Three Black Plays: Alienation and Paths to Recovery

Three Black Plays: Alienation and Paths to Recovery DOROTHY LEE • INDIVIDUALS TODAY, regardless of the particular society, too often have a tenuously held sense of personal or group identification.l The phrase "identity-crisis" has become a cliche. "Alienation from" precedes every mode of relationship as a theme in literature and a syndrome in life. Literary voices are constantly lifted to express bleak statements of and occasionally solutions for generational, sexual, ethnic, and metaphysical estrangement . Among these artists, not unexpectedly, are Afro-American writers in every genre. Some of the most articulate and interesting are the creators of a burgeoning Black theatre. In some instances, their plays -like other Black literary expressions - though serving an important social function as protest are intentionally limited artistically to the "agit-prop" level of literature. However, the alienation theme perceptively handled in a Black context can and often does become a metaphor for the human condition. We can find in these works definitions of a sense of community - or its telling absence - both uniquely Black and universally relevant. As they movingly concretize individual isolation and the exile's legacy of despair, they reveal the peculiar shape of suffering in the modern world. At least three major Black ensemble companies have developed in the New York metropolitan area in recent years. They constitute in themselves a special testimony to a sense of community which may have begun as compensation for exclusion but which maintains itself on more positive ground. They present plays which project nuances of the Black experience as seen by Black writers, acted by Black actors, and directed 397 398 DOROTHY LEE by Black directors. Although they offer a broad spectrum of attitudes and materials, symbolically they represent an ethnic family effort which is affirmative, unifying, and fulfilling. Audiences have responded with seemingly intense identification to the authentic projection of experiences close to their own. The terms with which they refer to themselves reveal their sense of direction. Ed Bullins's New Lafayette Theatre describes itselfas the theatre of "the black experience" or "people-people" theatre, conceiving drama to be a source of healing for the community as, with a shock of recognition, people confront themselves on the stage. Imamu Baraka's Third World Theatre, the most revolutionary, as its name suggests, creates an identity for itself outside the American mainstream. Douglas Turner Ward's Negro Ensemble Company is more traditionally but still definitively named. Ward has said that he refused to accept the "sixties" pejorative connotation for the word "Negro" because of its "long, honored history," though he likes the positive statement "black" makes.2 He has defined his goal to be the provision of a center where Black creative talent can be nurtured and a Black audience built.3 The plays the NEC presents tend heavily toward family drama. In short, the implicit goal of all these disparate groups is the establishment of community. They themselves demonstrate and the plays they stage present the recurrent theme of alienation from the majority American community with both its negative and positive results. A detailed consideration of three significant Black plays will reveal some representative responses to the problem of the exile: Joseph Walker's The River Niger, Lonne Elder's Ceremonies In Dark Old Men, and Charles Gordone's No Place To Be Somebody. Though they all are shadowed by anger and pathos, they also contain affirmation. The River Niger and Ceremonies, presented by Ward's theatre, are essentially domestic drama and propose family effort as a solution to alienation. No Place To Be Somebody, a more complex play, speaks more broadly to the ethnic and human family. All, both explicitly and implicitly by negative example, suggest paths which may be taken to recover from the suffering ofexclusion. The River Niger, significantly, and with symbolic force, is built upon a domestic event, a homecoming. Jeff Williams, son of John and Mattie, returns from the air force to waiting family, peer group, and girlfriend. In so doing, he precipitates an external crisis in which all participate and which exposes the internal spiritual disarray most of them share. John is the pivotal force in the group. He has an acute sense of the ineffective- "ness...