SOURCE: Adler, Thomas P. “The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse—Race.” In Mirror on the Stage: The Pulitzer Plays as an Approach to American Drama, pp. 68-84. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1987.

[In the following excerpt, Adler discusses some Pulitzer Prize-winning plays that dealt with the subject of race relations, noting how the plays reflect their historical context.]

It would be over fifty years after the establishment of the Pulitzers and well over forty years after the first Broadway production of a work by a black writer (Garland Anderson's Appearances in 1925) before a black playwright would receive the drama award. Racial issues, however, not only surface in but dominate a number of American plays from the mid-nineteenth century on, including such well-known ones as George Aiken's adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1859), Edward Sheldon's The Nigger (1909), O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings (1926), Langston Hughes's Mulatto (1935), and Louis Peterson's Take a Giant Step (1953). In her study Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre 1925-1959, Doris Abramson argues that the earliest plays by black authors—The Escape; or a Leap for Freedom (1858) by William Wells Brown and Caleb, the Degenerate (1903) by Joseph S. Cotter—inaugurate the “two strains,” respectively, of “protest against … the status quo” and of “acceptance of the status quo” in works “directed more against the attitude of [the blacks] than against white society” that will continue well into the twentieth century.¹ Abramson's book also makes clear the artistic concessions and compromises that playwrights made in treating the volatile issue of race so that their works would be palatable to commercial theatergoers.

Central to a consideration of any protest drama is, of course, the question of audience. If the protest is directed against the political and social values of the bourgeois establishment who make up, in large part, the audience of the commercial Broadway theatre, then it will likely be guarded and muted, only mildly reproving. The first two plays discussed in this chapter—one having to do with the cultural and racial differences between Americans and Polynesians, the other with anti-Jewish (and in some senses anti-intellectual) sentiment—are cases in point: despite their considerable protest against these forms of racism and prejudice, it is difficult to dispel the notion that either South Pacific or Talley's Folly is anything more than just theatre and theatre as an escapist withdrawal into a kind of fantasyland at that. Both works employ stage space and even the theatre metaphor in a very similar fashion: the characters retreat from society—in the first instance to an island, in the second to a boathouse—in the same way that the audience come into the theatre. In each, the theatre is where the audience go to dream, where the unlikely comes to pass; the romance will be remembered, while the reality will be filed away. What occurs on that island, or in that boathouse—that is, in the theatre—seems remote from the world outside, and so the connection between art and life is not forced home in any astringent manner. It is there for the taking or the leaving.

When it came time for the 1950 awards, the drama jury recommended Gian Carlo Menotti's “opera” The Consul—which received the music prize instead. The advisory board, ignoring the jury's selection, chose Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's South Pacific, based on James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, winner of the 1948 Pulitzer for fiction. (It especially pleased Rodgers that he as composer shared as an equal contributor in the award, since George Gershwin's name had not appeared on the citation for Of Thee I Sing eighteen years before.) Somewhat less Pollyanna-ish than the majority of musicals that preceded it, South Pacific boasts a more than usually full plot. Drawing mainly on three Michener stories, “Our Heroine,” “Fo' Dolla,” and “The Remittance Man (The Cave),” with a lesser debt to two others, “Dry Rot” and “A Boar's Tooth,” South Pacific charted new territory for the musical: because neither the main plot concerning the French planter Emile DeBecque and the Navy nurse Nellie Forbush nor the subplot (really a double plot because it parallels and comments upon the other so neatly) between the American Lieutenant Cable and the Polynesian girl Liat is comic, a third plot strand involving Luther Billis and Bloody Mary was added, as Rodgers notes, for “comic leavening.”² Furthermore, the show lacks extended dance routines, the only one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's classic musicals of the late 1940s and early 1950s not to include a ballet sequence.

South Pacific explores two major concerns: the tension between isolation and commitment in personal affairs and politics and the racial prejudice between cultures thrown together by war—the latter the subject two decades later of Rabe's much angrier Sticks and Bones. The first concern revolves around the pull between public and private duty, a popular motif before the war—and in Sherwood's plays—but one that by the late 1940s had lost some of its social edge. Tied in with this is an emphasis on love as a means of overcoming the separateness and estrangement endemic to the human condition. As the lyric to the haunting “Bali Hai” says, “Mos' people live on a lonely island, / Lost in de middle of a foggy sea,” longing for someplace where their special “hopes” and “dreams” might live.³ But that searched-for place might, significantly, be only another “island,” romantic and dreamlike, since love between different races evidently cannot exist within the framework of the advanced social structure called civilization.

This concern about racial hatred and whether it is born into a person or generated through training and environmental attitudes seems to receive, Rodger's disclaimer against intending any “propagandistic message” notwithstanding, the major emphasis. Almost twenty years before South Pacific, Jerome Kern, Hammerstein, and Edna Ferber treated the subject of miscegenation in Show Boat, which might justifiably be called the first modern musical play; in South Pacific, however, the races are not black and white but Caucasian and Oriental. The racial issue, which appears in both major plot lines, is encapsulated in Cable's act 2 song, “You've Got to Be Taught,” which, contrary to Nellie's belief that her racial attitudes are emotional predispositions born in her, proposes that these are acquired hates and fears inculcated into the children: “It's not born in you. It happens after you're born” (p. 346). This song constitutes the thematic center of the play.

