polite in contrast in Blues for Mister Charlie young Richard Henry back from the North to his Southern home deliberately provokes and wins a verbal confrontation with a white antagonist who then kills him and is acquitted by an all white jury. In Dutchman, Clay when sufficiently antagonized by Lula responds with a violent rhetorical attack which causes Lula to kill him. Darwin Turner: In Black dramas of the early 1960s therefore, manhood seems determined partly by the willingness of Blacks to challenge white authority even if that challenge is suicidal. That is not my interpretation. Notice that's what happens in the two plays. Focusing solely on this dimension, many play goers Black and white alight have viewed the dramas as militant, radical, revolutionary, melodramatic, you pick the term. Diatribes of racial hatred. Actually however, Blues for Mister Charlie and Dutchman are surprisingly similar to the plays of Peterson and Hansberry. I don't know whether Imamu Amiri Baraka would appreciate this comparison at all, but please notice what's actually in the plays rather than what's said about the plays. Both of these plays of the early 60s examined the dilemmas of middle-class characters. Darwin Turner: In Dutchman, Clay is a college educated Black who dresses in Ivy League clothes and lives in New Jersey, a world outside of Harlem. Although Richard Henry in Blues for Mister Charlie has been a professional entertainer, his father who may be the actual protagonist is an educated minister sufficiently affluent to support Richard when Richard returns home, at least there is no suggestion that Richard has to get out and find a job the next morning. In both plays, the similarities of Blacks and whites are stressed. For example, in Blues for Mister Charlie, the weaknesses of the whites, lust, lack of moral strength are the weaknesses for which Blacks stereotypically have been demeaned in American literature. And the strength of the Blacks, godliness, courage, braggadocio are the very virtues for which whites have been praised in American culture. Darwin Turner: Ironically then through the reversal, there is an emphasis upon the similarities of Blacks and whites. Like Peterson and Hansberry, Baldwin suggests the importance of an integrated society without arguing that Blacks seek that social relationship. In stage directions, Baldwin dumb breaks the interrelationship of the two groups. While the Blacks are on stage, a spectator can perceive whites through a scrim. While whites are on stage, one hears services from a Black church. Nevertheless, even though the Reverend Meridian Henry seeks to improve the position of Blacks in the community, even though he accepts Parnell a white liberal as a friend, it is the white liberal Parnell and the white antagonist Britten who forced the social interrelationship by their quests for Black women. Darwin Turner: It is even more surprising perhaps to observe that Dutchman stresses the similarity of racial values for Jones has become a symbol of Black nationalism and separatism. Although Lula, a white liberal temptress ridicules Clay because he practices European fashions in attire and culture, Clay defends his right to select the values which he esteems. He says, "Let me be who I feel like being, it's none of your business, you great liberated whore." He shouts this in a manner oh too reminiscent of Spencer's Scott denunciation of his ignorant white teacher who he says sits on her desk displaying her underwear to tantalize the male students in her class. Darwin Turner: At this stage of his career, Jones did not insist that absolute differences distinguished Blacks from whites. Instead he protested against the white American assumption that only they had the right to observe particular values and that they could stereotype and control all Blacks according to their ideas of what a nonwhite should be. Like Baldwin, however, Jones at this stage suggests the whites rather the Blacks who seek the relationship. Although Clay is attracted to Lula, he stares in her direction out the window of the subway train, notice that it is Lula who initiates the seduction. Although Jones has stated that Dutchman can be discussed as a play about a Black man and a white woman to limit a study of the play as Owen Dodson was saying this afternoon, to limit a study of the play merely to the Black male white female relationship I think is to ignore a dimension clearly suggested not merely by Dutchman, but also by The Toilet and The Slave, which Jones wrote during the same period. Darwin Turner: Each of the three suggests an indebtedness to expressionism. You recall the point was raised this afternoon that Jones in one of his essays has insisted that he is moving against Western culture. Each of the three plays I think suggests an indebtedness to expressionism, which originated in literary history as a label for the work of a group of German writers who at the time of World War I revolted against naturalistic method in their expression of the problems of mankind. In reference to drama, the term expressionism describes a reliance upon abstraction rather than upon a strict pattern of dramatic principles. The German