Evolution or revolution in black theater: a look at the cultural nationalist agenda in select plays by Amiri Baraka.

... we are on the verge of reclaiming and reexamining the purpose and pillars of our art and laying out new directions for its expansion. As such we make a target for cultural imperialists who seek to empower and propagate their ideas about the world as the only valid ideas, and see blacks as woefully deficient not only in arts and letters but in the abundant gifts of humanity. (August Wilson 71)

From a 1990's perspective, one might initially suspect that the nationalist tone demonstrated in the above excerpt is a flashback to the 1960s, when nationalist rhetoric virtually saturated the media and became part of a massive cultural event now known as the Black Arts Movement. Yet this impassioned appeal for a separate and viable black theater was issued by playwright August Wilson in a June 1996 speech delivered before a largely conservative white audience attending the eleventh biennial Theatre Communications Group National Conference at Princeton University. Amid charges of his arguing for "subsidized separatism" (Brustein 26) and dismantling the Civil Rights Movement, Wilson issued a challenge to the larger theater community to establish theaters of, by, and for African Americans and to discontinue funding color-blind casting--a practice he argues merely stifles the growth of black theater.

Although Wilson's recent wake-up call to the American theater community has engendered much enlightening debate and redirected attention back to the plight of black theater, the principle behind his call to arms is not new. Indeed some thirty years ago, poet, playwright, activist Amiri Baraka had similar problems with the melting pot of American Theater and devoted his energy toward advancing a separate aesthetic designed specifically for the black audience. He articulated this vision, with as much passion as Wilson commands, in one of many fiery essays written in the spirit of cultural nationalism. Exemplary is "The Need for a Cultural Base to Civil Rites & BPower Mooments," in which Baraka proclaims that

   Black Power movements not grounded in Black culture cannot move
   beyond the boundaries of Western thought. The paramount value of
   Western thought is the security and expansion of Western culture.
   Black Power is inimical to Western culture as it has manifested
   itself within black and colored majority areas anywhere on this
   planet. Western culture is and has been destructive to Colored
   People all over the world. No movement shaped or contained by
   Western culture will ever benefit Black people. Black power must
   be the actual force and beauty and wisdom of Blackness ...
   reordering the world. (47)

So that we may understand and more fully appreciate the basis of August Wilson's renewed appeal for a separate black theater, it is necessary to understand the historical basis of his argument and to realize that he, like Amiri Baraka, still realizes the need for continual self-definition through the medium of black theater and, by extension, all art forms. It is important to note that the media fallout surrounding Wilson's highly publicized remarks is mildly reminiscent of the reception that was prompted by Baraka's cultural nationalist stance, which he so forcefully articulated some three decades earlier in characteristically scathing rhetoric and in a number of revolutionary plays. Once under constant scrutiny by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, accosted by policemen, subpoenaed to appear in court, forced to spend time in jail and physically beaten, Baraka knows well the price of the nationalist ideology which dominated his personal life and permeated his plays.

Although time has seemingly tempered such fervor among artists, apparently one of the most important issues that fueled Baraka's anger still exists: the need for America to understand why culturally specific theater of, by, and for African Americans is crucial and should not only be subsidized but also encouraged to flourish without the stigma of separatism or racism. The delicate balancing act that Wilson is now performing (via various forms of the media and his history cycle plays) between appealing to the conscience of mainstream funding agencies on the one hand and advancing a culturally specific agenda on the other seems cyclical, for it resurrects comparable cultural racial and economic paradoxes that Baraka faced in his battle for an exclusively nationalist dramatic agenda. Though deemed too violent and offensive by some and considered anti-white and/or anti-American by others, Amiri Baraka's early plays challenged black audiences to take a more active role in their liberation from various forms of oppression. What August Wilson now terms "the warrior spirit" (qtd. in Moyers 179), or black people's refusal to accept victimization, Amiri Baraka conveyed repeatedly in his agitprop plays, especially those written in the wake of Malcolm X's assassination, when his efforts to make black theater a more politically functional medium were at a fever pitch.

Several plays, written during this time frame, when Baraka's nationalist vision was clearest, exemplify his passion for making black theater a focused means of communicating with black audiences. For example, in Home on the Range (1968), Experimental Death Unit #1 (1969), and J-E-L-L-O (1970), he seeks to make black audiences aware of the dangers of cultural assimilation and provides often graphic and startling means of exorcizing the condition. In each of these three plays, Baraka takes on the task of debunking a form of popular white culture by utilizing an inversion strategy--a tactic of employing extreme images and actions to reverse the frequent role of blacks as hopeless victims of white oppression to those who triumph at the close of the play by bringing into balance an unfair system. Blacks in these plays are clearly the moral victors, whether they are criminals or executioners. Whites, however, are portrayed as lifeless victims of a system which they created and perpetuate. It is the black revolutionary hero in these plays who either restores life and sanity to the white victims or chooses to eliminate them. Quite unlike the talkative, confused "Hamlets" (see Baraka's "Revolutionary Theater") of plays such as Dutchman (1964) and The Slave (1964), blacks in Home on the Range, Experimental Death Unit #1, and J-E-L-L-O are single-minded, systematic, and decisive in their efforts to bring sanity to absurdist situations.

The part-historic, part-folkloric origins of Baraka's borrowed title "Home on the Range" provide an interesting context for grasping the play's satiric tone. This once very popular and familiar song evolved from the exclusively oral domain of cowboy lyrics crooned along the Chisholm Trail during the 1800s to a favorite national tune eventually adopted by Kansas as its state song and designated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his favorite song. Yet controversy clouded the early history of "Home on the Range," and disputes over its authorship led legal experts on a quest to trace the song's obscure beginning. Despite an ambitious lawsuit brought by one of the song's many self-proclaimed authors, today "Home on the Range" remains in the public domain.

Despite the quagmire of litigation surrounding "Home on the Range," it struck a chord with white America and became especially popular in the Midwest during a time in the country's history when unbridled optimism and Western expansion were most prevalent. Implicit in the memorable lines "Oh give me a home / where the buffalo roam, / where the deer and the antelope play, / where seldom is heard / a discouraging word, / and the skies are not cloudy all day" is a sense of nationalism buoyed by collective notions of idyllic harmony, edenic serenity, and a confirmation that "all is right with the world"--the world of white America, that is.