Emile, the fugitive running away from a past in which he killed a man who tried to corrupt and take over a town, and Nellie, the “corny, cock-eyed optimist” (as she dubs herself in a lyric indicative of Hammerstein's consistently hopeful philosophy) who is running towards something, contrast with one another. If Emile once chose active involvement while the rest of the world just sat by and watched (is the man he killed to be seen as a symbol for Hitler or Benito Mussolini?), he now opts for savoring the sweetness of life with Nellie rather than risk losing her in a show of patriotic heroics. The hero and heroine's falling in love at first sight on an “enchanted evening” is as predictable and conventional as in most musicals (a truly unsentimental view of love and marriage will not come in a musical until almost a quarter century later with Sondheim and George Furth's Company). The dramatic “Twin Soliloquies,” with some of their lyrics taken directly from Michener's words, help make the too-sudden love more plausible and effect suspension of disbelief by openly admitting the artificiality and even ritualizing it through rhyme. Later, the Thanksgiving Follies segment employs the show-within-the-show, casting the audience in the role of American troops watching a musicale, thus furthering the breakdown of the barrier between auditorium and stage begun when Bloody Mary addresses the audience as customers for her exotic wares.

When Nellie runs off after learning that Emile had two children by his Polynesian wife, which momentarily destroys any chance that she could still consider marrying him, Emile decides to accompany Cable on a dangerous reconnaissance mission; he involves himself not from any sense of patriotism, but only from a feeling of having nothing left to live for. Cable dies, but his “springtime” love for Liat has already been cut short by the realization that he could never cross the racial prohibition against intermarriage except on an island where spells are cast and dreams come true—in the theatre. Even with his death, the war as pictured here is hardly realistic, seen instead through the nearsighted lenses of postwar euphoria with Billis as guide: exotic locales and customs, get-rich-quick schemes with the natives (as in Teahouse), and clowning around and sexual high jinks with the nurses. The unhappy ending of the subplot renders Emile's return and reunion with a chastened and wiser Nellie indispensable for the musical comedy audience. Yet if South Pacific makes no very substantial statement about war, or even about love, it does make a provocative one about racial attitudes and prejudices: to see them as learned responses implies that someday they might be unlearned and eradicated.

Given the strain of anti-Semitism that continues to exist just under the surface of American society, as evidenced in its most pronounced form by the renewed stirrings of the neo-Nazis in the late 1970s, it is perhaps not surprising to find Lanford Wilson exploring the issue in his 1980 prize play. Set on July 4, 1944, Talley's Folly is a slight, sentimental effort, somewhat redeemed by its endearing and engaging central couple: Matt Friedman, a liberal in his early forties, and Sally Talley, a nurse headed for self-imposed spinsterhood, who are misfits in the real world but, finally, fit together almost too neatly by the prestidigitation of some mischievous angel or crazy Providence. As misfits fearing the hurt of rejection, the egg serves as their overriding symbol: “Crack our shells, never be any use again … individuals. We had to keep separate, private.”⁴ Wilson disguises the slightness of his play in two ways: by the paranoid Matt's Jewish comedy routines (including Bogart imitations and farcical pratfalls) that Matt uses as ploys to cover his own vulnerability and keep cynicism at bay and by the Wilder-like frame of Matt as narrator/stage manager/central character addressing the audience. The latter device, rather than apologize for, actually calls attention to the saccharine, fairytale nature of the play. Here the nonrepresentational form is not integral to the content; rather, it is a clever ploy. What audience, warned beforehand not to expect more than its author is prepared to deliver, could fail to like a play that wears its heart so openly and unashamedly upon its sleeve?

Folly is, essentially, a play of character revealed largely through exposition and some lengthy monologues. Matt, because of the history of his wandering family, considers himself non-nationalistic and feels little allegiance to any political cause or “ism,” distrusting them all because “in no time at all you start defending isms like they were something tangible” (p. 46). When he tells Sally the tale of his past—of a Prussian father and Ukranian mother “indefinitely detained” by the Germans in World War I, of a Latvian sister tortured by the French so that their father would divulge information he did not have, and of himself, born in Lithuania and arriving as a refugee with his uncle and family from Norway via Caracas—he distances the story by narrating it in the third person, almost as if it were a parable or folk tale. Only unconsciously does he slip into the confessional, first person “I.” Although he escaped the draft because of his age, he is not unaffected by the war (which governments deliberately prolong, he thinks, for economic stability). Since the way of the world for Matt has always been that “life was war, war was life” and since he feels uncertain whether there will even be a time after this war, he refuses to “bring into this world another child to be killed for political purposes” (p. 40), and so he hesitates to marry Sally. In one of the running gags expressing his belief that “the car” (America) “is out of gas” (hope) (p. 50), he foreshadows the emotional and physical aftershock of Vietnam that will be felt by the characters in Wilson's sequel, Fifth of July, which occurs thirty years later.

