street performance, these plays aim to attract a crowd and communicate an incisive message as rapidly as possibly. Influential in the ritual theater of Baraka and in Bullins’s own “Black Revolutionary Commercials,” this strategy developed out of association with the black nationalist movement in cities such as New York, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, and Newark. Reflecting the need to avoid unplanned confrontations with police, the performances described in Bullins’s influential “Short Statement on Street Theater” concentrate on establishing contact with groups unlikely to enter a theater, especially black working people and individuals living on the margins of society—gang members, junkies, prostitutes, and street people. Recognizing the impact of the media on American consciousness, Bullins frequently parodies media techniques, satirizing political advertising in “The American Flag Ritual” and “selling” positive black revolutionary images in “A Street Play.” Somewhat longer though equally direct, “Death List,” which can be performed by a troupe moving through the neighborhood streets, alerts the community to “enemies of the Black People,” from Vernon Jordan to Whitney Young. Considered out of their performance context, many of these pieces seem simplistic or didactic, but their real intent is to realize Bullins’s desire that “each individual in the crowd should have his sense of reality confronted, his consciousness assaulted.” Because the “accidental” street audience comes into contact with the play while in its “normal” frame of mind, Bullins creates deliberately hyperbolic images to dislocate that mind-set in a very short period of time.

When writing revolutionary plays for performance in traditional theaters, Bullins tempers his rhetoric considerably. To be sure, Dialect Determinism, a warning against trivializing the revolutionary impulse of Malcolm X, and The Gentleman Caller, a satiric attack on master-slave mentality of black-white economic interaction, both resemble the street plays in their insistence on revolutionary change. Dialect Determinism climaxes with the killing of a black “enemy,” and The Gentleman Caller ends with a formulaic call for the rise of the foretold “Black nation that will survive, conquer and rule.” The difference between these plays and the street theater lies not in message but in Bullins’s way of involving the audience. Recognizing the different needs of an audience willing to seek out his work in the theater but frequently educated by the dominant culture, Bullins involves it in the analytic process leading to what seem, from a black nationalist perspective, relatively unambiguous political perceptions. Rather than asserting the messages at the start of the plays, therefore, he developed a satiric setting before stripping away the masks and distortions imposed by the audience’s normal frame of reference on its recognition of his revolutionary message.

Along with Baraka, Marvin X, Adrienne Kennedy, and others, Bullins helped make the dialectic of change an important cultural force at the height of the Black Nationalist movement, but his most substantial achievements involve the dialectic of experience. Ranging from his impressionistic gallery plays and politically resonant problem play to the intricately interconnected Twentieth Century Cycle, Bullins’s work in this dialectic reveals a profound skepticism regarding revolutionary ideals that have not been tested against the actual contradictions of African American experience.

Street Sounds

Street Sounds, parts of which were later incorporated into House Party, represents Bullins’s adaptation of the gallery approach pioneered by poets such as Robert Browning, Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology, 1915), Melvin B. Tolson (Harlem Gallery, 1969), Gwendolyn Brooks (A Street in Bronzeville, 1945), and Langston Hughes (Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951). By montaging a series of thirty-to ninety-second monologues, Bullins suggests the tensions common to the experience of seemingly disparate elements of the African American community. Superficially, the characters can be divided into categories such as politicians (Harlem Politician, Black Student), hustlers (Dope Seller, The Thief), artists (Black Revolutionary Artist, Black Writer), street people (Fried Brains, Corner Brother), working people (Errand Boy, Workin’ Man), and women (The Loved One, The Virgin, Harlem Mother). None of the categories, however, survives careful examination; individual women could be placed in every other category; the Black Revolutionary Artist combines politics and art; the Harlem Politician, politics and crime. To a large extent, all types ultimately amount to variations on several social and psychological themes that render the surface distinctions far less important than they initially appear.

