[Sidney Poet Heroical is] a slick, semi-musical satire of Sidney Poitier. In fact, Baraka's play attacks all blacks who "make it big" in white society, forget their roots, and begin to think, talk, and live "white." Much of Baraka's characterization is funny and effective: his portrait of Sidney's egotistical, ruthless buddy and mentor who prances across the stage in knee-high boots, skin-tight pants, and shirts invariably open to subnavel levels, and his white she-devils in glittery make-up, women propelled by extravagant sexual and economic tastes, are clever exaggerations of America's fortune-hunters and culture vultures.

But Sidney Poet Heroical … overworks the contrast between the bizarre, surrealistic white world and the more realistic scenes from black life. The down-to-earth black chorus that chides Sidney, warning him not to sell out, becomes predictable and tedious. So does the dizzy white nymphomaniac, who continually shinnies up poor Sidney as if he were some great phallic monument available to public climbers.

Eventually, what begins as a witty analysis of human appetite (not specifically black or white) dwindles into a simplistic morality tale, resolved as if by magic. All Sidney has to do is put on Black Muslim gear and chant a Muslim chant, and the evil that threatened him disappears, the girlfriend he abandoned when he married a white woman comes back to him, and all is well in Sidney's little heaven. The Black Muslim religion may be a potent force in the unification of black people, but at the end of a theatrical farce it makes for an incredible, heavy deus ex machina. (p. 52)