For herself, Sally yearns on this Independence Day to break free from a restrictive family that is antiliberal, anti-Semitic, and anti-German—and so anti-Matt. Yet political, religious, and racial intolerance are not the only things preventing her marriage. She was engaged once before to her high school sweetheart and fellow “golden” child, and their marriage portended a merger of the two families. But her father committed suicide in the Depression, and—in the secret the audience waits to have revealed—an illness left Sally sterile. Once her misconception that Matt was only saying he would never father a child so as to spare her the burden of not being able to give him one is cleared up, then these two, made for each other, can come together. Such a resolution has been inevitable all along, and if Wilson equates himself with the Providence who through sleight-of-hand finally brings them together, he delays that union until the last possible moment.

The “folly” of the play's title and the setting of the action is a boathouse that Sally's Uncle Everett, a free spirit like Matt, constructed in place of the gazebo that he had hoped to build. For Sally, it is a place of escape, of “magic.” Matt and Sally leave this place to return to a family and a community unprepared to accept them, to one which will ostracize them, just as Matt, the stage manager again at the end, sends the audience out from the theatre exactly ninety-seven minutes later and back into their imperfect world where the only certain value seems to be love on a very selective and limited basis. A dissonance exists between what Matt calls the “waltz” or “valentine” of this “once upon a time” bauble the audience has been watching and the prejudice that pervades the world. Maybe only art, the play, can make that reality bearable or lead the way to a change.

Certain dramas written by black authors in the 1950s and 1960s might well have been honored with the Pulitzer, for example, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun or LeRoi Jones's Dutchman, which both explore, in Jones's words, “the difficulty of becoming a man in America.”⁵ If Hansberry upsets many among a black audience by not questioning critically enough whether the dream that her protagonist pursues has been irreparably tainted by white values, she does examine the ethic that equates “being somebody” with material success while urging a new generation of black men to achieve dignity by coming into their own as husbands and fathers. As Clinton Oliver suggests, however, Raisin, though written by a black, is intended as “bourgeois or middle class drama” and so “is essentially integrationist.” Yet he is quick to deem that “an oversimplification. The segregation of the Negro from the mainstream of American life has made his art necessarily a reflection of this fact, and is therefore in its profoundest aspects, separatist”⁶—as Dutchman more obviously approximates. If Jones annoys many in an establishment audience by his insistence that white society has emasculated the black man, at the same time he still emphasizes how an assimilationist stance by blacks subverts selfhood; the blacks' justifiable hatred and impulse towards violence might even be seen as channeled into and sublimated in artistic creation. Before 1970, however, the two plays focusing on black/white issues that won the drama Pulitzer were both written by whites.

Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom, the first off-Broadway and the third regional drama to win the Pulitzer (for 1927), is, more importantly, the first specifically Southern play and the first about the black experience to be honored. Green (who later collaborated with Richard Wright on the dramatization of Native Son), adapted Abraham's Bosom, which covers a period of eighteen years beginning in the 1880s, from three of his one-act plays, accounting for the looseness of its structure and abundance of material and detail. The looseness is justified partly by the chronicle nature of the play and mitigated further by patterning the work as one man's odyssey towards selfhood. Moreover, an impressive, heightened rhetoric, appropriate because historical and biblical myths overlay the action, helps direct attention away from the structural flaws. Even though the Abraham whom Green alludes to in his title (taken from a well-known Negro spiritual) is the Old Testament patriarch, the mainly white audience might well connect the self-taught Abe McCrannie's efforts to educate and thus emancipate his people with those of Lincoln. McCrannie gives his son the name Douglas, evidently in honor of Frederick Douglass, the freed slave turned abolitionist and orator whom McCrannie himself emulates and may even be partly modelled after. That Douglas fails so miserably in living up to his namesake and in being the obedient son that Isaac was to Abraham, or like Moses in delivering his people out of the wilderness, are only a few of the play's multiple tragic ironies. Along with the patterning of fathers and sons, the archetypal antagonism between Cain and Abel underpins the work. As the mulatto McCrannie kills his white half-brother, Lonnie, the moral categories of good and evil become confused with the racial coloration. Finally, as frequently happens in American literature, the white/good and black/evil stereotypes are inverted and their validity questioned.

An action Abe performed two years before the play opens began his troubles; he buried a black man lynched for attacking a white woman and was saved from the angry mob only by the intercession of his father, the Colonel, who, though inwardly proud of Abe's strength and intelligence, must respond to his son in public in the way society demands that its leaders act towards blacks. So when Abe retaliates against the jealous Lonnie for striking him, the Colonel whips Abe, calls him a slave, and banishes him. The action picks up in Abe's two-room cabin in the springtime three years later; adorning the walls is a calendar picturing a slave leaving his chains with the caption, “‘We Are Rising,’”⁷ which foreshadows the aspiring Abe's own ascendency. His wife, Goldie, has just given birth to their third child—and first to survive—a son; and the Colonel, praising Abe's perseverance in contrast to Lonnie's laziness, gives Abe the house and land, as well as permission to teach at the black school. But in this play where the mood is a seasonal, shifting sistole and diastole of joy and grief, the winter—with the ragged field showing through the window—finds Abe beleaguered by the angry parents for having beaten one of the recalcitrant youths. Fifteen years later, on a dying winter day in Durham, Abe is devoid of funds and of any hope for his son; breaking the bond of kinship with Douglas, he even demands that the boy change his name. Instead of the Douglas/Abe relationship mirroring that of Abe and the Colonel, it more closely repeats the Lonnie/Colonel pattern. Deciding that their time in the urban hell has been a dark night of the soul, they return to the country and, close to the soil, make a new beginning. When Lonnie steals his crop and threatens him, Abe kills Lonnie in self-defense. Seeing himself as another Cain, deserted by God, Abe comes close to despair; stones are pelted through his window, and he is finally shot down like a dog.