But how does a cowboy song that originated in the 1800s serve Amiri Baraka's dramatic agenda for revolutionary theater in 1968? The answer to this question lies in his oft-repeated strategy labeled by William J. Harris as "jazzification," a process involving the playwright's search for and manipulation of

   the implicit blackness in whatever
   white mode he is transforming. His
   radical techniques are infused with an
   ethnic world view that takes images,
   poetic techniques, and avant-garde
   attitudes that are "pure white" and
   transforms them into a new and distinctly
   black vision that simultaneously
   rejects and accepts some of the most
   sophisticated and radical of his white
   predecessors' ideas. (91)

By 1968 Amiri Baraka's satirical style and wit, both in speech and in writing, had become his trademark, and Home on the Range epitomizes this strategy.

The play hinges on a parody of a song, mistaken to represent the sentiments of the masses, whose lyrics seem oblivious to the lot of blacks in America. Through "jazzification," Baraka highlights what he sees in the lyrics as blissful ignorance and selective blindness on the part of white Americans regarding the plight of African Americans. In line with the transformative process employed by jazz artists, therefore, he deconstructs the sacred truth of the familiar concept and presents a more empowering message to black audiences. His strategy for developing an effective cultural nationalist message in the play is based upon the repeated practices of inverting an original stereotype and thus giving blacks the moral and philosophical advantage over whites.

Baraka's jazzification in Home on the Range results in a unique futuristic parody of the hypnotic effects of television on white society. Adhering to the beat philosophy which casts aspersions on technology and its by-products, Baraka warns his black viewers against television's mind-altering influence. As he does so, he reinforces the then-novel ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who argued that television had become a new environment and had radically altered the entire way people use their five senses.

A black burglar (Criminal) breaks into a home occupied by a white family who sit engrossed in what occurs on the television screen before them. Obviously affected by excessive exposure to technological novelties around them, the family communicates in a jargon characterized by seemingly inconsequential words and phrases:

   FATHER. Red hus beat the trim, doing
   going.

   MOTHER. Yah, de 89 red garter
   shooting. (107)

Much to the chagrin of Criminal, he cannot understand the disjointed words and phrases of the family, and they cannot understand his demands for their money and jewels. Criminal takes upon himself the task of reintroducing the white family to their original identity. He is aided in awakening them from their robot-like trances by a group of Black People who transform the lifeless scene into a "wild nigger party." As the play ends, Criminal assumes a new role as teacher while reacquainting Father with his past.

Baraka was aware of the propagandistic importance of television, but he was particularly concerned about its adverse influence on black identity. As a technological innovation controlled by the white establishment, television, to the cultural nationalist, was just as detrimental to establishing a separate black cultural identity as was slavery; despite a more modern subliminal disguise, television makes its black viewers become slaves to the ideas sent forth by those in control. In his 1970 article "Technology and Ethos," Baraka suggests a compromise, prescribing qualifications for making the unavoidable technological development a positive force in developing cultural consciousness:

   The new technology must be spiritually
   oriented because it must aspire to
   raise man's spirituality and expand
   man's consciousness. It must begin by
   being "humanistic" though the white
   boy has yet to achieve this. Witness a
   technology that kills both plants and
   animals, poisons the air & degenerates
   or enslaves man. The technology itself
   must represent human striving. It must
   represent at each point the temporary
   perfection of the evolution of man.
   (157)

It is in his pursuit "to raise man's spirituality" that Baraka convinces his black viewers that they need not evaluate themselves vis-a-vis white standards.

In Home on the Range, the edifying cultural message to blacks concerning the effects of technology is facilitated by a combination of images familiar to the average black audience. Blacks who witnessed the play's production when it ran in Boston during a tour by the Spirit House Movers and Players, and in New York at a Town Hall rally in March 1968, were exposed to several stereotypically familiar aspects of their culture as a means of reflecting common concerns. Accordingly, the play's protagonist is a black Criminal; his language, like that of the raucous group of black partygoers, reflects the popular, hip talk of a younger generation of blacks; the action of the play revolves around the popular family pastime of watching television; and Black People invade the scene to initiate a rowdy party, complete with "dancing, singing, cursing, fighting" (110).

According to Baraka's inverted scenario, the crowd of partygoers represents to whites what Sterling Brown calls "The Exotic Primitive" or "the Negro's savage inheritance": "hot jungle nights, the tom-tom calling to esoteric orgies" (197). Thus, according to Baraka's reversed scheme, the Black People are faithful to the legacy of the stereotype as they initiate "a wild nigger party" to exorcize the nonsense around them. As a stereotype, however, this jubilant group seems superior to the mechanical white family. Baraka's familiar images of blacks in Home on the Range are based upon tongue-in-cheek inversions of the usual negative principles of black behavior assumed by whites. By transferring stereotypes into preferred character types, he defuses the negative connotations. Thus, in the play's unique context, the Criminal and the group of black partygoers become exemplary.

As an embodiment of the suspicions of many whites about blacks in general, Criminal goes about burglarizing the home of the white family with all the regimentation of an employee reporting to work. After a preliminary survey of the house's contents from the window, once inside, he reminds Father, "I don't have time to look at your bony ass trying to dance. I'm just a working man. And I've come, quite frankly, to commit a crime" (108). Later, in exasperation about the inability to communicate with his victims, Criminal screams, "All I did ... (Throwing up his hands) ... was go out and look for a job ... like all them cats in the newspapers say niggers ought to ... and what do I run into ... a goddam funny farm" (109).

By any conventional measure, Criminal's arrest for breaking into the home of the white family would be justified. Yet within the play's topsy-turvy context, instead of a convicted felon, Criminal becomes a savior. Much like Homosexual of Baraka's earlier play The Baptism, Criminal bears a consciousness superior to those of the disillusioned characters around him. Moreover, he simultaneously brings wisdom and humor to the pitiable circumstances surrounding him while remaining immune to their contagion.

As a by-product of Baraka's inversion strategy, Criminal exemplifies the playwright's skill in utilizing humor as a conduit for the play's cultural message. While compelling participation through laughter, Baraka subliminally convinces black viewers that burglarizing, within the context of the play, is as respectable a profession as any, and that the white victims deserve such treatment because of their obvious gullibility. More specifically, it is Criminal's deadly serious attitude which makes his gestures and comments so laughable. Mark Twain once observed that "the humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it" (1292). Such is the case of Criminal in Home on the Range. As the play's chief commentator, he sets the tragicomic tone which is likely to influence the viewer's assessment of the white family's predicament.

