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8 Black Revolutionary Playwright ALTHOUGH B ARAKA CONTINUED to write and perform poetry during the heyday of the Black Arts, his poetry became less significant as drama became his preferred genre. Baraka’s concern for a revolutionary mass art led him to encourage black artists to privilege those art forms most accessible to the broader black community. In 1972, he published the short essay “Black Revolutionary Poets Should Also Be Playwrights.” The essay begins as a condemnation of what Baraka views as pseudoblack black art. He labels as reactionary not only the film Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song but all those so-called black poets who romanticize the joy and delight of black life or sentimentalize “the good old days on the block.” Such poets refuse to acknowledge that the pervasiveness of white racism is strangling black life. Any art that tries to proclaim blacks as a hip people without showing how they are imprisoned is reactionary.1 Many of the known Black literati should be made to go to Political Education Classes or dismissed from the struggle as enemy sympathizers! Much of our black poetry is imitative at best, and mouths impossible rhetoric rather than concrete instructions for World African Revolution! . . . Also a great many of the theater companies that were once Black are still “Black” but hardly revolutionary. They often become fixed and stylized, and individualistic elitist celebrant cults for gigantic egos, to boot.2 Instead of relying on the writings of these deracinated black artists, true revolutionary black poets should organize small drama groups. They should write and even record improvised dramas, plays, skits, songs, and dances about the international black struggle. Poets could write short skits. Actors, singers, and dancers could write short musicals. Regardless of form, the guiding theme should be the need for black unity and self-determination. Baraka imagines these skits being produced for churches, youth groups, social clubs,fraternities,sororities,and any other black group.Insofar as black Americans do not yet have an identity separate from that of Americans at large, he suggests that these plays and skits be used to teach blacks a new 259 nationalist consciousness. Not surprisingly, the values that he believes constitute the core of this new revolutionary group consciousness are found in Kawaida. As Baraka intensified his commitment to the new Black Arts movement, his drama, like his poetry, became increasingly unambitious. In his attempt to develop a theater audience, Baraka wrote and produced plays that were not only inferior to his earlier efforts but, more often than not, artistically banal. Some scholars have attributed the pedestrian quality of his Black Arts plays to his understandable desire to politicize the black community (i.e.,his black audiences ). Such explanations assume that the artistic quality lost in producing agitprop plays was a cost that Baraka was willing to pay for political engagement . Assuming that Baraka did not suddenly lose the dramatic sensibility that inspired Dutchman, we must presume that his decision to write a string of minor dramatic pieces was intentional. But why? In 1969 Baraka published Four Black Revolutionary Plays, a collection made up of Experimental Death Unit #1, A Black Mass, Great Goodness of Life, and Mad Heart. The title of the collection indicates Baraka’s belief that the plays followed the dictates of his seminal 1964 essay “The Revolutionary Theater.” EXPERIMENTAL DEATH UNIT #1 (1964) Experimental Death Unit #1 was written in 1964 during the height of Jones’s anguish over his continued affiliation with the Village scene. It was first performed at the fund-raiser for BART held at St. Mark’s Playhouse on March 1, 1965. Like many other productions of BART, the production of this play had to overcome the destructiveness of various persons associated with BART. During the rehearsals for Experimental Death Unit #1, director Barbara Teer was slapped by one of the Patterson brothers,3 and so Jones was forced to take her place. Although the play’s content is racially militant, its form reflects Jones’s soon-to-be-discarded fondness for the European avant-garde. The three major characters in Experimental Death Unit #1 are two heroin-addicted white bums and a female black prostitute. The two bums, Duff and Loco, are modeled on Samuel Beckett’s characters in Waiting for Godot. As they stand on a street corner during a winter storm, they engage in an irrational but erudite conversation about beauty and life. Suddenly their conversation is interrupted by a once...

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