[In the following excerpt, Bain calls "The Toilet" "straight bathroom drama, with little if any plot and absolutely no uplift."]

Did you know the exclamation point was dead? Or that the Western white man had failed to realize "the idealization of rational Liberalism"? Or even that these questions could possibly be serious points for stage adaptation? Probably not. But for playwrights Lorraine Hansberry and Le-Roi Jones, the theater is a perfect place to act out these serio-comic problems.

Mr. Jones, the latest bombshell among the hip writers, is currently enjoying a successful run at the St. Mark's Play-house with his two one-act plays, "The Slave" and "The Toilet." Anarchic and prurient in tone, language and style, these two plays present a nightmare of twisted logic that will probably, by next season, descend in waves on Shubert Alley.

Played in the hermetic atmosphere of a small theater-inthe-round, "The Toilet," first up, locks the audience in with the oddest collection of subway marauders, basket-ball junkies and cool boppers to be seen anywhere outside of the hallways of Boys High. And these eleven boys, all of them mentally and linguistically retarded, leave the viewer with the decided impression that if Jones is not trying to prove that Negroes are "inherently inferior" to whites, he certainly is not making any effort to clear up any misconceptions. For this play is straight bathroom drama, with little if any plot and absolutely no uplift.

The curtain rises on five urinals and a rusty sink. And the first character to enter, Ora (described in the script as "short, ugly, crude, loud"), ought to set the mood sufficiently; but just in case you don't get the message, Ora next engages in a bit of highly graphic mime action ("He enters, looks around, then with one hand on his hip, takes out his penis and urinates …"). As I said, this is done in mime action, but it was the only concession made to sensibility for the rest of the play.

Gradually the other characters "bop" on stage. And it becomes apparent that a murder or near-murder is going to be the central act of the play. LeRoi Jones has always been fascinated with murder; there was a killing in his previous production, "Dutchman." In "The Toilet," Jones portrays the stylistic obscenities of the boys as the "natural" flowering of their primitive natures, but there is one added touch in this and the other play, "The Slave"—the white characters (there are two in each play) are characterized in such a devitalized fashion that all the brutalities appear almost "necessary." The two in "The Toilet" function as alternate and unsightly copies of the nine Negro boys. And their lines are so written that, when the first one is "sounded" out of the room and the other dragged in, bleeding and battered, his possible death horrifies but does not necessarily repel you.

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