It is one measure of Les Blancs’ success that on opening night no less than six reviewers found it pertinent to discuss not simply the play, but the state of mind of the audience. An audience so personally involved, so visibly affected that if one closed one’s eyes one might have imagined that this was not the Broadway of the seventies—the Broadway of the lethargic listeners—but the impassioned theater of the thirties. Or perhaps the Abbey Theatre of Sean O’Casey. In The Village Voice, critic Arthur Sainer described the scene:
Much feeling at the Longacre Sunday night.… A sense of emotional investment throughout the audience—black, white audience—partly a celebration of the spirit of the playwright, partly a response to the nature of the material. Much cheering … some scattered heckling, and a disturbance at the back of the house … At best, an audience feeling something at stake.… [in a play] that manages to speak where the century is discovering it lives.*
On the radio, Alvin Klein, bored by what was to him “pervading dullness and didacticism” of the play, pondered an audience that “seemed to be divided into two different clapping camps,” while Rex Reed in The Sunday News was more direct:
The opening night audience responded violently. Every time the whites were insulted on stage, the blacks applauded. When Mr. Mitchell finally called Mr. Jones a hypocrite, the whites applauded. One black militant was led from the theatre screaming.… Les Blancs is, if you’ll forgive me, too black and white.
In this context, Richard Watts in the New York Post considered that “it must surely be a sign of the author’s fairness” that the audience seemed “equally divided” in its charged responses to what was happening on stage, while Lee Silver in the Daily News congratulated the producer for his “courage,” compared the playwright to “the great Bernard Shaw,” and described Les Blancs as “a most absorbing drama” that “had last night’s audience cheering.… ”
It remained, however, for a black reviewer, Clayton Riley, The New York Times’ sometime critic of black theater, to link the reactions of the crowd unabashedly to his own, analyzing, in somewhat different terms, the “camps” to which the others had referred. To Riley, Les Blancs was not just “a piece of theater” but an event that had become for him:
… an incredibly moving experience. Or, perhaps, an extended moment in one’s life not easily forgotten.… in a commercial theatre that takes such pains to protect us from knowing who and what and where we are in 20th-century America.…
“Moving” in that fashion. In such a way as to polarize an opening night audience into separate camps, not so much camps of color, of Black and White, although that, too, was part of it. The play divides people into sectors inhabited on the one hand by those who recognize clearly that a struggle exists in the world today that is about the liberation of oppressed peoples, a struggle to be supported at all costs. In the other camp live those who still accept as real the soothing mythology that oppression can be dealt with reasonably—particularly by Black people—if Blacks will just bear in mind the value of polite, calm and continuing use of the democratic process.
… Somewhere, past performance, staging and written speech, resides that brilliant, anguished consciousness of Lorraine Hansberry, at work in the long nights of troubled times, struggling to make sense out of an insane situation, aware—way ahead of the rest of us—that there is no compromise with evil, there is only the fight for decency. If even Uncle Sam must die toward that end, Les Blancs implies, then send him to the wall.
If what Riley surmised was true, then it might help to explain why the reactions of many tended to extremes:
John Simon in New York:
… the result is unmitigated disaster. Les Blancs (the very French title in what is clearly a British African colony testifies to the utter confusion) is not only the worst new play on Broadway, of an amateurishness and crudity unrelieved by its sophomoric stabs at wit, it is also, more detestably, a play finished—or finished off—by white liberals that does its utmost to justify the slaughter of whites by blacks.… It is a malodorous, unenlightening mess.
Walter Kerr in The New York Times:
I urge you to go to see Lorraine Hansberry’s … ranging, quick-witted, ruefully savage examination of the state of the African mind today.… Virtually all of Les Blancs is there on the stage, vivid, stinging, intellectually alive, and what is there is mature work, ready to stand without apology alongside the completed work of our best craftsmen. The language in particular is so unmistakably stage language that … it achieves an internal pressure, a demand that you listen to it, that is quite rare on our stages today.
