Although known primarily as a playwright, Ed Bullins has also worked in forms ranging from fiction and the essay to the “revolutionary television commercial.” His novel The Reluctant Rapist (1973) focuses on the early experience of Steve Benson, a semiautobiographical character who appears in several plays, including In New England Winter, The Duplex, and The Fabulous Miss Marie. The Hungered Ones: Early Writings (1971), a collection of Bullins’s early stories and essays, some of which are loosely autobiographical, provides an overview of his early perspective. Active as an editor and a theorist throughout his career, Bullins has written introductions to anthologies such as The New Lafayette Theater Presents (1974) and New Plays from the Black Theatre (1969). Along with the introduction to his own collection The Theme Is Blackness, these introductions provide a powerful and influential theoretical statement on the aesthetics and politics of the African American theater during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The Theme Is Blackness also contains scripts for “rituals” and mixed-media productions, including “Black Revolutionary Commercials,” which reflect the concern with electronic media visible in many of his later plays.

Ed Bullins won the 1968 Vernon Rice Award for The Electronic Nigger, the 1971 Obie Award for In New England Winter and The Fabulous Miss Marie, and in 1975 both the Obie and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for The Taking of Miss Janie. In 1997 he received the Living Legend Award from the Black Theatre Conference, and in 1999 he won the August Wilson Playwriting Award and the Garland Anderson Playwright Award. He has also received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation (1971, 1976), the Rockefeller Foundation (1968, 1970, 1973), the Creative Artists Program Service (1973), the Black Arts Alliance (1971), and the National Endowment for the Arts (1974).

As much as any contemporary American playwright, Bullins has forged a powerful synthesis of avant-garde technique and revolutionary commitment challenging easy preconceptions concerning the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Like Latin American writers Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez and African writers Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Wole Soyinka, Bullins sees no inherent contradiction between the use of experimental techniques and the drive to reach a mass audience alienated from the dominant social/economic/racial hierarchy. Separating himself from the cultural elite that has claimed possession of the modernist and postmodernist tradition, Bullins adapts the tradition to the frames of reference and to the immediate concerns of his audience, primarily but not exclusively within the African American community. Although he frequently comments on and revises the philosophical and aesthetic concerns of European American modernism, he does so to clarify his audience’s vision of an American culture riddled by psychological and political contradictions that intimate the need for a basic change.

Paralleling the political modernism advocated by Bertolt Brecht in his aesthetic and political debate with György Lukács, Bullins’s synthesis takes on particular significance in the context of the Black Arts movement of the late 1960’s. As a leading figure in the movement for specifically black cultural institutions and modes of expression, Bullins refuted through example the casual stereotypes of black revolutionary artists as ideologically inflexible and aesthetically naïve. Although he supports the confrontational strategies of radical playwrights committed to what he calls the “dialectic of change,” he works primarily within what he calls the “dialectic of experience,” which entails a sophisticated confrontation with a “reality” he understands to be in large part shaped by individual perceptions. Drawing on Brecht, Jean Genet, Albert Camus, Amiri Baraka, Eugene O’Neill, John Cage, Anton Chekhov, and Langston Hughes with equal facility, Bullins is not primarily a literary dramatist or a political...