expressionists expressed or objectified ideas and emotions. Because they advanced philosophical attitudes, they designed either characters who represent social groups or characters who are to be identified with dynamic social ideals. Darwin Turner: As Ernst Toller, a leading expressionists explained, "In style, expressionism was always pregnant, almost telegraphic, always shunning the peripheral and always probing to the center of things. In expressionistic drama, man is no accidental private person. He is a tight posited for many and ignoring the limits of superficial characterization." Notice any constellation to Black Americans who may be writing this kind of telegraphic expressionistic drama, it's interesting to note that white American critics also rejected it when it was performed first by the Germans. Finally, they accepted it. Now we seem to be back again to the fact that that which is new is being rejected because it is new. Each of the three plays, which Jones wrote during 1963, 1965, expressionistically presents the tragic involvement of sensitive middle-class Black youth with European culture. Darwin Turner: The name may change, it may be Ray. It may be Clay, it may be Walker. But the character is sensitive, middle-class Black youth in each of the three plays. And ironically, the three supposedly vitriolic plays also remind one of Peterson's Take a Giant Step, not merely in the author's distinction between the cultural level of the protagonist and that of other Blacks, but also in the lack of suggestion of satisfactory resolution for the protagonists. In The Toilet, which Mr. Dodson was talking about this afternoon, Karolis representative of white European culture and ideals attempt to seduce Ray, a popular Black youth, nicknamed Foots by his gang. The Black gang or the Black masses, coarser, and more violent than Ray, the Black gang insists that he physically reject Karolis. As Ray hesitates, Karolis reminds him that Ray privately has responded not as Foots, the Black gang leader, but as Ray whom the Black game does not know. Darwin Turner: When Karolis attacks Ray and threatens to injure him, others in the gang beat Karolis to the ground. After all have left, however, Ray returns to comfort Karolis by holding him. In Dutchman too, the Black protagonists responded when seduction was initiated by the representative of white culture. In that play, however, rather than being pressured by his society to attack, the character realizes the need for physical confrontation with white culture. But in that play also, the middle-class youth refuses to attack. Instead of performing cathartic murder, he says he would rather write a poem. Neither love nor manhood can be achieved in such situations for in both plays the protagonist is suspended between a Black world, which he detests and a white world which tantalizes him, but which he cannot enter in full stature. Darwin Turner: If you wish to see LeRoi Jones the man as opposed to Imamu Amiri Baraka the public figure, somewhere in the role of Ray and Clay and Walker I think you would have justification looking for him then and perhaps in bringing that question, that tantalizing question to bear on what Mr. Dodson was saying this afternoon about what seemed to be the differences in the various positions of the individual. A comparable pattern exists in The Slave, a Black revolutionary visits his former wife who is white and her husband who in combination represent the emotional and intellectual aspects of European culture. Despite his role as leader of a group proposing to destroy that culture, Walker, the revolutionary is closer emotionally and intellectually to that culture than he is to the Black troops whom he detests. He is contemptuous of their lack of culture. Darwin Turner: Although he can generate a revolution against that culture, individually he can not initiate action. Like Ray, he can strike only when threatened, and like Clay he can rage against the emotional attractions but cannot act. One wonders whether he like Clay and Richard Henry would quietly accept execution by whites since he cannot transmute his rage into murder. Now, critics of the time described the three plays as violent and racist, yet can one say that the protagonist is significantly different from Spencer Scott? Rejected by a world, a culture which fears his masculinity, the protagonist cannot find identity among his own people. Like Scott, the Black protagonists withdrawals from the integrated society only because it rejects him. Darwin Turner: If anything, Jones's protagonists are even more desirous of an integrated society than is Spencer Scott. Black dramatists writing after 1965, however, seem to portray vision significantly different in one aspect. Seeming to accept the lesson of Jones trilogy, they presume that whether one wishes it or not Black life in America is and will remain separate from white life. They suggest that integration inevitably exploits Black people. In Great Goodness of Life, perhaps the most artistic of his published examples of Black revolutionary theater, Jones now writing as Imamu Amiri Baraka presents Court Royal, notice the name, Court Royal, a Black