In killing Lonnie, Abe kills not only his half-brother but tries to exorcise the white side of himself that has always existed so precariously with the black. Abe is a divided self, a constant struggle ensuing between his intellectual aspirations and his instinctive emotional drives; as one of the minor black characters analyzes it, his “nigger” heart lives in opposition to his “white” head. Acts 5 and 6, during which Abe kills Lonnie, seem indebted in their psychological use of stage setting to two of O'Neill's plays which feature blacks, All God's Chillun and The Emperor Jones. At one point, great leaping shadows that expressionistically objectify Abe's inner turmoil fill the cabin; later, when Abe is pursued in the moonlight, the trappings of civilization, such as learning and speech, fall away from him just as Jones sheds them in the forest. After killing Lonnie, Abe senses his spirit in the wind and sees the tree branches as menacing hands; he hallucinates, envisioning a lynching, ghosts and haunts, and finally a young Negress and a dandified white man coupling like “hawgs.” It is Abe's vision of the primal scene, and the child they conceive is himself. This contributes to the impression of Abe as a victim of his birth, who seems in the evil he does mainly to react to outside stimuli rather than to act, making him less tragic a figure than Green evidently intended he would be.

No matter how sympathetic an audience might be to Abe today, the play is not only a pessimistic and unlightened examination of the racial question, but even a reactionary one. Certain of its ideas do retain their viability: violence is not the solution; the urban ghettos are as enslaving as the cotton fields. On at least one point—the necessity for breaking down the idea of God as exclusively white—the play was even prophetic. Abe moves, in fact, from a belief that black oppression means a white God rules the universe to a recognition that God encompasses both black and white. But the work's central emphasis, voiced by Abe himself, clearly places the burden on the black man for his own lot: it is not white society that must change, but the black man who will rise only when he has first freed his mind through education. In Green's amelioristic approach, blacks are not yet ready to be the equals of whites—a viewpoint that may have made the play palatable to audiences of the 1920s but which renders moot any question of reviving the work today. Green, along with Abe and the minor black choral figures who reject Abe's way and opt instead for maintaining the status quo with the whites as superior, carefully prevents the whites in the audience from feeling guilty, even makes them feel complacent, which severely vitiates any grandeur the play possesses in characterization and language. Two Pulitzer plays on the racial issue from the late 1960s do, however, distribute the blame more equitably.

For over two decades now, the center of original theatrical activity in America has been shifting from on Broadway to off, even to the regional theatres, and a number of the more recent Pulitzer plays, like Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope, which won the award in 1969 but first opened at Washington's Arena Stage in 1960, reflect this trend. White Hope covers roughly the same time period in American history as In Abraham's Bosom and falls even more clearly into the chronicle-cum-tragedy form than does Green's work. But it owes just as much, as Gerald Weales notes,⁸ to the Brechtian epic theatre for its episodic structure, its style that blends song with dialogue, and its social commitment, though it does not depend on estrangement devises to stimulate an intellectual reaction at the expense of emotional involvement. Although several earlier American plays demonstrate some dependence on Brechtian techniques, Sackler's is so far the only winner wholly in the neo-Brechtian mode.

As a chronicle-cum-tragedy, Sackler's work details the desperate attempts of the white establishment, reaching even to the White House, to find a “great white hope” capable of defeating the black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Jefferson, a thinly disguised portrait of Jack Johnson. As if his race were not embarrassment enough to white strangleholds of power and authority, the married Jefferson further fuels the hatred by openly living with his white mistress, Ellie, eventually violating the law by taking her across the state line. Yet the conflict becomes one not simply of law versus love, but of the necessity to sacrifice personal integrity to the public role that America thrusts upon her culture heroes; for the white Kid who finally defeats Jack is as much a martyr to racial bigotry as is Jack: “his smashed and reddened face … barely visible” as he is borne out through the jubilant crowd, he is dehumanized by being turned into an object, a parody of “the lifelike wooden saints in Catholic processions.”⁹

His determination to define his life on his own terms makes Jack, hounded out of country after country, reduced to playing Uncle Tom to Ellie's Little Eva on the cafe circuit in Budapest and even to selling his gloves to survive, less the victim (as Abe is) and more the tragic sufferer, Promethean in his defiance of established codes. What topples him is not only his freely chosen burden of Ellie but also the unsought burden of being manipulated by his own race—most of whom long either to be assimilated into white society or kept in their lowly place. Despite his wanting to fight only for himself and not to deliver the black race, others force a Messianic role upon him until the gold belt becomes his albatross: “Ah'm stuck widdit, see, a hunk of junky hardware, but it don't let go” (p. 137). If the majority of blacks quickly lionize him, some who are making inroads into the white power structure hasten to vilify him for fear that their own standing will be jeopardized, while others want nothing more than to remain subservient, like his mother who “tried to learn him like you gotta learn a culled boy” (p. 75). So Sackler's play is a two-edged sword, cutting at both blacks and whites, as Jones does in Dutchman.