Indeed, to read the reviews that week was almost to come away with the feeling that the critics had attended different plays—or, in any event, had come out marching to the sound of quite different (Congo) drummers. And this was the more striking in view of their virtually unanimous acclaim for the performances, the direction and production.* The issue was the play.
Emory Lewis in The Record:
The heart of the matter is that Miss Hansberry is a major U.S. writer, in the grand tradition. The most penetrating, passionate and liberating of all her glorious works, it is also a compassionate exploration in depth of the making of a black revolutionary.… She shows us not a mass stereotype, but a gallery of … varied, profoundly complicated, and engrossing persons. It is easily the best play of the season.
Martin Gottfried in Women’s Wear Daily:
There is no story to the play, really … a didactic play, existing for its ideas rather than its theatre. Its characters are stereotypes, created as points of view rather than as people, and its language heavy with information.… It is still unfinished because, as a work for the theatre, it was mistakenly begun.
Lee Silver in the Daily News:
Les Blancs depends upon interesting characters that talk to each other and who move you one way or another because of what they are, what they have to say and what they become.… Miss Hansberry, like the great Bernard Shaw, knew how to make provocative characters become real people on stage … representing a variety of viewpoints on a subject of overriding importance.… A drama of conflicting ideas salted with some action, but never so concerned about action in itself as to interfere with the steady development of character and story to its inevitable explosive conclusion.
Haskel Frankel in The National Observer:
… the African setting is no more African than those walking symbols are really stage people.… the play is strictly yesterday.… The uncommitted man caught between two cultures is a man passé, at least insofar as the theatre is concerned.…
Richard Watts in The New York Post:
… things move so rapidly in black Africa that conditions have altered there in many ways since the coming of independence. Yet her final drama … remains a timely and powerful work and one of the most important we’ve had this season.… I think the quality that stays with you is its compassionate fair-mindedness. She was not out to get “whitey” but to understand him.… It is not a drama of heroes and villains but of worried and completely believable human beings.… I happen to be very fond of Africa and have never felt rejected by it, and I know Les Blancs is truthful as well as deeply haunting.
Hobe Morrison in Variety:
It is an absorbing show that offers little of the entertainment quality necessary for popular appeal … and its conclusion seems to boil down to … revolution and the ghetto slogan, “kill whitey.”
Richard N. Philp in After Dark:
Les Blancs is an extraordinary, eloquent play … a sobering, persuasive statement about the injudiciousness of human oppression.… Its universality moves it well beyond the black- white conflict … into the dilemma of active revolutionary change.… Hansberry identifies and understands both sides, handling her volatile material with perspective and compassion.… This is, above all else, potent drama—a splendid, provocative work among the best of many seasons. It bears all the requisite quality of a classic.
In short, it would not be amiss to conclude of Les Blancs, in the year of its premiere production, that Broadway’s tastemakers were somewhat less than unanimous. Neither vituperation nor the use of superlatives is new in the theater, of course. But where the disparity is this great, it would appear—at least in some cases—that quite apart from questions of taste and standards of dramaturgy, something else was operating. In an unsigned report on the “erupting” black-theater movement, Playboy summarized what was evidently uppermost in some minds: “A number of critics generally sympathetic to black-theatre aims were … appalled by Miss Hansberry’s Les Blancs, produced posthumously on Broadway, which advocated genocide of non-blacks as a solution to the race problem.” [Emphasis my own—R.N.]
It was in response to such interpretations that the noted director Harold Clurman, long one of the deans of theater criticism, took the unusual step in his Nation column of actually questioning motives:
At a time when rave reviews are reserved for plays like Sleuth and Conduct Unbecoming, I am tempted to speak of Les Blancs in superlatives.
