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Black Theatre: Present Condition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2022

Woodie King Jr.
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Extract

A black who works in the theatre, who cannot survive without it, can easily go out of his mind trying to write about it. It is even more difficult if he is a black writer writing in a white publication for a white majority. The white majority— who have unlimited access to the mass media—always expects a black writer to prove something about the black state of mind, something most blacks know exist, and that whites know exist—after four major riots. Yet these same1 whites are trying to deny that knowledge by pretending integration is just around the corner.

Type
Black Revolutionary Theatre
Information
The Drama Review , Volume 12 , Issue 4: Black Theatre , Summer 1968 , pp. 116 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © The Drama Review 1968

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References

1 The New Lafayette Theatre burned down on January 31, 1968. Three days earlier, Robert MacBeth, the director, had given permission to the Onyx Magazine staff for use of the facilities for that day. The occasion: a book party for one of the most important yet controversial books ever written by a black writer, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Harold Cruse. On hand to discuss the book were Roy Innis, Larry Neal, Preston Wilcox, Bill Strickland, Sylvester Leakes, and Charlie Russell. This panel attracted both militant and middle-class blacks to the theater. The New Lafayette took on a new identity in Harlem; it became a necessity. The fact that it was a theatre became secondary. The community showed that it needed first a cultural center, a meeting place, to discuss its art, its politics, and its economics. Because of the importance of New Lafayette's new direction, many blacks in the Harlem community are questioning whether the fire was accidental.—W. K.

2 O'Neal began “alternative service” shortly after the New York performances. As a conscientious objector he was assigned work first in a children's home and later with the Committee for Racial Justice of the National Council of Churches. He has remained very active with the FST, making frequent trips to New Orleans and supervising the FST's funding and administrative operations in New York. Gil Moses remained with the FST throughout the 1965 season, serving for a time as artistic director of the company. He toured with the FST during the summer of 1965, performing in The Rifles of Senora Carrar and In White America, which was revived for the 1965 tour. Moses left the FST in March, 1966, after a long series of debates on the “black-white” issue. Moses argued for an allblack theatre, and his idea was supported by most of those in the FST. He left the theatre for personal reasons. His play, Roots, was performed by the FST during the 1966 season. Tom Dent took over the New Orleans leadership of the theatre in 1966, and he continues to head the theatre today. O'Neal plans to return permanently to the South and the FST as soon as his alternative service is over. Moses is presently writing, arranging, playing, and singing his own music in New York and Boston.—R. S.