[In the following excerpt, Oliver praises the "deadly wit and passionate wild comedy " of "Dutchman, " but felt that the anger expressed by the black character, while justifiable, was ineffective.]

LeRoi Jones whose "Dutchman" is the final one-acter of "Three at the Cherry Lane," is an original and talented young dramatist. For about three-quarters of the way, his play has a kind of deadly wit and passionate wild comedy that are his alone, and then, sad to say, he almost literally sends it all up in smoke, under what I feel is the mistaken impression that in order to have point and impact a good story must be given general and even symbolic implications. Himself a Negro, Mr. Jones presents a young Negro who is accosted in the subway and subjected to a sort of mocking seduction by a crazy, though fascinating, blonde in a tight-fitting jersey dress. At first, the girl seems just a nutty bohemian type and scarcely dangerous—which, indeed, she turns out to be. She begins by needling him and trying to provoke him in every way, and ends up by goading him with such trigger words as "Uncle Tom" and "nigger." Finally, he can stand it no longer and tells her off in an outburst of fury that goes on for quite a while and encompasses all the anger of the Negro against white people. There is no doubt that this anger is justified, but there is also no doubt, I think, that in this case it is inartistic, weakening the character and the play. Up to the time of the outburst, the boy has been winning every round anyway, and it just won't do to suddenly cast him as the representative of the exploited telling off his exploiters. Much of what he says, however deeply felt it may be, has been said before. There are echoes of James Baldwin's essays, and even of Adrienne Kennedy's "Funnyhouse of a Negro." At any rate, somewhere in the middle of the harangue the rage sounded hollow to me—cooked up rather than real—and I stopped trusting the playwright. It is too bad to see a writer as gifted and as one-of-a-kind as Mr. Jones forcing himself into any sort of familiar mold. Still, the pre-outburst dialogue could scarcely be funnier or more painful or fuller of surprises, and even much of the monologue is forceful and satisfying to an invective fan like me. The language and some of the business are as rough as any I've ever been exposed to in the theatre, and both seemed to me entirely appropriate to the characters and the situation.

Mr. Jones has written two wonderful parts, and Jennifer West and Robert Hooks do them justice. Miss West is remarkably vivid and willful and funny and strange, and Mr. Hooks is good, too, recording any number of changes in emotional temperature and not letting one word of his scathing lines go to waste. The actors who play the silent, onlooking passengers display an indifference to the lethal vendetta taking place before their eyes that surely marks them as marrow-deep New Yorkers enjoying public transportation.