[In the following unfavorable review, Simon condemns what he considers to be an overtly allegorical plot, simplistic symbols, and pretentious language in "Dutchman."]

In LeRoi Jones's "Dutchman" an intellectual, artistic young Negro is picked up on the subway by a weird, taunting white temptress. He is to take her along to a party he is going to, in exchange for which she'll later take him home and to her bed. The girl provokes him with jeers at his attempts to become assimilated into white society and culture; hers in a vicious combination of inviting nympho-mania and castrating rejections. He finally explodes in a philippic hurled as much at some other white passengers as at the girl herself; when she further provokes him into swinging at her, it is she who pulls out a switchblade knife, kills him, and, with the help of the other passengers, dumps the body onto an empty platform. As the play ends, she has spotted another well-dressed, bookish young Negro who has just boarded the subway car, and she prepares to repeat the entire bloody ritual.

That the play is preposterous on the literal level is obvious enough. Yet allegory or symbolism, to be effective, must first function properly on the literal level. But does "Dutchman" work even figuratively? Does the white society woo the Negro with a mixture of promises and rebuffs only to destroy him utterly when he shows his just resentment? Perhaps. But it looks to me as if resentment were finally beginning to pay off. Whites, moreover, have been treating Negroes with a simpler, though no less damnable, cruelty. They have been neither so Machiavellian, nor so psychotic, as "Dutchman" implies. Add to this Jones's often consciously arty language and the vacuity of his symbols: the girl plies her victims with apples, an assembly-line Eve; the title presumably refers to the Flying Dutchman, but whether this describes the girl, fatally traveling up and down the subway line, or the boy, needing to be redeemed by the true love of a white girl, is unclear and, in either case, unhelpful. "Dutchman" [is] merely propaganda, which can add some fuel to a sometimes necessary fire; [it is] not truth, which alone can free us from our eternal enemy, ignorance.

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