Although their particular responses vary considerably, each character in Street Sounds confronts the decaying community described by The Old-timer: “They changin’ things, you know? Freeways comin’ through tearin’ up the old neighborhood. Buildings goin’ down, and not bein’ put up again. Abandoned houses that are boarded up, the homes of winos, junkies and rats, catchin’ fire and never bein’ fixed up.” As a result, many share the Workin’ Man’s feeling of being “trapped inside of ourselves, inside our experience.” Throughout the play, Bullins portrays a deep-seated feeling of racial inferiority that results in black men’s obsession with white women (Slightly Confused Negro, The Explainer) and a casual willingness to exploit or attack other blacks (The Thief, The Doubter, Young West Indian Revolutionary Poet). Attempting to salvage some sense of freedom or self-worth, or simply to find momentary release from the struggle, individuals turn to art, sex, politics, or drugs, but the weight of their context pressures each toward the psychological collapse of Fried Brains, the hypocritical delusions of the Non-Ideological Nigger, or the unfounded self-glorification of The Genius. Even when individuals embrace political causes, Bullins remains skeptical. The Theorist, The Rapper, and The Liar, who ironically echoes Bullins’s aesthetic when he declares, “Even when I lie, I lie truthfully. . . . I’m no stranger to experience,” express ideological positions similar to those Bullins advocates in the dialectic of change. None, however, seems even marginally aware that his grand pronouncements have no impact on the experience of the black community. The Rapper’s revolutionary call—“We are slaves now, this moment in time, brothers, but let this moment end with this breath and let us unite as fearless revolutionaries in the pursuit of world liberation!”—comes between the entirely apolitical monologues of Waiting and Bewildered. Similarly, the Black Revolutionary Artist’s endorsement of “a cosmic revolution that will liberate the highest potential of nationhood in the universe” is followed by the Black Dee Jay’s claim that “BLACK MEANS BUY!” The sales pitch seems to have a great deal more power than the nationalist vision in the lives of the Soul Sister and the Corner Brother, whose monologues frame the Black Revolutionary Artist-Black Dee Jay sequence.

One of Bullins’s characteristic “signatures” is the attribution of his own ideas to characters unwilling or unable to act or inspire others to act on them. Reflecting his belief that without action ideals have little value, Bullins structures Street Sounds to insist on the need for connection. The opening monologue, delivered by a white “Pig,” establishes a political context similar to the one that Bullins uses in the dialectic of change, within which the dialectic of experience proceeds. Reducing all blacks to a single type, the nigger, Pig wishes only to “beat his nigger ass good.” Although Bullins clearly perceives the police as a basic oppressive force in the ghetto, he does not concentrate on highlighting the audience’s awareness of that point. Rather, by the end of the play he has made it clear that the African American community in actuality beats its own ass. The absence of any other white character in the play reflects Bullins’s focus on the nature of victimization as experienced within and perpetuated by the black community. The Harlem Mother monologue that closes the play concentrates almost entirely on details of experience. Although she presents no hyperbolic portraits of white oppressors, her memories of the impact on her family of economic exploitation, hunger, and government indifference carry more politically dramatic power than does any abstraction. This by no means indicates Bullins’s distaste for political analysis or a repudiation of the opening monologues; rather, it reflects his awareness that abstract principles signify little unless they are embedded in the experience first of the audience and, ultimately, of the community as a whole.

The Taking of Miss Janie

Although Bullins consistently directs his work toward the African American community, his work in the dialectic of experience inevitably involves the interaction of blacks and whites. The Taking of Miss Janie, perhaps his single most powerful play, focuses on a group of California college students, several of whom first appeared in The Pig Pen. In part a meditation on the heritage of the 1960’s Civil Rights movement, The Taking of Miss Janie revolves around the sexual and political tensions between and within racial groups. Although most of the characters are readily identifiable types—the stage directions identify Rick as a cultural nationalist, Janie as a California beach girl, Flossy as a “soul sister”—Bullins explores individual characters in depth, concentrating on their tendency to revert to behavior patterns, especially when they assume rigid ideological or social roles. The central incident of the play—the “rape” of the white Janie by Monty, a black friend of long standing—provides a severely alienating image of this tendency to both black and white audiences. After committing a murder, which may or may not be real, when the half-mythic Jewish beatnik Mort Silberstein taunts Monty for his inability to separate his consciousness from European American influences, Monty undresses Janie, who does not resist or cooperate, in a rape scene devoid of violence, love, anger, or physical desire. Unable to resist the pressures that make their traditional Western claim to individuality seem naïve, both Janie and Monty seem resigned to living out a “fate” that in fact depends on their acquiescence. Monty accepts the role of the “black beast” who rapes and murders white people, while Janie plays the role of plantation mistress. Although these intellectually articulate characters do not genuinely believe in the reality of their roles, their ironic attitude ultimately makes no difference, for the roles govern their actions.

