[In this review of "The Toilet, " Hewes finds that while the gratuitous violence and obscenities may scare off many viewers, the play is nonetheless "a vivid and indelible work of art."]

LeRoi Jones's two new plays confirm the impression this thirty-year-old playwright made last season with his "Dutchman" and "The Baptism." Mr. Jones is less an astute dramatic craftsman than he is a Negro creatively expressing his portion of a total anger that his race has had to suppress in the centuries since the first slave-owner committed an injustice on the grounds that the Negro was sub-human. His plays are poetic and prophetic views of the total situation by one individual human being in search of a vital identity.

"The Toilet," written in 1961 (before "Dutchman"), is deliberately as unrelievedly obscene a play as Mr. Jones can make it. Against the smelly and profane background of urinals and scrawled-upon lavatory walls we watch a bunch of Negro high school students as they demonstrate the insensitivity, the foul language, and the exercise of gratuitous violence one finds among groups of boys attempting to maintain tough-guy status and a supermasculine virility. Amid all this, the necessity has arisen for a washroom fight between a white boy and a Negro honor student to whom he has written a homosexual love letter. The action is brutal, an example of how society can force people to behave at their worst. But if Mr. Jones deplores this, he also recognizes its essential reality as he seems to present the white boy's extreme pain and humiliation as being somehow inherent in his attempt to reach across the battle lines of moral and racial taboo. Furthermore, his tender ending tells us that only as two non-group-associated individuals can their genuine feelings be shared.

Director Leo Garen has staged the play beautifully and unevasively. Larry Rivers has constructed a realistic men's room, complete with urinals, on the small St. Marks Play-house stage. And the performances are most convincing. Where the play has difficulty is in its violence, which goes on much longer than necessary to make its dramatic point (although not as long as did the Living Theater's The Brig) and its deliberately redundant use of the sort of unimaginative obscene vocabulary adolescent boys use to show that they are one of the gang. Because of this un-pleasantness many will walk out. Those who stay are not likely to feel sufficiently rewarded with esthetic or intellectual gratifications. Yet they will have experienced a vivid and indelible work of art.