GOING TO THEATER , ETC.
The currency of exchange for most social and moral attitudes
is that ancient device of the drama: personifications, masks. Both for
play and for edification, the mind sets up these figures, simple and
definite, whose identity is easily stated, who arouse quick loves and hates.
Masks are a peculiarly effective, shorthand way of defining virtue and
Vlce.
Once a grotesque, a figure of folly-childlike, lawless, lascivious–
"the Negro" is fast becoming the American theatre's leading mask of
virtue. For definiteness of outline, being black, he even surpasses "the
Jew," who has an ambiguous physical identity.
(It
was part of the lore
of the advanced position on Jewishness that Jews didn't have to look like
"Jews." But Negroes always look like "Negroes," unless, of course, they
are inauthentic.) And for sheer pain and victimage, the Negro is far
ahead of any other contender in America. In just a few short years, the
old liberalism, whose archetypal figure was the Jew, has been challenged
by the new militancy, whose hero is the Negro. But while the temper
which gives rise to the new militancy- and to "the Negro" as hero--may
indeed scorn the ideas of liberalism, one feature of the liberal sensibility
hangs on. We still tend to choose our images of virtue from among our
victims.
In the theatre, as among educated Americans generally, liberalism
has suffered an ambiguous rout. The American theatre has always had
a large streak of moralism, of preachiness. And we would all, I suppose,
blush to have to reexperience plays like
Waiting for Lefty, Watch
~n
the
Rhine, Tomorrow the World, Deep Are the Roots, The Crucible-the
classics of Broadway liberalism. But what was wrong with these plays,
from the most contemporary point of view, is not that they aimed to
convert their audiences, rather than simply entertaining them. It was,
rather, that they were too optimistic. They thought problems could be
solved. James Baldwin's
Blues for Mister Charlie
is a sermon, too.
To make it official, Baldwin has said that the play is loosely inspired by
the Emmett Till case, and one may read, on the theatre program under
the director's name, that the play is "Dedicated to the memory of Medgar