Sackler never adequately dramatizes the relationship between Ellie and Jack, and yet on its outcome hinge the final choices that determine Jack's heroism. The same skepticism about the option of interracial marriage as a step towards integration pervades White Hope as underlies Green's drama. Ellie claims him to be kind and sensitive, yet the audience never sees this—unless the embarrassing sexual banter in the cabin is to be accepted as proof; when Jack's resentment boils over, he takes it out on her, forcing her to leave, which leads to her suicide. After her body is brought in, Jefferson decides on retaliation against what “they” have done; he refuses to throw the fight and will do his best to triumph. In the process, he endures a terrible battering, finally securing his freedom from control and his sense of dignity.

In place of depth, Sackler provides expansiveness through the panoply and pageantry of the chronicle form to which are added blackouts—with sound effects used as transitions or bridges as they would be in radio or film—and spirituals, blues, and pop tunes to punctuate the short scenes. Frequently, characters interrupt their longer speeches with single lines of direct address, further breaking the illusion of reality and establishing this as a convention, so that the five long speeches—three directed to the whites in the audience and two to the blacks—are prepared for. In the first of the three addressed to whites, Cap'n Dan, a former champion turned referee, declares that having a black wear the heavyweight crown is “like the world's got a shadow across it” (p. 42). In the second, Ellie's mother reiterates the numerous stereotypical connotations of the word black—“the dark to be afraid of, pitch black, black as dirt, the black hole and the black pit, what's burned or stained or cursed or hideous, poison and spite and the waste from your body and the horrors crawling up into your mind” (p. 135)—demonstrating how language can be used to foster and support prejudice, corrupting its original function. Just as Green takes pains not to annoy his white audience, Sackler allows the liberals to feel self-satisfied and morally superior, while at the same time playing to the white silent majority, as when he allows Dixon to echo their fears: “Give it some thought next time you're alone on the streets at night” (p. 111). The Brechtian form, however, demands less ambiguity and a clearer demarcation between heroes and villains and a more consistent social philosophy than the fence-straddling for the commercial theatre apparent here.

Two speeches addressed to the probably few blacks in the audience create additional difficulties. The first, by a character named Scipio who is totally extraneous to the play's action, speaks out for black pride—taunting the blacks by asking, “How white you wanna be?” (p. 71)—and holds up Jefferson as an example of selling out to the white value structure in a new brand of slavery. He urges them to take pride in their black civilization and culture: “Time again to make us a big new wise proud dark man's world—again!” (p. 72). The second black monologuist and final commentator is Jack's estranged wife, Clara, motivated by personal jealousy and vengeance against Jack for having turned his back on black women and succumbed to the white woman's mystique of black male sexuality. Costuming her in a garment stained by blood and excrement makes her appearance unnecessarily sensational. But then Sackler depends on broad strokes and effects throughout rather than on subtlety to propel his play, which is as much shadowboxing as the real thing.

Even before Green wrote In Abraham's Bosom, authors were beginning to formulate an aesthetic for a black drama that would address itself largely to a black audience. In his 1925 essay called “Play-writing,” Mark Seyboldt, while granting that black playwrights must continue to be aware of “two different audiences,” one “used to theatre going” and the other not, urged them to be “‘mainly interested in the second audience; we want colored folk to add the new diversion of drama to their lives. … It will stimulate and broaden cramped lives.’”¹⁰ By the following year, 1926, in a manifesto written for the Krigwa Players' Little Negro Theatre in Harlem, W. E. B. DuBois was arguing that “‘The plays of a real Negro theatre must be: 1. About us. … 2. By us. … 3. For us. That is the Negro theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences. … 4. Near us.’”¹¹ By the late 1960s, the notion not just of two audiences but of two Americas had become a sad fact of American society, and the Black Arts Movement had linked itself inextricably with, and become an instrument and expression of, Black Power—an understandable alliance for the drama since, as Larry Neal asserts, “theatre is potentially the most social of all the arts.”¹² Adopting Frantz Fanon's belief in the inability of “acquir[ing] the oppressor's power by acquiring his symbols,” Neal proposes that “a ‘black aesthetic’” must replace “the Western aesthetic [that] has run its course” as a viable “cultural sensibility”: “The motive behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of … white ways of looking at the world. The new aesthetic is mostly predicated on an Ethics which asks the question: whose vision of the world is finally more meaningful, ours or the white oppressors?” (pp. 29-30). Though neither seems addressed to an exclusively black audience, the two plays by blacks that have won the Pulitzer, perhaps especially the first, participate in the agenda that Neal envisions for black drama.