I suspect, too, that resistance to the play on the ground of its simplistic argument is a rationalization for social embarrassment. Les Blancs is not propaganda, as has been inferred; it is a forceful and intelligent statement of the tragic impasse of black and white relations all over the world.… it clarifies, but does not seek to resolve, the historical and human problems involved. It does not provide an Answer. It is an honest play in which thought-provoking matter is given arrestingly theatrical body.
And the following week Mr. Clurman, himself caught in the crossfire, returned to the subject:
Friends have taken me to task for having reacted favorably to a play they thought a set of declamations, “propaganda” on behalf of blacks opposed to whites.
The play is no such thing; it is a dramatic statement of the tragedy in history.…
Mr. Clurman concluded:
What [the ending] signifies is that mankind has always made its progress through a mess of bloody injustices and inevitable cruelty. There can be no “nice” war, however “justified” it may be. Thus only the saintly can be wholly neutral or extricate themselves from the ruthless machine which is history.
… To wave aside Les Blancs … is an evasion which I am inclined to ascribe to bad faith, especially in view of what certain folk call “good theatre.”
But Clurman was not the only critic to return to Les Blancs in the weeks following. About a dozen times that season, as the play struggled for survival (and even long afterward), Richard Watts came back to extol the qualities of the production, the “power” and “fair-mindedness” of the playwright, and the fact that, in his view, it was “too meagre praise to describe it as the one first-rate new American play of the New York season.” Others followed suit. And Howard Lord devoted several columns in the Long Island Catholic to the plight of Les Blancs as symptomatic of a larger problem:
If the theatre reflects the times, these are times when no one says what’s really on his mind. We speak in veiled allusions, and the forthright person who takes a stand is immediately ostracized.
Lorraine Hansberry took a stand in Les Blancs.…
How can the last play of one of America’s great Playwrights fail to attract large audiences?… especially when she’s in top form as a dramatist.
The answer is in the play—fear—fear of blacks, fear of the race problem, fear of facing it, fear of ourselves.
But we all know the truth: a disease, ignored, doesn’t disappear; it just becomes more virulent. The problem must be faced.…
Les Blancs shows us an image of our fears, but it charges that ultimate image with so much humanity—so much goodness, suffering, love and fear—that we leave the theatre unafraid. At least, we are no longer afraid of ourselves. And we feel we are moving in light, not darkness. We understand.…
The play moves inevitably to a tragic end. But James Earl Jones’ howl at the end is the howl in the head of every viewer. We weep for him and for ourselves. We have learned that racism is not an abstraction out there, but an anguish in here.…
Les Blancs is the finest drama of the season so far.… I think you ought to see it, especially if you think you won’t like it. You will see humanity at its best—and worst—struggling desperately against history, the facts of the past.
Yet Lord’s searching analysis of why such a play could fail to attract large audiences dealt with only one (although, in terms of our society, the most important) aspect. It ignored considerations rooted in the general crisis of the theater itself which arise from its commercial nature: the fact, for instance, that given the skyrocketing costs of production and operation, and the resultant exorbitant price of tickets which makes theatergoing a luxury, the number of plays that most people can afford to see is severely limited—and the number of serious plays (as distinct from musicals and comedies) even more so. Within this context, a very simple factor operates which most critics tend to pass over inasmuch as it touches on the efficacy of their own positions, yet nine times out of ten one need not look beyond it to determine whether a production will live or die. One might call it Sulzberger’s Law, after the publisher of The New York Times: the fact that, given the situation described, no serious play can withstand a cool review from the daily reviewer of The New York Times.* For no matter how enthusiastic his colleagues may be, it is to the Times that the brokers, the businesses, the large commercial and organizational accounts who together make up the major slice of Broadway box-office—and for whom a “prestige” ticket is but commerce in another form—turn first. And by the time the Times’ Sunday man may follow up two weeks later with a perhaps contrary review, the die is already cast. In the past decade, it is difficult to think of a single exception to Sulzberger’s Law. Now this, it should be emphasized, is a power the Times’ reviewers never sought; it is simply the reality within which they—and the theater—operate. And as it happens, the paper’s current critic, Clive Barnes, did not like Les Blancs, although he acknowledged “many moving moments.” “The major fault of the play,” he wrote,
… is the shallowness of the confrontations. The arguments have all been heard before … and the people in the play are debased to labeled puppets mouthing thoughts, hopes and fears that lack the surprise and vitality of life. No one, throughout the play, says anything unexpected.…
I wonder how much Miss Hansberry knew or Mr. Nemiroff really knows about Africa? … It is obvious that they are trying to tell us something about America—and I think they would have done better to have told it to us straight.
