[It] pleasured me no end to hear the characters in "Happy Ending" and "Day of Absence," a pair of one-act plays …, giving voice to some rich, funny, authentic American Negro speech. The author of these dramas is Douglas Turner Ward, and he is equally adept at turning a telling phrase and inventing sly, satiric plots. When "Happy Ending" starts to unfold, we are introduced to a couple of weeping women, who are bewailing the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Harrison, the white folks they work for, are about to dissolve their marriage. Pretty soon, I think, you'll be shedding a few tears yourself, but only of laughter, for Mr. Ward quickly goes about demonstrating that his mourners' grief is peculiarly motivated….

While Mr. Ward uses very broad farce to spoof the Southern establishment [in "Day of Absence"], nothing less, perhaps, would work out, since at times the Southern realities teeter on the edge of farce themselves.