Charles Gordone, the first of only two blacks thus far to win the Pulitzer for drama, frames the action of his “Black Black comedy” and 1970 award play, No Place to Be Somebody, by employing a nonrealistic technique. The frame hints that the entire play may be occurring in the mind of the apocalyptically named apprentice playwright, Gabe Gabriel—may, in fact, be the play he is writing. The nonillusionistic devices, including long narrative passages and poems, function more satisfactorily than the similar ones in White Hope because Gordone establishes the illusion-breaking conventions earlier and employs them consistently. No Place departs from the traditions of the barroom drama in America (evident in such plays as Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, and Jack Gelber's The Connection) in that although some of the bar's habituees gravitate to it as a protective womb or source of intoxicating illusions or forgetfulness, it is not, finally, a haven of safety and security. It becomes, instead, a testing ground for people's perception of race and the black movement.

The rather cluttered melodramatic action, reminiscent of a grade-B gangster movie, can be dealt with quickly; it is important mainly for the effect that it—real or imagined or both—has upon the light-skinned Gabe and, by extension, the black race in general, in the change from nonviolence to violence. Since the events are melodramatic, Gabe can participate in actions which, lacking subtlety, ambivalence, and ambiguity, force reactions that reveal his progression. Gabe writes his play in a bar owned by Johnny Williams, a black pimp intent on leading a Black Mafia, who equates respect for the law with the white way. In his stable are two black (Evie and Cora) prostitutes and one white (Dee). Frequenters of the establishment include Shanty, a hypster white drummer who dreams of winning Cora through his music, which supposedly proves he has as much soul as any black; and Melvin, a black dancer. Arriving at the bar after a long absence in prison is Sweets Crane, a reformed black racketeer and Johnny's surrogate father. Sweets, challenging Uncle Tomism, regrets that Johnny has aped his “bad points” and expresses disdain “for giving Johnny the worst sickness of all: the Charley fever.”¹³ Coming into the bar for the first time are two whites, Mary Lou (daughter of Judge Bolton) and Ellen, both civil rights picketers. The judge, it happens, has risen to office by acquitting two Italian mobsters on charges of bribery and murder, and Mary Lou willingly turns over a file incriminating him to Johnny. Dee, jealous of Johnny's attention towards Mary Lou, degrades herself by putting on black face and ultimately commits suicide. Sweets, after willing everything to Johnny provided he reform, knifes Mafucci and is himself killed in an altercation over the files. Johnny taunts Gabe, who has “no stomach” for this personal war against whites and refuses to hand over the information, with being a “lousy, yellow, screamin' faggot coward” (p. 113) and threatens to kill him. In a pattern that closely repeats the action of Albee's The Zoo Story, Johnny drives Gabe to kill him so that Gabe can no longer be the uninvolved, nonviolent observer, the passive commentator who speaks through words rather than actions.

Gabe addresses the audience directly in three of his poems. The first is a satiric work about a Whitmanesque speaker at a civil rights protest rally who tries to embrace all blacks, pleading for solidarity rather than violence, but receives no response. The second narrates a fable about blacks who move into the white world, go unaccepted, and finally return to the black world, only to find rejection there as well. This poem, which begins with Gabe intoning the old Protestant hymn, “Whiter Than Snow,” underscores (like Mrs. Bachman's monologue in White Hope) and simultaneously undercuts the stereotypical association of whiteness with moral rightness and purity. Gabe's final verse insists, “There's mo' to bein' black than meets the / Eye” (p. 79), yet it ultimately defines blacks by the same stereotypes that they themselves help the whites to perpetuate. Gabe symbolizes his own prescience as black poet and suggests the violent course of action he will follow through the mock communion in which he eats a gun and drinks a Molotov cocktail.

Just as Sackler introduced Scipio, the black militant, Gordone brings on an equally unprepared-for character named Machine Dog, dressed in a military uniform and given to Nazi-like salutes. Whether he exists only in Johnny's imagination, or only as a tempter in Gabe's mind, is not clear; what is clear is that Machine Dog serves as a kind of deus ex machina (perhaps that wryly accounts for his name), delivering an edict canonizing Johnny as a heroic martyr for his people. His revivalist monologue delivered immediately after Gabe kills Johnny is rhetorically confusing and probably an obfuscation for an audience in the theatre, though it appears to be a series of charges against the blacks for failing to aid the revolutionaries.

In the epilogue, Gabe appears one last time, now dressed in a new role as a woman in mourning, to utter a jeremiad in biblical phraseology that recalls the prologue. Contrary to Walter Kerr's belief that the “Epilogue” is “false to the play's tone … too thin and obvious in its humor for the weightiness of the text as a whole and should … be dropped,”¹⁴ it marks the essential end-product of Gabe's development. Appropriately dressed in the widow's weeds that had become so familiar an American sight by the end of the 1960s, Gabe—and through him, Gordone—mourns the years of dehumanization and degradation that the people have allowed themselves to suffer, mourning, too, the end of nonviolence as a solution for himself and for his race. The play's title suggests that finding and living by one's own proper identity is a near impossibility for the blacks in this society, that there is, literally, “no place” for them “to be somebody” except by aping Charley's ways, which ironically only renders each of them even more of a “nobody.” The epilogue rounds out the play thematically by suggesting the frightening impasse at which the struggle for racial equality has arrived.

