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Tonya
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Username: Tonya
Post Number: 4027
Registered: 07-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, January 14, 2007 - 07:05 pm: | 
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January 14, 2007
A Return to Rage, Played Out in Black and White
By CELIA McGEE
HISTORY seemed summoned to one of its spotlight moments on March 24, 1964, when Amiri Baraka’s “Dutchman” had its premiere at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York. He was little known outside the studied bohemian precincts of the Greenwich Village poetry scene; but this short, brutal play about the fatal confrontation between a black man and a white woman on a subway made him famous, respected and despised. Edward Albee was among the three producers. It won an Obie. He was called “King of the East Village” by The New York Herald Tribune Sunday magazine. At the time, though, he hadn’t yet changed his name to Amiri Baraka from LeRoi Jones.
The actress Cicely Tyson was in the audience on opening night. “I remember her yelling, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ ” said Mr. Baraka’s former wife, the poet and writer Hettie Jones.
Howard Taubman, wrote in The New York Times: “If this is the way the Negroes really feel about the white world around them, there’s more rancor buried in the breasts of colored conformists than anyone can imagine. If this is the way even one Negro feels, there is ample cause for guilt as well as alarm, and for a hastening of change.”
Now the Cherry Lane is preparing once again to showcase a new production of this play, directed by Bill Duke and starring Dulé Hill (familiar from his television work in “The West Wing” and “Psych”) and Jennifer Mudge. Yet mounting “Dutchman” today is not without hurdles: the play runs the risk of seeming artistically out of date and musty in its views, and Mr. Baraka’s writings during his Black Nationalist period, which were at times racist and anti-Semitic, may once more come in for scrutiny.
“Dutchman” was a pivotal play not only at a particular juncture in 20th-century American culture but also in Mr. Baraka’s increasingly politicized career. The original run coincided with the escalation of the civil rights movement. The play’s sudden emergence on the scene helped expose ambiguities in American race relations that would shortly erupt in angry upheavals in cities nationwide, while establishing Mr. Baraka, to both good and occasionally harmful and intolerant effect, in African-American writing.
Today some critics view him as a marginal figure. “I don’t think his literary standing is very high,” said the cultural critic Stanley Crouch. “For the last at least 40 years he’s been more interested in writing propaganda than in writing literature. As a young man he seemed to be a unique talent, and there was an open sky before him. But then he was overwhelmed by the Black Nationalism of the day, then evolved into a Marxist, which he still is.
“If he had gone in a different direction, LeRoi Jones could have been more like Saul Bellow, but with his own style and perspective. If a writer goes into politics, he should maintain his independence. He should perceive what the human complexities behind events are.”
To Glenda Carpio, an assistant professor of African and African-American studies and English and American literature at Harvard, “Dutchman” is a historical if significant curiosity. “I teach a course on contemporary African-American literature,” she said, “and I start with Baraka. People are trying to figure out what his legacy is. A playwright like Suzan-Lori Parks comes out of him, as a negative response to what he’s done. He’s dated in many, many ways — the sensualist blackness ‘Dutchman’ performs, the misogyny a lot of his stuff has — but there’s also dialogue that is just outside of time.”
As the third installment in the Cherry Lane’s Heritage Series (revivals of works that had their debuts there), “Dutchman” arrives trailing controversies past and present. Mr. Baraka’s 9/11 poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” which suggested foreknowledge of the attack on the part of Israel, among others, cost him his position as poet laureate of New Jersey in 2003. Close behind was his strongly worded opposition to Cory Booker, Newark’s new mayor, whom Mr. Baraka’s son, Ras, an at-large council member, also opposed. (Ras Baraka lost his Municipal Council seat in June.)
But Angelina Fiordellisi, the theater’s artistic director, welcomes the baggage. “New Yorkers love controversy,” she said. “It could really enhance the play.”
Seated at the book-stacked round table on the winterized reading porch of his home in Newark, a house he and his second wife, the poet Amina Baraka, moved into in 1970, Mr. Baraka, 72, argued that the play was not only relevant but also topical. Around the Cherry Lane the talk is of Sean Bell, the young man killed in a hail of 50 police bullets outside a Queens nightclub on Nov. 25.
“Any black person that doesn’t wince from hearing that,” Mr. Baraka said, “is completely alienated from his black persona, or is already dead.”
Though he has long since forsaken the militant nationalism and Black Arts aesthetic he turned to following the 1965 murder of Malcolm X, when he also staged “Dutchman” in Harlem, he remains largely unreconstructed in his political views. “The civil rights movement,” he said, “has just provided more opportunities for prostitution.”
James King, the Cherry Lane’s managing director, is a generation younger than Mr. Baraka. Yet he agrees that the play will speak to “the idea that there’s still an undercurrent of tension to race relations.”