All the more heartening and unusual, therefore, when some weeks later, in Mr. Barnes’ roundup of the season, the following appeared:
What else is new? We have the late Lorraine Hansberry’s play, Les Blancs, in a realization by her former husband, Robert Nemiroff, which has enlivened the theatre scene with a great deal of discussion. Personally I feel that its treatment of European racism and African nationalism is oversimplified and distilled into a cliché. But some very good people think otherwise, and I concede that James Earl Jones is giving an absolutely great performance in the play. I hope it succeeds. It is a flawed play, but it you have any sensitivity to our times I think you will appreciate it. At times a flawed play on a vital subject is more valuable than a flawless variation on inconsequentiality.
It was the kind of gesture that does not surprise from Mr. Barnes—the mark of a man who cares more about the theater than he does about proving himself right.
Encouraged by it—and the magnificent reviews of Walter Kerr and Clayton Riley in the Sunday Times—we even hoped for a time to reverse the tide and struggle through the disastrous pre-Christmas slump that inevitably engulfs Broadway. For the word-of-mouth was catching and, as appears by now to be the case with virtually everything Lorraine Hansberry has written, something was being generated in the world beyond Broadway which brought forth volunteers on every hand who cared enough about the play to fight for it. In the very first days, for example, when it had just opened and was about to close, the late Whitney Young, Jr., of the National Urban League had called to offer an unsolicited statement:
James Earl Jones is chilling in this overpowering drama of a modern black man caught betwixt worlds and war in Africa. Les Blancs represents a rare moment in American theatre where history, rage and drama meet. No simple platitudes will do. This play must be seen.
That same week meetings were held with Dr. C. Eric Lincoln and Julia Prettyman, president and executive secretary of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, to arrange a reception for United Nations delegates. Producer Matthaei, with the support of a number of his backers, undertook to meet personally the heavy losses of keeping the show alive while others swung into action: Jocelyn Cooper of the Human Resources Administration of the City of New York;* trade unionists from District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale and Distributive Workers, from Local 1199 of the Drug and Hospital Workers, the Fur and Leather Workers Joint Board, the Social Service Employees, and the State, County and Municipal Employees unions; ministers called together by Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, formerly executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; members of the Harlem Writers Guild, Headstart Mothers, Operation Breadbasket, the Urban Coalition, parents’ and teachers’ groups. In an incredible, virtually round-the-clock three-day push, almost $10,000 in commitments for tickets for youth and low-income groups—to be matched by a like amount from the Theatre Development Fund—was raised as a temporary finger in the box-office dike.
Thus, for a time it almost seemed as if the miracle of 1964—the miracle that had saved The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window and ultimately secured it a lasting place in our theater—was about to be repeated. But miracles are, I am afraid, just that: they only prove the rule. On Broadway they may give struggling artists the momentary lift to go on against the heartbreaking odds of commerce—but don’t count on them. And in this case, a “miracle” of another kind was about to strike: the New York taxi strike of December 1971—which in one stroke knocked the props out from under every Broadway box-office that did not have a heavy advance.
Les Blancs, with its large cast and handsome settings, cost more than $35,000 a week just to operate. The result was inevitable: After forty-seven performances, we closed.
Yet, of course, the story doesn’t end there.