With A Soldier's Play, Charles Fuller became in 1982 the second black to win the drama Pulitzer. His play, which mixes yet finally transcends two perennially popular forms, the whodunit and the courtroom melodrama, is acted out on a nonrealistic set in the shape of a “horseshoe-like half circle” resembling a courtroom. It opens with a tantalizingly incomplete reenactment of the 1944 murder of a black tech sergeant, Vernon C. Waters, near an army base in a small Southern town; by the time it ends with a complete reenactment of Waters's death, suspicion has shifted from the Klan, to two white officers, and finally to the two guilty black soldiers. In its overall physical conception of the setting and its fluid, cinematic shifting between present and past, Fuller's work recalls Peter Shaffer's Equus, also an investigation of sorts, albeit a psychiatric one. During the criminal investigation, testimony about the past is not simply recited but is acted out (again as in Equus), the audience sometimes viewing the past within the past. Because of the courtroom setting, the audience becomes implicated in the action as spectators at the inquiry and even as a tribunal or jury assessing guilt and innocence. When the killers are revealed, however, the complex question of guilt still resonates.

Capt. Richard Davenport, dispatched from Washington to conduct the investigation, functions as the play's most obvious narrator, establishing the time frame as he probes the witnesses. But as these witnesses testify, they, too, become narrators, helping to distance the theatre audience, as Brecht does, and permitting it to analyze the events with a degree of objectivity. The white company commander, Capt. Charles Taylor, has been so acculturated with the stereotypical white-as-master/black-as-servant division that he finds it difficult to accept Davenport's authority, especially before he learns that he has been betrayed by the white superiors who have tied his hands out of fear the scandal will spread. Yet Davenport, who has always tried to be a source of pride for his fellow blacks, ultimately wins Taylor's support and respect because he is “not your yesserin' colored boy.”¹⁵ That Taylor attains this new attitude because of Davenport's conduct and despite his skin color is one of the positive notes in an otherwise pessimistic play, and it is signalled by Davenport's finally shedding the tinted glasses he has hidden behind. But Davenport's awareness, expressed in his preachy summation, that “the madness of race in America” (p. 84) has made blacks as well as whites small of heart counterbalances Taylor's growth.

Waters, under the tutelage of his “Daddy,” came to regard the army as the only avenue open to blacks for entrance into the white power structure. He became, though, as racist as any white, psychotically obsessed in his preaching against “lazy, shiftless Negroes.” Peterson, one of the black soldiers, hints at the analogy between Waters and Hitler; Waters, indeed, developed his own version of the Nazi plan for a master race by campaigning to eradicate certain kinds of blacks he despised. One of these, the gentle musician C. J. Memphis, embodied for Waters all the worst features of the “cotton-picker, singin' the Blues, bowin' and scrapin'—smilin' in everybody's face” black (p. 55). So the megalomaniac Waters, like Lula who represents white society in Jones's Dutchman, goaded C. J. into reacting against him, only to break him—a pattern of action that (again like Lula) he had successfully followed elsewhere. C. J. commits suicide in prison, prompting Peterson's eventual vengeance against Waters. Waters, attempting to gain an entree into white authority structures by hating his own race, redefined himself in terms that masked his true identity. Because he tries to deny his brotherhood with other members of his race, Waters reverts when drunk to an animalistic black every bit as stereotypical and onerous as the shuffling Uncle Toms he has goaded to death. His futility at the point of his own death resides in his recognition that those in power who successfully connive to have him do their dirty work for them “still hate [him]” (pp. 4, 82). By repressing his racial identity, he has enslaved himself.

As important to the total impact of the play as Waters's and Davenport's attempts—the first despicable, the second admirable—at discovering a social role that can mesh with a private role without any concomitant loss of integrity, are the modes of response of the minor characters. In his handling of them, Fuller is at his most subtle and complex. At opposite sides of the stage hang two pictures: one of FDR in Taylor's office; a second of “Joe Lewis in an Army uniform” above the words “We'll Win Because We're on God's Side” (p. 3) in the soldiers' barracks. The portrait of FDR serves as a reminder that the avenue of political action was largely closed to blacks, despite the generally liberal stance of the Roosevelt years, and would remain closed to them for two more decades. The poster of Louis suggests that the way to success most available to blacks was—and this remained true for a long time afterwards—sports; in fact, the black soldiers segregated in this barracks are being exploited for their success in the Negro Baseball League. They yearn to fight in the war against Hitler and the Japanese, but they fail to see any connection between Hitler's oppression of the Jewish people and white oppression of blacks, and between themselves as victims of American racism and the Japanese in America as victims during World War II. They want only to be called up into the game of war (certainly one of the connotations of the title Soldier's Play) and are elated when they finally receive equal treatment and are shipped out—though they do not understand the hypocrisy of America's missionary zeal abroad when coupled with its moral astigmatism over racism at home. Ironically, the entire squadron, black soldiers and white officers, die almost as soon as they see action. Fuller's drama is thus more radical and subversive than at first appears, taking a stand against all power structures that abuse people by too narrowly defining their roles or by inculcating distorted values. Certainly in Fuller's America both sides, black and white, are guilty, and both sides lose. Fuller arraigns both society as a whole and his specific audience who, unless they actively protest the status quo, are tacitly furthering it.