Although the rape incident provides the frame for The Taking of Miss Janie, Monty and Janie exist in a gallery of characters whose collective inability to maintain individual integrity testifies to the larger dimensions of the problem. Rick and Len enact the classic argument between nationalism and eclecticism in the black political/intellectual world; Peggy tires of confronting the neuroses of black men and turns to lesbianism; “hip” white boy Lonnie moves from fad to fad, turning his contact with black culture to financial advantage in the music business; several couples drift aimlessly into interracial marriages. Alternating scenes in which characters interact with monologues in which an individual reflects on his future development, Bullins reveals his characters’ inability to create alternatives to the “fate” within which they feel themselves trapped. Although none demonstrates a fully developed ability to integrate ideals and experiences, several seem substantially less alienated than others. In many ways the least deluded, Peggy accepts both her lesbianism and her responsibility for her past actions. Her comment on the 1960’s articulates a basic aspect of Bullins’s vision: “We all failed. Failed ourselves in that serious time known as the sixties. And by failing ourselves we also failed in the test of the times.” Her honesty and insight also have a positive impact on the black nationalist Rick, who during a conversation with Peggy abandons his grandiose rhetoric on the “devil’s tricknology” (a phrase adopted from the Nation of Islam)—rhetoric that masks a deep hostility toward other blacks. Although he has previously attacked her as a lesbian “freak,” Rick’s final lines to Peggy suggest another aspect of Bullins’s perspective: “Ya know, it be about what you make it anyway.” Any adequate response to The Taking of Miss Janie must take into account not only Peggy’s survival strategy and Rick’s nationalistic idealism but also Janie’s willed naïveté and the accuracy of Mort’s claim that, despite his invocation of Mao, Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon, Monty is still on some levels “FREAKY FOR JESUS!” Bullins presents no simple answers nor does he simply contemplate the wasteland. Rather, as in almost all of his work in both the dialectic of change and the dialectic of experience, he challenges his audience to make something out of the fragments and failures he portrays.

The Twentieth Century Cycle

The Twentieth Century Cycle, Bullins’s most far-reaching confrontation with the American experience, brings together most of his theatrical and thematic concerns and seems destined to stand as his major work. Several of the projected twenty plays of the cycle have been performed, including In the Wine Time, In New England Winter, The Duplex, The Fabulous Miss Marie, Home Boy, and Daddy. Although the underlying structure of the cycle remains a matter of speculation, it clearly focuses on the experience of a group of black people traversing various areas of America’s cultural and physical geography during the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s. Recurring characters, including Cliff Dawson, his nephew Ray Crawford, Michael Brown (who first appeared in a play not part of the cycle, A Son, Come Home), and Steve Benson, a black intellectual whose life story resembles Bullins’s own, serve to unify the cycle’s imaginative landscape. In addition, a core of thematic concerns, viewed from various perspectives, unites the plays.

In the Wine Time, the initial play of the cycle, establishes a basic set of thematic concerns, including the incompatibility of Ray’s romantic idealism with the brutality and potential violence of his northern urban environment. Stylistically, the play typifies the cycle in its juxtaposition of introverted lyricism, naturalistic dialogue, technological staging, and African American music and dance. Individual plays combine these elements in different ways. In New England Winter, set in California, draws much of its power from a poetic image of the snow that takes on racial, geographical, and metaphysical meanings in Steve Benson’s consciousness. Each act of The Duplex opens with a jazz, blues, or rhythm-and-blues song that sets a framework for the ensuing action. The Fabulous Miss Marie uses televised images of the Civil Rights movement both to highlight its characters’ personal desperation and to emphasize the role of technology in creating and aggravating their problems of perception. Drawing directly on the reflexive rhetoric of European American modernism, In New England Winter revolves around Steve Benson’s construction of a “play,” involving a planned robbery, which he plans to enact in reality but which he also uses as a means of working out his psychological desires.

Ultimately, Bullins’s Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam extends Bullins’s vision into an imaginary future to depict the former Black Panther leader down and out in the wake of a black revolution. Bullins suggests that each of these approaches reflects a perspective on experience actually present in contemporary American society and that any vision failing to take all of them into account will inevitably fall victim to the dissociation of ideals and experience that plunges many of Bullins’s characters into despair or violence. While some of his characters, most notably Steve Benson, seem intermittently aware of the source of their alienation and are potentially capable of imaginative responses with political impact, Bullins leaves the resolution of the cycle plays to the members of the audience. Portraying the futility of socially prescribed roles and of any consciousness not directly engaged with its total context, Bullins continues to challenge his audience to attain a perspective from which the dialectic of experience and the dialectic of change can be realized as one and the same.

Boy X Man

In Boy X Man (the “X” means “times,” as in an equation), Bullins constructs a memory play in which a young man’s return to attend his mother’s funeral prompts him to remember his boyhood with his mother and her “friend,” who raised him as a son. The song “Blues in the Night,” his first crib memory, provides the transition to scenes from the 1930’s and 1940’s. Ernie’s mother, Brenda, is a single mom and dancer whose life improves dramatically when she meets Will, who lacks ambition but who nevertheless provides his “family” with much-needed stability. The play includes a series of highly emotional vignettes, including the following: Brenda’s reliving of her discovery of her dead mother; Will’s reliving of his Nazi concentration-camp experiences; and, to provide balance, Will’s attending and listening to Negro League baseball games. Bullins provides his audience with a glimpse of the problems, prejudice, and tensions that black American families encounter; but because many of the problems are not confined to the black experience, the play reflects on American life in general.