In succeeding weeks—indeed for months afterward—occasional comments would appear in reviewers’ columns expressing the hope that the play might be revived off-Broadway.*
On January 17, 1971, an extraordinary review appeared in the Detroit Sunday News in which critic Jay Carr, who had seen Les Blancs just before its closing, expressed what was in the minds of many:
NEW YORK—Only one play of any reach or importance has opened on Broadway so far this season. It was Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs.… I am convinced Les Blancs will resurface, and repeatedly. It is too strong a play to meekly shuffle off into oblivion.
The play is a collision course between the races … and Miss Hansberry’s plotting of that course is wise, sure, ironic, clear-eyed, and electrifying in the drive and finality of its tragedy.
• • •
Again and again I was impressed by the craftsmanship and daring in the writing, and by the thoroughly developed assessment of the impasse between the races. Miss Hansberry was too honest an intellect to take any detours into mere shrillness. The insistence and urgency in Les Blancs stem from breadth of vision and masterly technique. The largeness of gesture in Les Blancs is exhilarating in a theatre that has all but abdicated to zombies, novelty-chasers, and infant drool.
Had I not known that the play was left unfinished by Miss Hansberry at her death … I don’t think I’d have suspected it. The play seemed not only finished, but possessed of the sort of unrelenting power that only a very few playwrights are capable of in any one generation.
And in May 1971 six of the New York Drama Critics voted for Les Blancs as first, second or third choice for the Best American Play of the Year.
It is now almost eleven years since the day when Lorraine looked up from the typewriter to announce, as was her way, that she had a bit of “a surprise” for me: the first working draft of “a play about Africa.” Today it will surprise no one that my own, hardly unprejudiced view is that Mr. Carr is right, that Les Blancs will resurface “repeatedly.” But fortunately that is out of my hands now. With the play at last in print, its future is for others to decide.
—ROBERT NEMIROFF
* And there is something at stake,” continued Sainer, “that talks about the condition of human beings, some of whom are cutting each other to pieces for the sake of other human beings. At its best, the play is a harrowing revelation of what we have brought each other to. A time without answers because the questions have become too urgent.” Sainer quarreled with aspects of the script and especially—alone among the critics—the production, which he found much too “high-gloss.” Nonetheless, he concluded, “The spirit of a brave woman flashes through the synthetic brilliance. What is best about Les Blancs is the intelligence of Lorraine Hansberry, the passion and the courage. The playwright suggests no absolutes, with the exception of a moral imperative which moves like a brushfire through the action—the necessity to become free. This necessity cuts through all other sentiment, is ultimately clear and terrifying.”
* James Earl Jones’ performance was hailed by many as the greatest of his career; Lili Darvas’ unforgettable Madame won her a Tony nomination; Cameron Mitchell’s sensitive Charlie, his first appearance on Broadway since Death of a Salesman, moved many and was cited by Richard Watts as “brilliant”; Earle Hyman, Harold Scott and Humbert Allen Astredo, among others in the large cast, were singled out by many for special praise. Designer Peter Larkin won the Variety Poll of New York Drama Critics for best set design of the year.
* Which is not the same thing at all, it should be noted, as saying that a good review can assure success.
* One of the permanent offshoots of Les Blancs was the formation of the Lorraine Hansberry People’s Theatre Foundation to foster community theater throughout the city under the leadership of Mrs. Cooper and Commissioner Major Owens.
* And indeed it did seem—briefly—as if that might happen. If the opening night audience of Les Blancs had recalled the theater of the thirties, it was in precisely that spirit—that passion, that solidarity—that the cast now rallied around the inspired, committed figure of director John Berry, himself a product of those times as a young actor in Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre, who offered to restage and redirect Les Blancs gratis anywhere that we could move it. And, by contrast, I personally shall never forget the image of Lili Darvas, for two generations one of the authentic great ladies of world theater, widow of the renowned Hungarian dramatist Ferenc Molnar, announcing that it didn’t matter where, she would perform Les Blancs in churches, lofts, in the streets of Harlem, without sets or costumes, for union minimum—because this was a play that the world must see!