Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Hansberry, Lorraine - Brendan Gill

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BRENDAN GILL

So much has happened in Africa since 1961 [when Lorraine Hansberry began the writing of "Les Blancs"] that the play, laid in a Schweitzer-like medical mission in some vast equatorial country plagued by white colonial rule and black terrorism, has an air of being far less current than it claims to be …, and this datedness is reflected in its doggedly didactic tone; we are being lectured to and made to see things in the light that Teacher wishes us to see them in and not otherwise. When, fairly late in the play, the plot erupts into melodrama … our sympathies are not engaged, for the characters involved have long since come to seem symbols of sets of beliefs and not individuals capable of holding contradictory opinions and of being murdered in cold blood.

Brendan Gill, "The Theatre: 'Les blancs'," in The New Yorker (© 1970 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. XLVI, No. 40, November 21, 1970, p. 104.

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1. Introduction
2. Brooks Atkinson
3. Tom F. Driver
4. Gerald Weales
5. Harold R. Isaacs
6. Stanley Kauffmann
7. John Cutts
8. Walter Kerr
9. Ossie Davis
10. Arthur France
11. C.W.E. Bigsby
12. Gerald Weales
13. Jordan Y. Miller
14. Martin Gottfried
15. Brendan Gill
16. Walter Kerr
17. Harold Clurman
18. George R. Adams
19. David E. Ness
20. Clive Barnes
21. W. Edward Farrison
22. Julius Lester
23. Bertie J. Powell
24. Copyright

1. Lorraine Hansberry