In addition to the local color provided by Criminal in his stereotypical depiction of the average black, the television set is also a familiar prop. Although no one verbally acknowledges its profound effect upon the white family, it is obvious to viewers that it is the origin of their problems:

   Laughter is coming from the television
   set. A cold hideous sustaining laughter.
   That backs the CRIMINAL unintentionally
   into the wallpaper.
   CRIMINAL. Goddam. (He waves gun
   at television. Laughter goes on, rising.
   Then broken by explosions, of great
   dimension. Screams. People in violent
   turmoil. The laughter rises again above
   it. Now the FAMILY, the MOTHER
   starting it, passing it to the SON, to the
   DAUGHTER, then the FATHER. They
   all begin to imitate the laughter on the
   television screen. They are wiggling
   and shaking, slapping each other and
   grabbing themselves in a frenzy of
   wicked merriment.) (107)

Baraka demonstrates the mind-altering effects of the television set on both the language and behavior of the family. As evidenced by their hybrid form of verbal communication and their irrational gestures, the family's disorientation comes from an obvious overexposure to the visual media. Accordingly, the play's symbolic advertisement against technology is simultaneously an advertisement for a much-needed cultural base as the preferred alternative. Without it, the play implies, blacks would merely mimic features of an alien culture. In his book Understanding the Media, Marshall McLuhan, noted authority on the effects of popular culture on modern man, indicts television and other visual media as culprits in desensitizing Western man. However, Baraka was more objective in recognizing it as a symptom rather than as a cause. He admitted during an interview that "the question is not the media itself because the media is neutral. Television, per se, is no more committed to backwardness than, say, a typewriter or a photocopy machine, or a gun. The question is its owners and its users" (personal interview).

One such symptom of the visual medium in Home on the Range is the white family's verbal communication, characterized by an incoherent mixture of familiar words and phrases and an apparently technologically motivated, specialized vocabulary. What results is a frighteningly modernized destruction of traditional language patterns, so unique that it is understood by the three white family members only. Words like "disreal," "achtung," "vataloop," "crindlebindle," and "stoopnael" pass between them and so dumbfound Criminal that his mission to burglarize the home is forgotten. As in Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange, the distorted language depicts a futuristic world ruled by massive disorder--a world lacking regard for the individual.

Baraka's play on language does not stop with the mutation of the white family's speech. He also incorporates the music of Albert Ayler, which features a male voice repeating the words "black" and "blackness" in increasing musical intonation. Paul Verde acknowledges the peculiarity of this dramatic strategy in his article "Pursued by the Furies": "'Black,' says a male voice, repeating the word at intervals, then altering it with 'blackness.' As the intervals become shorter, the voice takes on a chanting quality: 'black, blackness, blackness, black'" (440-41). But in a 1968 review of the Black Panther benefit performance, theater critic Dan Sullivan seemed rather unmoved by the extra innovation: "It is a profoundly boring thing to hear the word 'black' repeated what sounds like 25 times" (42).

For persons limited to reading instead of witnessing the actual performance of the play, Paul Verde's and Dan Sullivan's reactions--in Commonweal and The New York Times, respectively--to the dubbed male voice are moot, given their isolated experience. Neither critic seems entirely convinced of the function or the necessity of the added voice, even though Verde cautiously qualifies his appraisal. In a rather philosophical commentary on the performance of Home on the Range before "a mixed audience of blacks and whites" (440) at a Black Panther benefit, Verde sees the sole male voice as basically superfluous to the play's message: "Despite the blatant hocus pocus of the manipulation [sole chanting voice] and the language, which was nothing special, the overall result was a quite moving recitation that curiously did seem to touch the chords of racial history" (441) What reviewers Verde and Sullivan refuse to see is a holistic endeavor achieved through a synthesis of the play's more obvious chaos and the healing voice of black consciousness.

For one who reads Home on the Range, this vocal feature to which Verde and Sullivan refer is nonexistent; the written version--published in a 1968 issue of The Drama Review--has only the stipulation that the play is "to be performed with the music of Albert Ayler improvised in the background" (Home on the Range 106). Yet, since one of the conventions of Ayler's music is improvised chanting and rituals, any director should take for granted that a production of the play requires incorporation of a vocal element. On stage, the recurring chants represent Baraka's attempt to give fuller dimension to the play's black cultural message. In Home on the Range, Baraka endows the stage setting with easily identifiable images of black culture amid the chaotic disorder. Indeed, he inundates his black audience with such reminders in order to maintain the play's central focus amid its absurdity.

The cultural message of Home on the Range depends upon drawing a sharp line of distinction between the world as seen from a white perspective and the world as it should be viewed by blacks, based on a clear awareness of their identity. Although the play's message depends upon juxtaposing opposites, it emphasizes the latter half of the comparison. That is, Baraka's caricature of whites in the play is a necessary element--but only an element--of the message intended for his black viewers. In this sense, Verde's one-dimensional assessment of the moral of the play as "blacks are more natural, more creative than whites, who are imitative and who basically want to be like blacks" (441), focuses too much upon caricature as an offensive strategy and too little upon its function of exposing the excesses of the dominant white culture.

During his brief involvement with the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem (March 1965 to December 1965), Baraka staged Experimental Death Unit #1 (first performed at the Saint Mark's Playhouse in New York City on March 1, 1965). At a time when he was writing specifically for black audiences, "the play was considered to be too poetic, abstract, and intellectual for the popular Black audience" (Brady 59). Yet upon closer examination, the play reveals parallel relationships among the emptiness in popular European absurdist theater, the lack of morality in white Western culture, and, subsequently, the absence of a strong black value system.

Experimental Death Unit #1 is, for all intents and purposes, an inversion of Samuel Beckett's existentialist drama Waiting for Godot (1954). Instead of a universal setting adorned only with a bare tree, Baraka chooses Third Avenue in the East Village of New York City for the action of his play. Instead of Beckett's emphasis upon Vladimir and Estrogen's long wait for their spiritual guru, Baraka's play features a fight to the death between two white men over a black prostitute and each of their summary executions. Instead of the cyclical stasis of Beckett's drama, Baraka's play is distinguished by three separate movements which culminate in both resolution and catharsis. And, most importantly, instead of Beckett's portrayal of universal human prototypes, Baraka focuses upon the issue of race: Duff and Loco are white, and the prostitute is black. Simply put, Baraka's play cancels out each of Beckett's absurdist strategies and culminates in a total purging of decadence by a designated death squad.

Although Baraka transforms each of Beckett's abstractions into specifics for his black viewers, full comprehension of the latter version is dependent upon the unlikely fact that the black audience is familiar with Beckett's original play. But Baraka compensates for this potential gap in communication by endowing Experimental Death Unit #1 with enough familiar images of black life to make black viewers at least receptive to the play's ulterior message about black consciousness. Thus, it is doubtful that one of Baraka's parallel themes--aesthetic decadence--registers within his viewers as easily as the more dominant emphasis upon the theme of ridding the cultural wasteland (a.k.a. America) of its various degenerates. Accordingly, the images for the latter theme are comparatively bold and resounding.