postal worker who is bewildered when he is arrested and charged with harboring a murderer. Darwin Turner: Knowing that he as a representative of the post office, an employee of the United States government cannot have committed a crime consciously would not violate a social law, Court Royal reluctantly agrees to expiate his crime by symbolically executing the murderer. At the moment of execution, a cry of papa informs the audience that the middle-class Black has been tricked into destroying his rebellious offspring. In the drama, neither manhood nor love exists. Court admits his weakness. He says, "Please, I never wanted anything but peace. Please, I tried to be a man, I did, I lost my heart. Please, it was so deep. I wanted to do the right thing, just to do the right thing. I wanted everything to be all right." Having surrendered himself to his desire for peace as Ray and Clay before him, Court Royal does not lose his life instead he loses his manhood and his progeny. Darwin Turner: What should be a man's love for his son is surrendered to his love for social acceptance. Yet one must ask whether there is more than a difference of degree in Baraka's expressionistic vision of a Black parent who sacrifices his child's life to society and Louis Peterson's more individualized study of Black parents who require their child to surrender his awareness of truth and self-respect. Since 1965, Black dramatists of Black life have focused on the same themes of love and manhood, which dominated Afro-American theater in the early 1950s and 1960s. Love and manhood, you may recall is what Clay and Lula said Dutchman was all about. The vision of a separate society despite its bleaker and more violent cues in the late 1960s was not entirely new to Black drama. It is four shadowed in part by Baldwin's The Amen Corner written in the 1950s but not performed professionally until 1965. Darwin Turner: The Amen Corner like Baldwins first novel is set in a Black church. In writing it, however, Baldwin seems minimally concerned with the relationship between white society and Black life. Please do not misunderstand, notice that I am not saying that this is separatists drama. I am saying that it is drama of a Black world which is separate. The Amen Corner, I am talking about in that light. The Amen Corner has no protests against or a lesson for a white audience. If any comparisons are to be drawn between Black people and whites, they must be based upon the experiences which Black and white spectators bring to the theater. Baldwin in The Amen Corner writes about the people he knows as though no other people need to be considered. And in doing so, in writing without consciousness of a different audience to which he must explain, he gains a freedom and a strength. Without reference to the values of Western society, Baldwin diagrams the good life and the need for human love. Darwin Turner: Sister Margaret, a minister, fanatically denounces all pleasures of the flesh. She demands absolute moral perfection from her congregation. Resisting her tyranny and lack of compassion, her parishioners, even her son David rebel against her authority. Her control is further threatened when Luke her dying husband returns and forces her to face the truth of their past. When their second child died, neither Margaret nor Luke had strength enough to offer the love which the other needed. Because she blamed him not their poverty, but him for the child's death, she could not comfort Luke in his grief. And because he derived no comfort from her, he turned to drink and thus became even less able to offer the strength which she needed. Requiring security, she fled to God who in her own needs she identified as one who forbid the human involvement which had precipitated her troubles. Darwin Turner: Finally forced to see herself honestly, she realizes that she still wants to be a woman and wife more than anything else. Just as Luke, a wandering musician has always known that a career cannot compensate for the absence of love. The realization comes to light, Luke dies. And humanized by her love, Margaret loses the power to preach the wrath of God. Ironically, she loses both husband and congregation at the very time at which human and compassionate, she is most capable of being a wife or a minister. The only hope in the play remains with David who leaves the church not in flight from repression, but in search of a way through music to express and thus assist Black people. Though written in the 1950s, The Amen Corner I believe is as clear and example of Black arts drama as anything written by Ed Bullins, well known as a theorist and practitioner of that concept. Darwin Turner: In his dramas about Black life, Bullins generally suggests a vision I believe, and here is the point at which Owen Dodson and I disagree. Bullins generally suggest a vision by picturing the absence of vision. Love is a ruse for stealing a wife from a benefactor, love is adultery and lesbianism, love is abuse and betrayal. Manhood is the practice of Walter Youngers' false dream to exploit others before they exploit you, and there is no good life. The vision is at best a dream, which will never