THEATER CHRONICLE
AN UNUSUAL PLAY
Lionel Abel's
The Pretender
(The Cherry Lane
Theater) cannot
be
an easy play for the ordinary New York
theatergoer to assimilate. It does not fall into any category that
he can readily identify. One might call it a dreadful comedy! It
combines a certain ironic lightness with dissonant· notes which
inspire fear. A Parisian audience accustomed by now to the
theater of Giraudoux and Sartre-not to say Ionesco and Genet
-would feel more at home with such a mixture.
The ingredients are American. The play deals with nothing
less than the negro "question." The story is that of an important
negro novelist who has gone to live in the deep South because
this section of the country, he believes, retains some vestiges of
aristocracy now entirely absent elsewhere in the country.
It so happens, however, that one night his wife, on her way
to the post office, is molested by a local fanatic who, in retalia–
tion for a crime recently alleged to have been committed by a
negro, has sworn to attack any colored person who ventures out
after dark. The novelist's wife suffers little more than a bruise
and a rough kiss, but for an entirely feminine reason-she believes
her husband too complacently sure and somewhat cold in his
treatment of her-she leads him to believe that she has been raped.
The husband, in what appears to be a demonically deliberate
calculation, plans to avenge the disgrace by arranging to lynch the
offending white man. He (the husband) calls the leading negro
citizen of the community-one who has made himself responsible
for the protection of negro rights-together with several strong–
armed neighbors to assist him in carrying out his plan. When the
novelist's wife fails to dissuade her husband from engaging
in
this
insane enterprise, she leaves their house with the threat that she