Despite the fact that Duff and Loco are chronologically first in the play's developing action, in a cultural nationalist interpretation, their significance is secondary. As white men, they are not the protagonists of the play; rather, they initiate the play's movement toward its apocalyptic end and, according to a seemingly understood martial law, provide a just motive for their execution by the Experimental Death Unit. They are the second-class citizens of an environment taken over by black military rule.

Duff and Loco's initial existential ramblings concerning the relationship of art to reality reflect a philosophy which Baraka adamantly opposed throughout his artistic career. The obscure level of their verbal exchanges transcends the comprehension level of the average viewer. For this reason Duff and Loco's significance to the average black viewer rests not in what they say but in their visible identity as white men, which significantly increases the play's conflict.

The stereotypes represented in Experimental Death Unit #1 are polarized, apparently based on a set of moral standards which become evident with the entrance of the death squad. It is at this point that the play clearly takes on instructive significance. However, Baraka does not preach moral dogma; he has no designated mouthpiece to scold the behavior of the promiscuous interracial trio, and there is no narrator to comment on the characters' amorality. Instead, the decadent ones are shot to death, and the black moral enforcers remain alive.

At the less exemplary end of the spectrum, Woman, a black prostitute, shows a complete loss of self-worth as she auctions her body to two intoxicated white intellectuals, Duff and Loco: "Give me some money ... and pile on ... champs" (11). She is the composite extreme of the familiar prostitute image, yet both alone and in relationship to her two white customers, she is made to suggest several levels of amorality in the eyes of black viewers: first, as a woman selling her body; second, as a black woman selling her body; and third, as a black woman selling her body to white men. The image of the white man violating the black woman retains its early, degrading stigma from slavery, despite the differences in circumstances.

The cultural nationalist relevance of Experimental Death Unit #1 begins when the two white men encounter the black prostitute in the town's red-light district. It is at this point in the play, during their sexual bargaining, that the larger cultural nationalist issues come to the fore. The prostitute's acquiescence to the white men's sexual pleasures suggests a loss of self-pride to the representatives of Western white culture. Yet, as agents of her demise and as symbols of the white culture which Baraka satirizes, Duff and Loco seek a purely selfish interaction with the black woman, each intending to fill some void in their lives. While their talk suggests a pseudo-intellectual superiority to the prostitute's humble status, once they solidify their deal with her, they undergo a metamorphosis from the cerebral to the primitive:

   (They scuffle, with screaming. Now
   there are drums heard in the background,
   regular, like a military march.
   Then there are singing voices. Finally,
   DUFF pulls LOCO out of the hallway
   and begins to beat him with his heavy
   boot. He clubs until the boy is bleeding
   unconscious.) (13)

Whether Loco sees the black prostitute as "a remedy for his personal insanity" or whether Duff sees in her a "despised, exploited sexual primitive" (Brady 69), they both consummate their sexual deals and, in so doing, fare no better morally than she when judged by the death squad.

Baraka presents the image of the prostitute in such a credible fashion that black viewers--especially from heavily populated urban areas--are not likely to consider her as absurd. She is in an environment which is conducive to her profession: "The integrationist atmosphere of the place allows free traffic between white and Black ..." (Brady 59). Her language, her demeanor, and her actions, though richly symbolic, depict the familiar characteristics of her profession. In fact, the very significance of Experimental Death Unit #1 hinges on the black audience's ability to see some aspect of themselves in the prostitute's compromising role. Though black viewers who lack a sense of racial pride may reject, ignore, or be offended by the suggested parallel between their cultural vacuum and the image of a prostitute, she is the central image on which Baraka's instructive remedy depends.

Lloyd Brown, one of several critics who have dealt with the prostitute's significance to the play's cultural message, notes that "prostitution represents the broader historical experience in which blacks barter their humanity in order to be accepted or merely tolerated by white society" (151). Theodore Hudson simplifies the significance of the black prostitute in cultural nationalist terms: "A black who literally or symbolically prostitutes or, worse still, perverts himself ... to the white world deserves summary execution" (164). However, it is Owen Brady whose analysis of the black prostitute encompasses the broadest picture:

   The WOMAN ... becomes a "symbolic
   nigger from the grave" (7-8). First she
   assumes the symbolic burdens thrust
   upon her by the men--coveted lover,
   life-symbol for LOCO, and despised,
   exploited sexual primitive of DUFF.
   But she also assumes the role of the
   Black individual prostituting herself to
   the desires of her oppressors.

Brady notes further that she "negates a self identity and cannot recognize the Leader [black commander of the squad of executioners] as a force for change, a Black vector moving away from white Western culture. She suffers but cannot detach herself from moral decay" (60).

In Experimental Death Unit #1, Baraka once again relegates the role of principal communicator of his play's cultural message to the least likely member of society--the social deviant. Just as in his dependence upon the homosexual in this capacity in plays such as Police and The Toilet, the prostitute lessens the homiletic tone of his didactic theater and thus engenders a more receptive black audience. Whereas the homosexual allows Baraka to focus upon the tragic dilemma of integration vs. separatism, the black prostitute allows him to warn blacks in general against the demeaning results of total assimilation. He implies, via the symbol of prostitution, that such a merger would result in "merely whitening to fit the white soul's image. It is also for the black man, a weakening, through contact with a beatified decadence" (Home 226).

The extended analogy which Baraka creates in the white characters' relationships with the black prostitute encompasses his concern for what Woodie King has called "the theft of black art." Instigated by a need to replenish an ailing Western literary reservoir, the theft of black art by rich white sponsors yielded works which distorted the true essence of the black experience for material gain. While evidence of pseudo-black art occupied film, publishing, music, etc., this practice was especially prevalent in black theater. In his 1970 essay "Negro Theatre Pimps Get Big Off Nationalism," Baraka explains the practice:

   He [a white sponsor] got some niggers,
   some whiteflesh addicts, to make
   smokedust storms and as Bullins says,
   "giggle, buckdance and break wind,"
   in the name of a negro theater still
   committed to the same ol same ol ...
   ie, whiteness. The white flesh of
   dreams. The white flesh of ideas. Like
   they were in black face, these nigger
   robots, made homage to ... and at this
   very moment, make homage to,
   Europe, its life, its rule, its degeneracy,
   and its death; in actuality such theater,
   like white life itself, is part of that
   death. (112-13)

Woodie King--whose profession as playwright, director, and producer enables him to understand the capitalist motivation which lead to diminished artistic integrity in some black actors and playwrights--examined the bribery involved in artificial black art:

   They [middle-class hustlers] are trying
   to get the Black experience into this
   game. Whites do this by laying some
   money on Black playwrights. (They
   usually accept about one every ten
   years.) The writer in turn, knowing his
   chances, pretends to reveal Black experiences
   to a $7.50 white audience--an
   audience that is running away from
   real experiences, away from the lifeline.
   (13)

Duff and Loco may easily represent the black art hustler. Though they discuss the pros and cons of a liaison with the disappointing cultural heroine, they each proceed with personal gain in mind. In this interpretation, the willing black prostitute becomes a universal symbol for those black artists who willingly fashion their work for profit on the white market rather than for artistic faithfulness to black aesthetics.