materialize. Art is nostalgia for what might have been. If these dramas are to be described as educational as I think Bullins would say, then Bullins might argue that these are the realities which must be transformed if Black life is to be improved. Perhaps the closest character in all of Bullins's drama to serve as a positive example rather than a negative one is Cliff Dawson. Darwin Turner: Though he may have been dishonorably discharged from the Navy, though he commits adultery, abandons women, and abuses his wife, he nevertheless is capable of compassion as when he kills a man to protect his young nephew from a brawl, which will end either in death or prison, or when he demonstrates compassion for the wife and half brother who have betrayed him. But except for Cliff, the cycle of Bullins's plays is a world of squalor. As laud as the world of William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams or Erskine Caldwell, in Clara's Old Man, a middle-class youth believes that he can seduce a young woman in the absence of her old man whom he carelessly assumes to be either a father or a husband, does matter. His fleeing is abated by his discovery that he stumbled into a lesbian relationship in which he's easily outwitted by the old man who utters him beaten. Darwin Turner: In Goin' a Buffalo, a pimp racketeer, murderer planning a robbery to finance a new start in Buffalo, this is his dream, a new start in Buffalo. This criminal befriends a young man whom he met in prison. The young man trusted and treated as though he were a brother betrays his benefactor to the police, steals his money and his wife and plans to establish himself in Buffalo. In the play In the Wine Time, the central character is Cliff Dawson, a farmer, sailor now attending school in an effort to raise himself above the level of bare sorted existence in the ghetto where love is a euphemism for lust, where husband and wife talk past each other instead of to each other, and where lovers substitute humiliation for respect. Cliff is educating his wife's nephew to dream of beauties in a world beyond the ghetto. When the nephew becomes involved in a drunken brawl with a neighborhood youth, Cliff to protect his nephew kills the youth and goes to jail. Darwin Turner: In New England Winter takes up the story after Cliff has been released from jail. With his half brother Steve Benson and two others, Cliff plans a bank robbery, which will earn all of them sufficient money for a new start. Steve persuades himself that he will return to New England to a girl who loved him but whom he deserted. The robbery is abated when Steve kills another member of the gang to prevent that gang member telling what Cliff already knows that Steve took Cliff's wife, his lover while Cliff was in jail, made her pregnant and then caused her to be involved with another man so that Cliff would not suspect his guilt. The Duplex, a continuation of this story is set two years later. Steve attending school has become his landlady's lover. When the landlady's husband returns to abuse, rob, beat, and rape his wife, Steve is impotent to act despite his protests of love. Darwin Turner: But later in the play asserting himself, insisting that he is now man enough to protect her, he takes her openly. And then when the husband returns, the husband beats him, drags his wife away, and the life of cards and whiskey goes on. It is a world of squalor, a world in which the actions described by Owen Dodson signify the tone, the aura, and the odor of the life of the community. But is that something that Bullins is advocating as what should be or is it not possible that by presenting this negative image he is suggesting a world that must be corrected if there is to be love? It can be argued that these characters are not of the same social class as the characters in Baldwin, but I think the difference is rather immaterial. They exist in an all Black scene in which survival requires one to assume everyone else to be his enemy. Education is judged desirable but rackets provide the money. Whites who flitter through this world are not villains, they're alcoholics, dope addicts, and prostitutes because that's their world also. They are easily deceived as are the Blacks. Darwin Turner: And like Baldwin, Bullins offers no problem to be solved by a white audience. If there is any significant difference, it is that where Baldwin rationalizes the behavior of a wondering musician who drinks too heavily, Bullins spares no feelings in describing his protagonists who drink excessively, murder, unsuccessfully attempt robbery, betray each other, abuse, exploit, and abandoned loved ones and fail in their plans to improve themselves. Yet, as I suggested, the multiplicity of evidences of lack or loss of vision I think suggest the need for vision and implies Bullins's educational thesis that such a world can be salvaged only if it is supplied with visions of love, manhood, and a good life. Darwin Turner: Neither Lonne Elder nor Charles Gordone has been identified with Black arts drama as clearly as has Bullins. Both are assumed to be writing traditional drama yet their works resemble the Black experience dramas of Bullins. Lonne