[In the following excerpt, Keyssar argues that Baraka has portrayed the main characters of "Dutchman" realistically, not just symbolically, thereby intensifying their effect on the audience.]

There is, as in most drama, an attempt in "Dutchman" to change the spectator's way of looking at the world. "Dutchman," however, works in such a way that for spectators as well as stage characters, changes in perspective vary according to whether one is black or white. "Dutchman" makes manifest the ambivalent intentions that have been disguised or latent in earlier black dramas. While "Great Goodness of Life" and other black revolutionary dramas urge the need for separate dramatic strategies for black and white audiences by aiming their intentions only at black spectators, "Dutchman" acknowledges the encounter of two worlds and two modes of seeing within the one world it constructs onstage and within the space of the audience for which it is played. The play presumes our differences and confronts them; some elements of its strategy will work similarly on black and white spectators, but its essential strategic devices affect not what black and white spectators share as human beings, but what separates us as black and white Americans.

In "Dutchman," the imprisoning paradoxes that black dramas had been revealing for forty-five years are boldly and baldly thrust at the audience; in the world of twentieth-century urban America that Baraka synthesizes and mythologizes, it becomes an insult to call a black man middle class. It is also possible in this world at once to perceive a black man as middle-class, a bastard, and the son of a "social-working mother." This is a play in which not to be a nigger is to be a "dirty white man," and in which, as "Dutchman" goes on to expose, not to dance with Lula, the drama's emissary from the white middle class, is to choose death as your partner.

For the many spectators who have witnessed productions of "Dutchman" since its first performance in 1964, it has remained singular, baffling, and troubling. For forty-five minutes we listen to a white woman, Lula, delineate what it means to have "made it" in modern America, to be middle-class. But Lula not only catalogs middle-class attributes—having an education, being able to make appropriate small-talk, wearing a three-button suit—she presents the other main character, the black man, Clay, to himself and to us as a model of these characteristics. While some, particularly those who are black among the audience, may be suspicious and angered from the beginning of the play by Lula's easy assumptions, it is not until Clay's long and explosive speech near the end of "Dutchman" that white spectators are fully forced to acknowledge their disorientation and black spectators are led to unmuted fear. At the end of Clay's speech, he warns Lula and the audience that the day may come when black Americans are indeed accepted into the fold of white middle-class society, and that will be a day when "all of those excoons will be standup Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you." This is not simply a threat that the rage of black people against racism will eventually and inevitably explode, it is a warning that the very central image of the good American life, the open door to the middle class, is not only a deceptive fantasy but a death wish if realized.

The inclusion of blacks and whites in the world of "Dutchman" is not, then, the "integrated" world of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It is a world in which a black man and a white woman meet in the rushing anonymity of the subway, engage in conversation at once intimate and estranged, and come to a mutual recognition through violent action. Clay, the black man, and Lula, the white woman, are in the same physical place, but neither they nor we ever see them as alike. Lula attempts to seduce, taunt, bewilder Clay; Clay tries to ignore, rebuff, enjoy, and humor Lula. Finally, only rejection is possible. Clay's refusal is violently verbal; Lula's literally murderous: She kills him. In the end, we learn from this play that black people cannot rest peacefully in the same world with white people like Lula.

Although there may be a moral to "Dutchman," the play is not a fable. Baraka has urged that we regard his "Dutchman" characters as human beings, not primarily as symbolic figures: Lula, Baraka has said, "does not represent anything—she is one" [Doris Abramson, Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925-1959, 1969]. Lula is not a fantasy or an emblem; she is not a character created by a synthesis of Baraka's understanding of important elements in the white American character (or even just the white American female character). Nor is she a figure like Edward Albee's young man in The American Dream—a creature who could never exist in the real world but who functions as a kind of flag to illustrate what that world is elementally like. Lula and Clay are real people, or, in theatrical terms, realistic characters, who can and do exist. We could not encounter Albee's young man on a subway train; we can and do, find people like Clay and Lula on a subway every day, even if we do not recognize them.

Creating the understanding that Lula is one of the people who ride the subway and is not only a representative of them, is central to Baraka's strategy. The playwright wishes to prohibit the audience from maintaining an intellectual distance from Lula and Clay. We are not to be allowed to say, "Well, yes, she does represent elements of American society, but there is no one around really like her." Literary symbols can trouble an audience, but they do not frighten us as would "real" people, because they cannot act like a real people.

Yet Baraka's intention is not limited to our recognition of Lula and Clay as a real white woman and a real black man. The subway on which we discover Lula and Clay is, according to Baraka's stage directions, "heaped in modern myth." From its title, "Dutchman," through its use of apples and its allusions to places like "Juliet's tomb," Baraka's play is "heaped in myth." We are to perceive Lula and Clay, then, as real and mythical figures. This is not a contradiction. As anthropologists have shown us, myth is not a false or fictitious description of events in the world; rather, it is an expression of the particular, common, basic, and necessary ways in which men and women relate to each other and the world around them. The power and magic of myth are that it isolates and enables us to acknowledge those structures of human relationship that define who and how we are in the world. This power and magic are at the core of Baraka's strategy in "Dutchman."