The other extremity of Baraka's moral code is represented by the Manichean opposite of the prostitute's lax bohemian morals--the Experimental Death Unit. In addition to the multiple connotations of discipline, unity, and moral fortitude suggested by their military status, they represent a type of antidote sufficient to destroy the agents of the god-forsaken environment which they come upon. They assume the role of totalitarians in deciding who is fit to live and to die.

Baraka's use of violence as a symbolic means of distancing both himself and his viewers from the effects of assimilation assumes a focused role in Experimental Death Unit #1. However, in his earlier autobiographical play The Slave (1964), it is obvious that he searches for the proper motive to justify the use of guns, fists, and explosives. While he flaunts the various agents of death and physical abuse before viewers, his sheer ambivalence neutralizes their effectiveness and instead presents the picture of Walker Vessels as a schizophrenic "rebel without a cause."

The violence in Experimental Death Unit #1, on the other hand, is restricted to the command of the Leader of the black execution squad, who is quite serious about his charge. His squad exhibits a certain calm, objective resolve that perhaps an exterminator of rodents or insects might display during a house-call: "Come out or I'll send somebody in to drag you out" (14). Moreover, since the Experimental Death Unit comes on stage only after viewers have witnessed the puzzling aesthetic circumlocutions and the less than exemplary sexual dealings among the interracial trio, viewers are given time to understand the squad's actions, even if they abhor them.

Baraka's Experimental Death Unit #1, if taken too literally, may indeed prompt frightening responses to the rather boldly advocated apocalyptic deaths for the degenerates. The two murders and three decapitations which ensue (in addition to evidence of a previous violent exorcism, suggested by the squad's entrance carrying "a white man's head still dripping blood") emphasize for viewers a frighteningly literal means of eliminating elements of moral decay. The play not only seems to advocate the organization of self-righteous vigilante groups, but its extremism in advocating high standards of conduct may also distance viewers and encourage a certain reluctance on their part to cast the first stone. Moreover, the violence administered in eliminating the black prostitute in the play suggests that selling sex is morally more reprehensible than murder. Even the possibility of such an interpretation again lessens the value of human life in favor of cultural revolution--another of Baraka's seemingly counterproductive strategies.

Yet, as is the tendency in much of Baraka's revolutionary drama (Black Mass, Great Goodness of Life: A Coon Show, and J-E-L-L-O, for example), he first inverts a certain generally accepted truth, then parodies in hyperbolic style the extremities of this inversion. Thus, in Experimental Death Unit #1, Baraka first inverts Samuel Beckett's original concept of what the black playwright considers "weak-drugged contemplation" (Home 219). That is, Baraka seems disgusted that white absurdist artists such as Beckett or Stoppard view the world as a land inhabited by a cult of fatalists who essentially have lost the will to effect change. He sees them wallowing in their own self-imposed alienation. In the guise of Loco, Baraka's beliefs surface: "I hate these fools who walk around and call themselves artists, whose sole connection with anything meaningful is the alcohol decay of their skins. Weak dope dripping out of their silky little beards" (219). According to his cultural nationalist view, the absurdist represents the antithesis of the healing concept of black consciousness.

The next step in Baraka's inversion strategy is to carry his interpretation of Beckett's artistic principles to their extreme. He does this by altering the original intellectual scheme and including a prostitute, marijuana, a character "barely high on heroin," "suede shoes," wintry weather, and, most importantly, a death squad. Each of these additions cancels out the abstractions of Beckett's original play and brings Baraka's version closer to the reality familiar to his black viewers.

The prefatory admonition to readers of Baraka's collection Four Black Revolutionary Plays, in which Experimental Death Unit #1 is included, foreshadows a violent Armageddon. He writes,

   i am prophesying the death of white people in
   this land
   i am prophesying the triumph of black life in
   this land, and all over all the world
   we are building publishing houses, and
   newspapers, and armies, and factories
   we will change the world before your
   eyes ... (vii-viii)

With the notable exception of the apocalyptic explosions and deaths featured in The Slave (1964), few of Amiri Baraka's revolutionary plays come as close as Experimental Death Unit #1 does to portraying graphic violence in the interest of the black man's consciousness. The "white man's head still dripping blood" which the approaching squad displays suggests that a similar past exorcism has occurred; offstage murders and startlingly realistic evidence of decapitations allow viewers a direct sampling of the bloody violence included in a typical episode of the death squad's continual clean-up efforts; and, as the death squad moves forward, there is promise of future homicidal missions. Helen Johnson, author of "Black Influences in the American Theater," offers the following explanation for Jones/Baraka's graphic scenes:

   Although Jones speaks of murder with
   great frequency, it is clearly symbolic
   murder. He says specifically: "We've
   got to change America as we know it
   now." He does talk of killing people,
   and there is a symbolic bloodletting to
   which he returns again and again, as
   the title Experimental Death Unit #1 suggests.
   Unfortunately, however, far too
   many people under Jones' political and
   artistic influence fail to perceive the
   level and shape of his thought. (706)

Johnson's assessment is based upon a necessary familiarity with and acceptance of the artist's dramatic strategies and his single-minded attempt to awaken black men to a realization of their inherent worth. Many critics or spectators who evaluate Baraka's revolutionary plays outside of these considerations assess his works as products of a homicidal maniac or a hopeless bigot, and thus see the playwright's work purely as an obsolete piece of agitation propaganda rather than viable art. Such misconceptions obviously influence New York Times critics Harry Gilroy, who summarizes condescendingly Great Goodness of Life as "one black man must shoot another to be freed of nonexistent guilt" (92); Mel Gussow, who assesses Black Mass as "a portentous ritual [which] suddenly turns into a clown show" (18); and Clive Barnes, who dismisses Slave Ship as a "get whitey" play (46). In a rare instance, Mel Gussow looks beyond the violence in Experimental Death Unit #1 but only to focus upon the potentially confusing use of black actors wearing white make-up on their eyes. In his 1972 review of the revived Experimental Death Unit #1 in New York by the Advanced Theater Workshop, he makes the following observation:

   There is also some sharply observant
   dialogue in "Experimental Death Unit
   #1," in which two youngsters and a
   confident black whore are killed by a
   marauding gang hellbent on murdering
   stereotypes.... the black actors
   wear white eye make-up, but in this
   play there is some confusion as to their
   identity. Perhaps they are supposed to
   be white students, but there is not such
   indication in the performance. (41)

J-E-L-L-O, which uses the actual names of comedian Jack Benny and co-stars Rochester, Dennis, Mary, and Don, was rejected as an original entry for Baraka's collection Four Black Revolutionary Plays (1969) on the basis of its potential for libel. The original storyline for the play is based upon the popular 1950s' television situation comedy The Jack Benny Show, in which Benny, the ever-youthful, penny-pinching miser, trades witticisms with his black chauffeur Rochester. In J-E-L-L-O, however, Baraka's cultural nationalist agenda leads him to turn the tables to make Rochester the focal character and Benny the weak, frightened secondary character. As he so often did in his comedy series, Mr. Benny summons Rochester to perform one of his customary assignments as his chauffeur. This time, however, Benny is confronted by a completely changed version of his predictable sidekick. Much to Benny's surprise, Rochester refuses to get Benny's car, demands all of his money, and taunts the other regular cast members as they enter the stage setting.

In the 1960s, the new image of African Americans, prompted by increasing Civil Rights legislation and black consciousness campaigns, changed the face of comedy involving blacks as stereotypes. Groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People urged the discontinuation of shows which restricted blacks to stereotypical roles. In the 1950s, CBS officials yielded to pressure from NAACP members to remove from the air waves the then-televised version of the Amos 'n' Andy Show. While confined to radio, the antics of the caricatured blacks were condescending enough, but when brought to the screen, they became unbearably offensive. As a result of such disapproval, what was perceived as funny to blacks and whites in the 1950s ultimately became grounds for a class-action suit.

The one compelling irony and ultimate source of humor on which Baraka's version of The Jack Benny Show is based is that the white cast members are so accustomed to their roles as witty superiors that they seem oblivious to Rochester's complete metamorphosis from docile servant to "a renegade behind the mask"--a description the origins of which may be traced to the subject of Baraka's "Poem for Willie Best" (The Dead Lecturer [1964]). The poem's namesake is the black character actor Willie Best (1916-62), who, somewhat like Benny's chauffeur Rochester, "is more than a figment of the white imagination; he is actually a flesh-and-blood actor behind the white image who has extended his role beyond its white creators' intentions" (Harris 92). Best so perfected his role as the buffoon that he was dubbed Sleep 'n' Eat, the penultimate label of invisibility, mindlessness, and insignificance. In both "A Poem for Willie Best" and J-E-L-L-O, Baraka attacks such white bourgeois perceptions and stereotypes of African Americans and thereby presents an often ignored perspective on black reality. His exposure of the renegade in Best and Rochester is an affirmation of the veil or mask which W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, and Paul Laurence Dunbar acknowledged in their works as well.

Don Wilson's routine commercial on Jello gelatin (a familiar segment of the Benny Show) stands in stark contrast to the new black image which Rochester, the renegade, represents. While still considering Rochester's display of assertiveness as an unrehearsed part of the show, Wilson improvises:

   Ladies and Gentlemen, The Benny
   Show has been brought to you by
   J-E-L-L-O, Jello, America's favorite
   dessert. Remember, it comes in five
   delicious flavors, Raspberry, Orange,
   Cherry, Lemon, and Lime. Kids adore
   it. Remember J-E-L-L-O. (Big dripping
   voice) America's FAVORITE
   DESSERT. YOU'LL LOVE IT! (Laughs
   in big fat jocular manner) The Jack
   Benny Show will come to you next
   week same time, same station. We'll be
   looking for you. (37)

Aided by the characters' disbelief, Baraka's Rochester robs the members of the cast, verbally insults them, and eventually leaves the stage cluttered with their unconscious bodies.

The television, as chief representative of popular culture (and nemesis to disciples of the Beat philosophy, such as Baraka, Ginsberg, and Kerouac), also figures prominently in J-E-L-L-O. Just as in Home on the Range, the television set is portrayed as an antagonistic and corrupting factor in direct opposition to the growth of black cultural awareness. In Black Awakening in Capitalist America, Robert Allen explains the premise which Baraka rejects throughout J-E-L-L-O:

   The media are not trying to project a
   picture of black life as it is, but rather
   they are telling black TV viewers how
   they are expected to act if they want to
   make it in white America. Television
   thus plays the role of a socializing
   mechanism, probably second only to
   public schools, devoted to inculcating
   blacks with white middle-class values.
   (180)

Yet instead of satirizing the holistic effect of the visual medium upon the spectators' psyches as he does in Home on the Range, Baraka here focuses on one particular television show as a sort of allegory for the predicament of the average black in America. In this sense, The Jack Benny Show features such stock characters as a humble member of the black working class, a miserly white capitalist, a deceptive white seductress, and patronizing white liberals. Each of these character types is brought together in an absurdist situation to illustrate black people's inherent capacity to conquer whites.

Furthermore, by creating life-sized replicas of the miniature television images, by means of the theater, Baraka minimizes the potential for apathy within an otherwise detached observer. This closeness, along with the obvious dramatic irony of Rochester's actions, enables blacks to feel more like "insiders"; more specifically, it is very likely that they will identify with the black revolutionary hero rather than laugh at him--as was so often the effect of television. As a result of the play's magnification of character types and the physical closeness afforded by the theater, black viewers are invited both to understand and agree with Rochester's need to rebel. Most importantly, they see that change comes as a result of one individual's resolve to effect it.

In order to understand the role that comedy plays in J-E-L-L-O as a persuasive device for Baraka's black audience, it is first necessary to examine Benny's original formula for making The Jack Benny Show one of the most popular comedy series of the 1950s and early 1960s. Much of the humor of the show centered around Benny's unshaken loyalty to certain trademark characteristics: "forever 39," miser, poor violinist, elbow-in-hand posture, and deadpan delivery. Audiences were conditioned to laugh whenever Benny resorted to any of these pat devices.