Elder's Ceremonies in Dark Old Men tells the story of a Black families battle with reality. After the death of his wife, a father and his two grown sons allow the daughter of the house to support them until the daughter refuses. Unable or unwilling to get jobs, the males of the family enter into a racket, which they believe to be justified because it permits Black rather than white exploitation of the ghetto. Their get rich quick scheme prospers then fades. The younger son is killed in a robbery and the family plight remains essentially what it has been at the beginning of the story. Darwin Turner: Perhaps because Lonne Elder had a role in Raisin in the Sun, there are some echoes of the earlier play. The older son like Walter Lee Younger adopts the capitalistic values of America, but there's no conscious effort to evoke admiration for a hardworking family thwarted only by lack of money. Emphasis in the characterization of the males is placed on the father's tendency to daydream on his fear of resubmitting himself to humiliation by a white world and on his desire to find youth in the love of a young girl who deceives him. Flawed characters, but characters whom one can understand, characters who can be seen as universal, but characters written about by the Black writer as Black characters within a Black world. Emphasis in the play is placed on the willingness of the sons to drift indolently unless they're given responsibilities which interest and involve them. Emphasis has given to the daughter who desiring happiness turns to a man who will betray her. Darwin Turner: These sure are not noble characters. They are probably no better, no worse than the characters in Bullins's world. They do not pronounce the belief that separation from whites is advantageous for Blacks, instead they accept separation as a fact of life. Whites are downtown where Blacks must sometimes go to seek work, but the Black world is uptown. Charles Gordone's controversial play No Place to Be Somebody intended for a white audience seems to stress the dangers potential whenever a member of one race imitates the values of a different race. If this is the thesis, notice, I'm not sure it is. But if this is the thesis, then the values ascribed to white society seem to be greed, exploitation, corruption, and immorality, whereas the virtues ascribed to Blacks are naturalness of expression, basic honesty, generosity, and loyalty. Well, this catalog puzzles me because the play itself in general seems to be a mockery of Black people and Black dreams. It is another reason that I call the play both controversial and ambiguous. Darwin Turner: No Place to Be Somebody is a story of Gabe Gabriel, notice Gabriel, a light-skinned actor writer seeking employment in American theater. It is also the story of Johnny Williams, a dark skinned bar owner and pimp who is awaiting the return of his mentor Sweets Crane from prison so that the two can carve off a slice of mafia territory downtown. Like Walter Lee in Raisin and Theo in Ceremonies, Johnny believes that virtue is doing others before they can do you. Surrounding Johnny in this Black world are Shanty, a white man who wants to be Black, Cora, a Black woman who wants to be white, Dee, a white prostitute who loves Black Johnny. And Evie, a Black prostitute who loves female Dee, and Melvin, a Black man who wants a career in ballet. Like the characters of Raisin, each has a dream, which reveals a conscious acceptance of particular value standards. Darwin Turner: Whereas Gabe, as narrator mocks the efforts of Black people either to secure integration or to live without awareness of their own Black identity, he seeks a career in an integrated theater where he is rejected because depending upon the particular social moment, he is either too fair skinned or too dark skinned for American theater. Above all, Gabe refuses to agree with Johnny that life in America must be a continuous war between Black and white. He refuses to accept it, yet ironically he is forced at the end of the play to kill Johnny. Shanty, the white man seeks in Black life and in Black Cora, a naturalness of expression, a rhythm, a freedom of behavior different from the white life symbolized for him by his former white wife who resented the fact that instead of protecting her from the pawings of his Black musician friends, he beat her. Darwin Turner: Ironically, Shanty fails to perceive that Cora despite her dark skin has values identical with those of his former wife. Disillusioned by the behavior of Black men, she desires a white husband because she assumes that a white will provide security, will treat her with respect, and will honor her morality. Dee who recalls her early love for a Black youth seeks in the self-centered and ruthless Johnny a mature expression of that childhood dream. Johnnie represents for her a possibility for marriage and motherhood that she cannot find among whites. Melvin who was appalled by what he believes to be the ignorance and uncouthness of Black people seeks culture and refinement among white artists. Darwin Turner: Most of the characters experience disillusionment in their search to realize their dreams. Unsuccessful