Sackler has written a play [The Great White Hope] of caterwauling theatricality, in which all the surface techniques are distracting enough to nearly obscure the fact that almost nothing at all seems to be happening inside any of the characters. (p. 108)

And with it all goes an uncomfortable, nagging feeling that we have seen it before, nearly a quarter of a century ago, that it reminds us too much, in fact, of Native Son, that Jack Jefferson is Richard Wright's agonized hero, Bigger Thomas, swollen to celebrity size. But while Native Son was the direct, hot expression of uncontrollable black anger, The Great White Hope, written by a white man, seems in some of its aspects an act of nearly appalling self-hatred. It is populated by a huge cast of black angels (with one exception) and malevolent whites (with two exceptions), which allows us, the (mainly white) audience, to make a perfect cop-out: we can't identify with those whites onstage, it's not us up there, it's a race of other, vile Americans, whose guilt, however, we are perfectly willing to shoulder for the evening.

The Great White Hope has an enormous impact on audiences; and it is this impact, not the play itself, that is what people talk about…. (pp. 108-09)