Perhaps even more important than the various routine gestures and roles to which Benny resorted during the course of his comedy series was the show's appeal to the middle-class white audience. That is, the laughter which often followed certain scenes emanated from financially comfortable white viewers who could easily relate to Benny's pecuniary jokes. In addition, the white audience of the 1950s and 1960s accepted as convention Rochester's role as black chauffeur and Benny's role as "boss." Apparently, many middle- and upper-class whites who actually hired blacks in domestic capacities similar to that of Rochester could relate to the humor of various situations involving the two. In all likelihood, they could freely laugh at the pair without seeing an oppressor-oppressed relationship; instead they responded to a comedic relationship between the witty white employer and his faithful employee, brunt, and sidekick.

That blacks of the 1950s and 1960s found humor in The Jack Benny Show is also related to general racial conventions of the times. As evidenced by such shows as Amos 'n' Andy, The Little Rascals, and numerous Shirley Temple episodes, blacks had little or no choice in how they were portrayed. Essentially, what they saw was dictated by the white majority, who, for the most part, financed and sanctioned television's content. As a result, blacks were exposed to negative images with such regularity that they undoubtedly became numbed to the underlying condescension and accepted as humorous certain situations involving them. Therefore, it is very likely that the popular appeal of The Jack Benny Show was also due to its acceptance by a large black audience.

Baraka's mid-1960s' adaptation of The Jack Benny Show features a formula for humor greatly dependent both upon his black audience's prior knowledge of the format of the original series and upon their raised levels of black consciousness. For black viewers who satisfy these two criteria, Baraka's trademark inversion strategy destroys the former status quo-generated humor between Benny and Rochester. The "neo-humor" which Baraka sets in motion in J-E-L-L-O, therefore, is based upon the unusual, the unexpected, and the seemingly unrehearsed deviation from the rote patterns of Benny's original show. As a result of their dulled senses, the regular characters appear humorously idiotic as they insist upon attributing Rochester's behavior to "the script." Yet it is Benny who best sums up the situational irony: "No, Mary, this is not the script. This is reality. Rochester is some kind of crazy nigger now. He's changed. He wants everything" (31). Thus, Rochester, not Benny, commands the actions of others; Rochester, not Benny, gains access to great hoards of money; and Rochester, not Benny, delivers the "punch lines" for all the jokes.

In the neo-humor of Baraka's version of the show, Benny is the acknowledged voice of white America. As such, he speaks to Rochester in a manner which echoes the collective stereotypical thoughts of white America toward the black man--as his patronizing benefactor: "All right, then get out and scrounge around for yourself. Without me supporting you. See how you wind up! Hah. You'll be a bum, just like the rest of these ... unfortunate Negro men" (14); as his loyal friend: "My God, Rochester, thirty-five years of service of good work, and cheerfulness all shot and gone at once. How could you do such a thing?" (17); and ultimately, as a petrified white man: "Look at Rochester. You never saw him look like that before, did you? All that bushy hair. Look at those horrible eyes. How hard they've gotten ... and cold. It's no joke, Dennis. Rochester has become a mad thief and murderer" (28). The humor in J-E-L-L-O, therefore, results from the black viewer's ability to recognize the satiric exposure of the invincible emblem of white America. As the play progresses, Benny is forced to reveal his vulnerabilities and his real attitude toward black men. By the play's end, he has been reduced to the level of buffoon.

The success of J-E-L-L-O in evoking a fitting audience reaction to the play's cultural message is predicated upon the successful effect of its humor. Humor neutralizes the possible subconscious reactions of terror within the black viewer to initiate a solo rebellion; comedy makes the act more conceivable. For example, Rochester's initial sharp exchanges with Benny seem funny because they are so very alien to the original context of his character. Yet Rochester's expressed thoughts represent latent emotions familiar to many blacks in similar oppressive situations: "Damn. You always want me in with you. In your shitty little life. Why do I have to drive you? Why don't you drive me? What makes you think you should be driven anywhere? What're you God, or somebody hip like that??? Wow" (12). In seeing Rochester's display of the necessary confidence, wit, and self-control to change his perpetual servitude, black viewers are invited to take a lesson from him in their own lives. To be sure, the dramatically exaggerated actions of robbery and violence function as symbolic, assertive means of regaining one's long-delayed freedom. In the context of humor, these otherwise deplorable acts lose their shock appeal and become necessary means of correcting grossly unfair odds.

Moreover, laughter signals both genuine entertainment as well as an unspoken appreciation for the active role which Rochester assumes. Viewers are first attracted to the play's action by its jocular tone and then invited to learn from the example which Rochester sets. It is humor which leads the black viewer toward a realization that the reins of power exist in the hands of people who are just as anxious about the black man's potential to revolt as the black man is awed by their access to power.

While Benny is the comic representation of white America, his colleagues--Mary, Dennis, and Don--each represents individual peculiarities in the dominant white culture. As Baraka portrays them, they are reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's "grotesque" characters in Winesburg, Ohio. That is, each takes "a truth out of the context of other truths and, fanatically clinging to it, distorts his own nature" (Brooks and Warren 1926). By doing so, each appears laughable. Mary, for example, is the epitome of virtue in the original comedy show. Yet in Baraka's neo-humorous version, black viewers see her as a sex-starved white woman hiding behind the theatrics of her comedy routine:

   Rochester ... Rochester, don't you do
   this ... You can't just take me ...
   against my will ... (She closes her
   eyes, pretending to struggle, but she
   opens her arms and leans against
   Rochester immobile) You can't be so
   cruel! (As Mary flings open her arms,
   Rochester reaches very quickly up
   under her skirt) There it is! (Mary,
   when Rochester's hand first sweeps
   under her clothes, gives a little sigh of
   pleasure ... but then she lets out a horrified
   shriek, and her eyes come open
   as Rochester withdraws his hand holding
   up a leather money pouch)
   Haaaaa! I knew you had a whole lotta
   useful merchandise up there! (Opens
   bag, starts counting money) (35-36)

Dennis, a timid and naive white co-star, represents the recurrent homosexual motif which surfaces in many of Baraka's revolutionary plays. In J-E-L-L-O the unspoken premise is that both he and Benny are effeminate whites--an image which Baraka uses to characterize the "deadly whiteness beaming forth" ("Work Notes--'66" 12) from the television set. While Benny tries unsuccessfully to convince Dennis that Rochester has gone mad, Dennis sings as a sign of being loyal to the script: "When Irish eyes are smiling, it's like a breath of spring, when Irish eyes are smiling ..." (29).