in his efforts to become a Black mafia don, a godfather, Johnny is killed by Gabe who learns ironically that violent confrontation does seem to be the way of life. Distraught with realization that Black Johnny is as willing to exploit her as was the white father who raped her, Dee kills herself. Unwilling to be either a stud or a sex object at a white orgy, an artistic orgy, Melvin withdraws from ballet. Mary Lou Bolton, a naive white liberal permits herself to be driven from the exploitative reality of a Black man personified by Johnny. Darwin Turner: Only Cora and Dee ... I'm sorry. Only Cora and Evie seem to realize dreams. Now, try to find a pattern in this, if you will, I cannot. Cora the Black seeking a relationship with a white professional moves outside the Black culture. She finds a Canadian doctor. Evie gives up the life of prostitution to seek education and hard work, she will remain perhaps within the Black culture. But only these two seem to realize dreams. There are ambivalences and ambiguities corresponding to these. Unlike Peterson and Hansberry, Gordone does not suggest that Blacks and whites are identical except for skin color. On the other hand, he does suggest unexpected similarities. As in the previously mentioned fact that Shanty's behavior corresponds with that of the husband whom Cora left, whereas Cora's values correspond to those of the white wife whom Shanty left. Darwin Turner: The world that is pictured is nonetheless a Black world. The success of integration is debatable. What is suggested if I read the play correctly is a need for Blacks to be willing to accept existence in a world populated by those whom Jones identified as the gang in The Toilet and the troops in The Slave. I think it is unfortunate and I'm not certain it's an accurate presentation of Black people that Jones and Gordone would see the Black world as only a world populated by the gang and the troops. But again, I'm not evaluating, I am describing tonight. By the gang and the troops individuals who lack the cultural knowledge of Europeans but who constitute the Black population. Escape from this world seems to lie only in education, which is not scrutinized as a solution, our hope lies in flight to a different nation. Darwin Turner: Those of course are not new solutions. Education was the one offered immediately after the Civil War, flight is the one that most Black American artists have been following as I've said as soon as they made enough money from the first book to get out. Almost as controversial as Gordone's play is Melvin Van Peebles's Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death. Now, I confess that I do not judge this to be a drama according to what I would call a drama. I see it instead as a musical poem. But it is a work of theater, which is being discussed today and which I think reveals an important vision. It merits examination to suggest the continuing movement of Black playwrights into an examination of a separated Black life. The only white who appears in A Natural Death is a policeman or the police who forces a young prostitute to submit to a sexual abuse and who kills a young Black. Darwin Turner: I confess, I have varying reactions about Melvin van Peebles. He was invited to the institute, he was too busy to come. I have varying reactions. I discovered that even though I did not like Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death when I saw it, even though I wasn't sure I liked it when I read it the first time. When I reread it, thinking about what is actually there, I am much more impressed by the idea that perhaps is not fully realized by the dramatist, the concept is perhaps superior to the craft in this. The continuous manipulation of the Black ghetto in Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death is symbolized by a white mask puppet master who dangles the strings which control and are clutched by ghetto Blacks. Now, except for that continuous manipulation, this is a presentation of a world which is separate. Darwin Turner: What impresses one in the presentation however is that except for the concluding scenes, which emphasize the frustration which turns a postal clerk into an armed rebel, and which emphasized the brutality of the police, concluding scenes, which I frankly feel are somewhat tacked on for their appeal to a Black audience. Except for these, most of the interludes in the play focus on the desperate and generally unsuccessful search for love and on the various distortions of love. And how different is that from what Baldwin was saying in The Amen Corner. Unsuccessful in his efforts to persuade his sweetheart to give up prostitution, country boy becomes a Muslim minister. Seeking riches beyond those, which young Junebug can offer, Tomboy turns to prostitution, but she becomes the object of sexual exploitation by the police. Dorothy otherwise known as big titties, a buxom prostitute vacillates between a life of exploitation by her pimp and the love offered by the lesbian, The Dyke. Darwin Turner: Although his/her love is not approved by society, the quest for love by Funky Girl is as genuine as that of others. He/she wants love, not merely