[In the following excerpt, Taubman calls Jones an angry and gifted playwright.]

LeRoi Jones is one of the angriest writers to storm the theater—and one of the most gifted. On the evidence of his new one-acters, "The Slave" and "The Toilet," one wonders whether his rage is not at war with his instincts as an artist.

In both halves of the double bill, which opened last night at the St. Marks Playhouse, Mr. Jones has exciting and moving things to say. Once again, as in "Dutchman," he discloses a sure grasp of the theatrical image.

But he cannot resist the urge to shock by invoking violence and all the obscenities he can think of. There are times when these shock tactics perform no useful dramatic function, when they clarify no meaning, when they merely set up needless resistance to what the play is saying.

When Mr. Jones sets out to be literal, he is about as un-subtle as the law will allow.

"The Toilet" occurs in a toilet of a boys high school. Larry Rivers has obliged the author by designing a retreat with all the equipment you would find in a men's room. Leo Garen has staged the opening moments of the play to indicate realistic use of the equipment. Mr. Jones and his colleagues apparently assume that nothing can be left to an audience's imagination.

The students, nearly all of them Negro, drift into the toilet. Again Mr. Jones, his director and his actors are nothing if not realistic. The talk is latrine language. The boys are ugly, mindless, full of bravado and violence. They are waiting for a fight to be fought between two boys. Meanwhile, the Negroes assail each other and are particularly vicious to a white boy who has drifted into the room.

Karolis, apparently a Puerto Rican, is finally hauled in, already bloodied from a beating he has received en route to the arena. Foots, a bright boy, whom a teacher has called "a credit to his race," is waiting to take on Karolis. Foots is angry because Karolis has sent him a love letter. Though badly hurt, Karolis rises to fight, and as he is getting the better of Foots, the other Negroes savage him.

For all its violence and "ritual filth," to use Mr. Jones's phrase, "The Toilet" ends on a note of tenderness. The denouement of the play is moving as only a natural dramatist can make it, and underneath its coarseness there runs a strong sense of the needless debasement of human beings. One is sure, however, that Mr. Jones could have made his points without the shock tactics.