Not until Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody, which premiered at Joseph Papp's Public Theatre, and Fuller's Soldier's Play, first produced by the Negro Ensemble Company, are there Pulitzer plays about the black experience that do not bow to commercialism, partly—maybe even primarily—because they were addressed to a black audience as well as to a white. In Abraham's Bosom and The Great White Hope, written by whites with an almost exclusively white audience in mind, both sacrifice some of their dramatic consistency and integrity to make their material palatable to paying customers; they both insist on straddling the fence, critical of the manner in which blacks have been oppressed and yet careful not to make whites feel too guilty or uncomfortable. No Place, the most theatrically complex of all these works, and Soldier's Play both rely on conventional, easily recognizable forms—the gangster movie in the first, the courtroom melodrama in the second—used in unconventional ways to dramatize the dilemma blacks face in a white society: how to discover a black identity that is not defined by a white power structure and value system and so is no better than what it attempts to change or replace. Yet blacks in these plays who try to goad their fellow blacks out of complacency risk becoming as oppressive as their own oppressors. As one of the characters in August Wilson's recent Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, about racism and rage in Chicago in the 1920s, sums up the problem, “As long as the colored man look [sic] to white folks to put the crown on what he say … as long as he looks to white folks for approval … then he ain't never gonna find out who he is and what he's about.”¹⁶ One of the most pernicious cultural inheritances—and one, ironically, fostered and sustained by literary symbolism—which these playwrights as far back as Green have attempted to expose, is the antithetical way of perceiving experience that sees white as synonymous with right and good and black as synonymous with wrong and evil. This mind-set is now so ingrained in the consciousness (and racial unconscious) that to alter it will demand, Sackler and Gordone and Fuller know, a change not only in their audience's way of thinking but also in their very habit of being.

Five of the six Pulitzer dramas that examine the racial issue break, to a greater or lesser extent, the confines of strict realism. Soldier's Play, No Place to Be Somebody, and Great White Hope, by employing Brechtian distancing devices, all preach directly to an audience aware that they are watching a play. The stage in the last two even becomes at times a lectern or platform, except that the messages sent are occasionally confusing and/or obscure, probably because of uncertainty about the nature of the audience in a volatile and unstable time. South Pacific—which at one point casts the theatergoers in the role of American troops enjoying a musicale-within-the-musical—and Talley's Folly force their audiences to think about the experience of going to the theatre, intimating that only in a place of romance and illusion removed from the real world (the island Bali Hai, Uncle Everett's boathouse) can racial differences be ignored and overcome in love relationships. Yet both are only gently corrective of civilization's failure, with the playwrights' intention to entertain remaining preeminent. It might even be that the theatre metaphor itself in each of these works, because it emphasizes the illusionary nature of what happens up on the stage, acutally helps shield the audience from the racial issues; both of them, to extend Matt's categorization of Folly, might well be called “valentines” sent to their audiences. Folly, however, more so than South Pacific, adopts the paradigm of sending its audience back out into society to face and maybe to solve the problem, a strategy that White Hope and No Place and, to a lesser degree, Soldier's Play follow as well. Most prominently in Soldier's Play, the stage of the action moves out into the audience as they watch the play; they become aware of themselves as a jury weighing the evidence and passing moral judgment on the American political and military system as the radical protestors have always done.

Notes

1. Doris E. Abramson, Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre 1925-1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 8.

2. Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 222. In his autobiography, Josh: My Up and Down, In and Out Life, the musical's director, Joshua Logan, lays claim to having supplied much of the libretto: “After three fourths of the first act, I realized Oscar was throwing me lines for Emile Debecque, Bloody Mary, and sometimes for Captain Brackett, and I was doing all the rest” (New York: Delacourte Press, 1976, p. 222). Although he feared “‘no one will ever know I wrote a word of it,’” at Rodgers and Hammerstein's own insistence, his name was added to the award citation (Hohenberg, Prizes, [see chap. 3, n. 4], p. 201).

3. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, South Pacific, in Six Plays (New York: Modern Library, 1959), p. 294. Further references appear in the text.

4. Lanford Wilson, Talley's Folly (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), p. 35. Further references appear in the text.

5. Quoted in Abramson, p. 276.

6. Clinton F. Oliver, “The Negro and the American Theater,” intro. to Contemporary Black Drama from “A Raisin in the Sun” to “No Place To Be Somebody”, eds. Clinton F. Oliver and Stephanie Sills (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), p. 24.

7. Paul Green, In Abraham's Bosom, in Pulitzer Plays, p. 396. Further references appear in the text.

8. Gerald Weales, The Jumping-Off Place: American Drama in the 1960s (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 292.

9. Howard Sackler, The Great White Hope (New York: Dial Press, 1968), p. 186. Further references appear in the text.

10. Quoted in Oliver, p. 19.

11. Quoted in Oliver, p. 20.

12. Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” The Drama Review, 12, 4 (Summer 1968), 33.

13. Charles Gordone, No Place to Be Somebody (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 39. Further references appear in the text.

14. Walter Kerr, “Not Since Edward Albee …,” The New York Times, 18 May 1969, D22.

15. Charles Fuller, A Soldier's Play (Garden City: Nelson Doubleday, 1982), p. 3. Further references appear in the text.

16. August Wilson, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (New York: New American Library, 1985), p. 25.