“So many of us who, especially as black males, have succeeded in getting ahead in our fields have made adjustments in certain ways, including how we appear, how we sound, how we learn to ‘play the game,’ ” he continued.
Mr. Duke said he was transforming the theater into a “total environment” for the play. It was 1969, Mr. Baraka said, when “I first encountered Bill Duke, when my play ‘Slave Ship’ was done at BAM. We did a similar thing — the whole theater became the ship.”
He diverges more from Mr. Duke when it comes to the interpretation of Lula, the seductive white beauty whose mere presence onstage with Clay, an intellectual young black man, was considered shocking at the time. Mr. Duke sees her as having been in a relationship with someone Clay reminds her of.
That relationship “has broken everything in her, it’s irreparable,” Mr. Duke said. “She thought if she loved him enough it would be all right. It’s primal. But she’s dealing with the vomit of slavery, the Middle Passage, the slave block and the auction and lynchings,” and events “where they roasted us on spits.”
Mr. Baraka, on the other hand, still tends toward his old vision. “I saw her as a metaphor for America,” he said. “She represented temptation and seduction, but also death, if not of the flesh then of the spirit.”
A number of Newark schools have asked about bringing their students to “Dutchman.”
“There’s so much apathy among youth today about what the arts can achieve that it will be interesting to see whether a play that fueled the belief that art can make a difference will wake them up,” Ms. Carpio said.
As for Mr. Baraka, he said it was important to him that young audiences experience the play. He brought up one particular memory of his own youth, which he also addressed in “The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones.” “I went on a school trip to the Bronx Zoo when I was in about eighth grade,” he said. “I really loved the elephant house. But when I asked the keeper why it smelled so bad, he said, ‘I’m used to it — I live in Harlem.’ Here I’m in my 70s, and I still remember.”
Mr. Baraka said that analyses and conspiracy theories he found online were what led to his poem about the World Trade Center attacks, and its most notorious line, “Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers/To stay home that day?”
He insisted that these reflect not anti-Semitism but a condemnation of Zionism, along with all other forms of “authoritarian” nationalism. “To accuse me of being anti-Semitic,” he said, referring primarily to statements about the poem issued by the Anti-Defamation League, “is the same way some Negroes will use the race card. Israel is a foreign state and it warned the U.S. about the attacks. Why wouldn’t it warn its own citizens? Look at the nationalities of the World Trade Center tenants who died, and do the math.”
Only months before he wrote the poem, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A photograph of the induction ceremony hangs prominently above his bookshelves.
To Ms. Fiordellisi, the stature Mr. Baraka attained in that picture is undiminished, and she endorses both the verses and any foreshadowing of their ideas found in “Dutchman.” “The poem is very powerful,” she said.
Mr. Baraka looked up at the photograph. “There are a couple of black folks in that picture,” he said. “Only a couple.”
But readers haven’t heard the last of Mr. Baraka. Largely out of print in recent years, he just published “Tales of the Out and Gone,” a new collection of short stories reaching back to the ’70s. His publisher is Akashic Books, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, headed by Johnny Temple, the bassist for the rock band Girls Against Boys. Extra chairs had to be added for a Barnes & Noble audience in Manhattan — a mix of ages, ethnicities and sex — that showed up for a reading early last month. (Mr. Baraka, however, ended up stranded in traffic on the far side of the Lincoln Tunnel on the way to the event at the Astor Place store, and it has been rescheduled for Tuesday.) Several titles are coming from other publishers, Mr. Baraka said.
Mr. Baraka said he still writes in his upstairs office every day. He is most eager to revamp a musical about the black underworld boss Bumpy Johnson that he wrote with Max Roach, the jazz drummer and composer. “Now that’d be something — a gangster musical,” Mr. Baraka said. “A black gangster musical.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/theater/14mcge.html?_r=1&ref=theater&oref=slogin |
Kola_boof
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Kola_boof
Post Number: 4005
Registered: 02-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, January 14, 2007 - 07:22 pm: |
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This shit is old and needs to be retired right along Baraka's sexist, black woman-hating ass, though I guess now that he's old and LIMP he's suddenly had a change of heart. YUCK.
I'm sure he thinks I'm an opportunistic PHONEY (and a fake bi-tch) so the feeling is mutual.
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Schakspir
Veteran Poster
Username: Schakspir
Post Number: 812
Registered: 12-2005
Rating: 
Votes: 4 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, January 15, 2007 - 01:55 am: |
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KB: This shit is old and needs to be retired right along Baraka's sexist, black woman-hating ass, though I guess now that he's old and LIMP he's suddenly had a change of heart. YUCK.
I'm sure he thinks I'm an opportunistic PHONEY (and a fake bi-tch) so the feeling is mutual.
Schakspir: Kola, Baraka is a writer. You're not. Case closed!! |
Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 3400
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, January 17, 2007 - 02:14 pm: |
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It's telling that the theater has to go back to a 40 year old play to seem relevant. |
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