sex. Funky Girl says the world is all scabs and broken needles unless someone cares for you. Fatso, whose name suggests his build and his problem. Fatso considered suicide because he's been tricked and deserted by a young girl he loves, but he received no compassion from the others in the play. A waitress tells him, "Like the man said what will be will be." About the only time the man ever spoke without fat tongue. Deceived by Perfume, the blind man cries out for Funky Girl, the fag whom he believes to be the woman of his dreams. The drunk, Pops fails to evoke crowd sympathy with his story that loss of love is responsible for his condition. Darwin Turner: A convict awaiting execution recalls the dancing beauty of Lilly the lover he killed. The only love rewarded in these scenes is what may be the temporary or permanent reconciliation of Pops the drunk with Missy now free from sunshine who exploited her. The world of a natural death is a world known to many Blacks, and the presentation is one intended for them. Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death shows Black characters who validate the derogatory aspersions of white society that these beings are unfit. Darwin Turner: Van Peebles does not lessen the sting by showing as he might have that such beings also populate white society, nor does he seem to advance sociological arguments to defend the behavior of the natives of the compassionless urban reservation, nor does he concern himself with Blacks who live outside the ghetto experience. Yet compassion strangely does develop in the interludes not so much through van Peebles symbolic indication that Black action is manipulated by whites, but more through van Peebles individualizing and humanizing the stereotypes through their search for love. Funky Girl is real in the search for love. One may not identify with homosexuals, but one sees the sincerity and the need of Funky Girl. These stereotypes are humanized. Darwin Turner: In conclusion, as Black arts drama has developed through the final years of the 1960s, critics have attacked the violence, the rhetoric, the emphasis upon a need for separation of the races. If however one looks at presentations of Black experience since 1953 by the best known Black playwrights, one sees an evolution. Early, the Black playwrights vision of a world in which integration was not working but was honored because no other way of life seemed viable. Then a new vision of a world in which Blacks live and act apart from whites. While playwrights clung to divisions of a unified society, they tried to emphasize the resemblances between Blacks and other Americans. As hope for that vision has waned, Black playwrights have looked more closely and more critically at the individuals who populate the Black society. Darwin Turner: This pattern appears whether the playwright consciously working as a Black arts dramatists argues the need to examine the internal problems of the Black community or whether like Baldwin he has chosen merely to write about a world he knows for an audience which also knows that world. Ironically, as Black dramatists examine their people more critically, often they seem not only less polemical but also more compassionate for what they discern in the Black world is not merely a group of individuals searching for manhood and love, but an even more pathetic group of those who are too impotized to search for manhood, too impotized to achieve a relationship of love. Because these dramatists are not romantic idealists, they do not offer placebos and easy escapes. Much more softly than Richard Wright, but with equal vigor, they say that the present day Black community lacks manliness and lacks love. Is this need for manliness and love common to America in general? In his novels, James Baldwin certainly implies that it is. But the issue seems unimportant to those Black dramatists who are concerned with the problems of their Black love. Darwin Turner: Is there overemphasis on the starvation of love? Perhaps. Nikki Giovanni suggests that fact in Nikki-Rosa. She argues that sociological biographies of Blacks fail to observe the strength of Black love within the family. And as I suggested before, is there no need to picture Blacks who live outside the urban Northern ghetto? What about all those Black people who are still in the South, do they play no role in America today? What about the Blacks who are not merely within the South side ghetto or the New York ghetto or the Harlem ghetto, do they have no problems which can be considered Black problems and which deserve a presentation to Black people? Darwin Turner: This evening, I do not have the time to debate these three questions, but these three I certainly would like you to consider through the balance of this institute. At present, whether they propose realistic portraiture for the artistic entertainment of audiences, which may be white or whether they propose realistic portraiture for Black audiences, the best known Black playwrights are picturing an urban Northern community which is separate from the white community and which is populated by those who need but lack the strengths which come from love. Thank you.