THEATER, ETC.
393
and destructiveness (often, self-destructiveness) by which one tries to
surmount this msis.
It
has, in short, a psychological subject. The !urface
may be Odets, but the interior is pure Tennessee Williams. What Baldwin
has done is to take the leading theme of the serious theater of the 'fifties
-sexual anguish-and work it up as a political play. Buried in
Blues for
Mister Charlie
is the plot of several successes of the last decade: the
gruesome murder of a handsome virile young man by those who envy
him his virility.
The plot of
Dutchman
is similar, except that here there is an added
fillip of anxiety. In place of the veiled homoerotic hang-ups of
Blues for
Mister Charlie,
there is class anxiety. As his contribution to the mystique
of Negro sexuality, Jones brings up the question-which is never raised
in
Blues for Mister Charlie-of
being authentically Negro. (Baldwin's
play takes place in the South; perhaps one can only have such a problem
up North.) Clay, the hero of
Dutchman,
is a middle-class Negro from
New Jersey, who has gone to college and wanted to write poetry like
Baudelaire, and has Negro friends who speak with English accents. In
the early part of the play, he is in limbo. But in the end, poked and
prodded by Lula, Clay strips down to his true self; he stops being nice,
well-spoken, reasonable, and assumes his full Negro identity: that is,
he announced the homicidal rage toward whites that Negroes bear in
their hearts, whether they act on
it
or not. He will not kill, he sa.ys.
Whereupon, he is killed.
Dutchman.
is, of course, a smaller work than
Blues for Mister Charlie.
In only one act and with only two speaking characters, it is a descendant
of the sexual duels to the death dramatized by Strindberg. At its best,
in some of the early exchanges between Lula and Clay, it is neat and
powerful. But as a whole-and one does look back on the play in the
light of the astonishing fantasy revealed at the end-it is altogether too
frantic, too overstated. Robert Hooks played Clay with some subtlety,
but I found the spasmic sexual contortions and raucousness in Jennifer
West's performance as Lula almost unbearable. There is a smell of a
new, rather verbose style of emotional savagery in
Dutchman
that, for
want of a better name, I should have to call Albeesque. Undoubtedly,
we shall see more of it.. . . In contrast,
Blues for Mister Charlie
is a
long, over-long, rambling work which is virtually an anthology, a summa
of the trends of serious big American plays of the last thirty years. It
has lots of moral uplift.
It
carries on the good fight to talk dirty on
the legitimate stage to new, splendid victories. And it adol Its a complex,
pretentious form of narration-the story is told in clumsy flashbacks,
with the ornament of a non-functioning chorus, some kind of world-
