Douglas Turner Ward's Brotherhood, … may have been the most embarrassing forty minutes of theater I have ever managed to sit through, not so much because Mr. Ward had got his playmaking wrong as that he had got his hate wrong. Getting the hate wrong is worrisome, and is the reason I wish to pause to speak of the play.

Brotherhood was meant to fantasize a fairly simple black-white situation in which a casually dressed white couple entertained an impeccably dressed black couple in their home for an evening.

It was recognizable as fantasy on the instant because an otherwise perfectly ordinary living room was cluttered, and in fact overwhelmed, by a group of sheeted forms that appeared to be concealed statues, inexplicable on any realistic basis. The note of fantasy was immediately reinforced by the absence of ashtrays and the white couple's cheery insistence that the black couple simply scatter their cigarette ashes anywhere about the floor. So much for beginnings. (p. 206)

[In] Mr. Ward's Brotherhood nothing could be believed from beginning to end. This was not due solely to the playwright's present technical clumsiness, though he was clumsy indeed. We hadn't the faintest notion of what the white couple were scouring the floors for before the genteel blacks arrived. We did not understand, not satirically or in any other way, why the black couple or any couple should have been encouraged to scatter ashes on the floor…. Not so shortly, the black wife had to go to the bathroom. Now there was a scurry in which it developed that the bathroom was in the process of being painted and even the children's "potty" was unavailable. She had to go outside in the bushes, with the white wife accompanying her.

Yes, bathrooms have been segregated. But not by the kind of white liberals, fatuous or fake or whatever they might be, who receive black couples in their homes. The gestures were out of place, maddeningly; what we could have grasped as a clear reference in a southern railway station could not be grasped as satire here. The satirical thrust was irrelevant and we were disoriented. Did Mr. Ward mean to go after the comedy, and the perhaps submerged racism, inherent in the awkwardnesses, the painful eruptions of self-consciousness, that do sometimes overtake whites and blacks when they are trying to come together socially? Certainly that is a true and legitimate source of comedy, and of soberer comment. (p. 208)

But Mr. Ward wasn't doing that. Something larger and more extravagant loomed. When the couples had parted for the evening, the whites were finally, joyously free to whip from the statuary all those covering sheets—revealing enormous figures of coal-black Jemimas, jockeys, old retainers, boys eating watermelon. They ripped a concealing canvas from a painting to turn the whole back wall of the room into a bloody slaughtering of blacks. They popped into place pillows and doilies with black faces shining from them. They settled back onto the sofa, contented now.

And it was all as wrong as we'd felt it to be while we'd been sitting there, struggling with our bewilderment. It was wrong at a surface level on any count you could conceive. Whites who try to establish social relations with blacks do not secretly keep fetishes about to renew a subliminal hate. Suppose that they do feel the hate. What they do with it is suppress it, concealing it even from themselves. And whites who really hate and who are perfectly willing to acknowledge the hate to themselves do not surround themselves, even symbolically, with black imagery, with reminders of what they hate. They try to banish the dread view from their lives, not only in their living rooms but on buses and in toilets and in schools. There is no context in which this particular juxtaposition of values might work, no point of vantage from which it could be looked at and believed.

It was apparent that Mr. Ward did mean what he seemed, at the end and below the fantastic surface, to be saying. (p. 209)

Mutual, total, unalterable hate. Hate is all that can be hoped for. It cannot be erased, not by any amount of good will, because the good will itself is only a mask for more hate. That is the concept the play's structure was built to reflect, the premise that gave rise to its particular gestures. It was disturbing that a talented playwright should think the content true enough, absolute enough, to serve as a basis for assent, for quick recognition, for laughter. It was a relief—and the only comfort I was able to take from an uninterruptedly depressing experience—to notice that the notion, when worked out on a stage, stood there as transparently, moment-by-moment and finally in essence, false. (pp. 209-10)