Don Wilson, the self-conscious announcer for the show, is most concerned that the program maintain its regular schedule. In this respect, he is the allegorical equivalent of whites who ignored the black revolution around them, choosing instead "business as usual." It is conceivable that they do not realize the rebellion around them, yet their failure to acknowledge it seems to be a therapeutic means of negating its existence. While Benny, Mary, and Dennis lie unconscious and Rochester loots them, Wilson is concerned with surface appearances and finances: "Jack ... Mary ... Dennis, please get up and say see you next week to the audience. You're supposed to, before the commercial. The sponsor ... won't like this. Please Jack. This is art for art's sake you're pulling, and nobody goes for that jazz anymore" (37).

Of Benny's three co-stars, Wilson poses the greatest potential threat in the eyes of the cultural nationalist. He represents the "deaf ear" which white America gives the concerns of black oppression. Symptoms of the ongoing revolution, such as harsh language, startling spectacles of police brutality, or drastically unfair oppressors had little effect upon the "deaf" white sector of the population. Understandably, then, many awareness campaigns lost their force or simply died because white-controlled media suppressed or distorted the principles of the black revolution to perpetrate a sense of calm. What often made its way to the screen were pictures of complacency which did not include the festering race relations going on outside the fictitious studio setting. In his commercial pitch, Wilson exposes how out of touch with reality, how bent upon following a rehearsed pattern, and how utterly oblivious the powers that be are, even as symbolic mutiny goes on around them.

One would be remiss, however, to think that Baraka's efforts made great strides toward diminishing the image of the stereotype or of the token black, for, as Robert Allen notes, "Blacks have become very visible on television and in mass circulation magazines. Of course, the roles that they play ... have nothing to do with cultural nationalism but are rather the white cultural establishment's effort to 'absorb' Negro cultural protest" (180). Historically, the cultural media of the stage, screen, and the written page have not been particularly benevolent in portraying blacks. Unfortunately, the growth and perpetuation of negative stereotypes are, in large part, due to the subliminally persuasive power of the visual medium and one indisputable truth: People believe what they see. It is the danger of this simple truth which Baraka attempts to exorcize in Home on the Range, Experimental Death Unit #1, and J-E-L-L-O.

As major culprits in preventing the growth of black consciousness, the media of television and theater--under the auspices of white culture--send steady subliminal images which promote Western values as universal paradigms of behavior and thought. Though the messages are often submerged beneath various gimmicks, collectively they serve to negate black ideals. In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse analyzes this tendency of the dominant culture consciously to cancel out the legitimate concerns of oppressed people. He notes, "One of the keys to understanding the effectiveness of any tactic, idea, strategy or trend in the Negro movement, is to determine how well the American system can absorb it and, thus, negate its force. To repeat, the American social system quite easily absorbs all foreign, and even native, radical doctrines and neutralizes them" (36). Chief among the culprits for what Cruse ironically calls "democratization" are components of the mass media.

Some thirty years after Baraka's flurry of nationalist activities focused upon the stage, August Wilson would again caution the American theater against the dangerously familiar threat of cultural absorption. Yet the concerns of African American playwrights, actors, actresses, stage technicians, and others about the direction of black theater are not clear-cut ones and cannot be easily settled by impassioned debates and appeals to logic. Practical concerns among black theater professionals over sheer economic survival complicate matters, as does a desperate need to utilize the theatrical medium to affirm and preserve black culture. What issues are at stake, for example, when an unemployed actor or actress takes a role originally designed for an individual of another race or nationality? Should the focus of this renewed campaign on behalf of black theater be directed more toward the black community, where support has traditionally not been so forthcoming, or should American society be challenged for its questionable funding policies? Can black theater as Amiri Baraka and August Wilson envision it become a culturally empowering American product--rooted firmly in American society, nourished and cultivated by its mainstream funding institutions--yet retain its essential blackness. Eugene Nesmith, professor of theater and English at the City College of New York, clearly articulates the paradoxical nature of both Baraka's and Wilson's efforts:

   I am suggesting that, on the one hand,
   African Americans need to consider
   sacrificing their sometimes purist and
   exclusionary notion of an Afrocentric
   theatre. On the other hand, whites
   need to consider giving up the conviction
   that American theatre should be
   exclusively or even predominantly
   white, Eurocentric and male. (14)

With these two opposing views once again set before the American public and its theater community generating as much interest and passion as it stirred in the mid 1960s and early 1970s, one has to wonder if black theater has significantly evolved since then, and question its capability to reach the ideal levels envisioned by Nesmith or Wilson. Is there a need to revisit and learn from some of the revolutionary strategies utilized by Baraka to underscore what is at stake in this campaign? Both Baraka and Wilson are aware of the power of black theater--then, as now--to be an effective means of preserving black culture and warning against the pitfalls posed by tendencies toward benevolent mainstreaming. The challenge, then and now, is for black theater to hold tenaciously to its separate identity and to steer clear of those who, as Cruse observes, would "negate its force."

Works Cited

Allen, Robert. Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytical History. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Baraka, Amid. Experimental Death Unit #1. Four Black Revolutionary Plays. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. 1-15.

--. Home: Social Essays, New York: Morrow, 1966.

--. Home on the Range. Drama Review 12 (Summer 1968): 106-11.

--. J-E-L-L-O. Chicago: Third World P, 1970.

--. "The Need for a Cultural Base to Civil Rites & BPower Mooments." Baraka, Raise 39-47.

--. "Negro Theatre Pimps Get Big Off Nationalism." Baraka, Raise 111-15.

--. Personal Interview. 8 Jan. 1986.

--. Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965. New York: Random, 1971.

--. "Revolutionary Theater." Baraka, Home 210-15.

--. "Technology and Ethos." Baraka, Raise 155-57.

--. "Work Notes--'66." Baraka, Raise 11-15,

Barnes, Clive. Rev. of Slave Ship, by LeRoi Jones. New York Times 22 Nov. 1969: 46.

Brady, Owen. "Baraka's Experimental Death Unit #1: Plan for Revolution." Negro American Literature Forum 9 (1975): 59-61.

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. "The Moderns: Founders and Beyond, 1914-1945." American Literature: The Makers and the Making. Ed. Brooks and Warren, New York: St. Martin's P, 1973. 1923-29.

Brown, Lloyd. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne, 1960.

Brown, Stealing. "Negro Character as Seen by White Authors." Journal of Negro Education 1 (Jan. 1933): 179-203.

Brustein, Robert. =Subsidized Separatism." American Theater Oct. 1996: 26+.

Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: Morrow, 1967.

Gilroy, Harry. Rev. of Great Goodness of Life, by LeRoi Jones. New York Times 27 Apr. 1969: 92.

Gussow, Mel. Rev. of Madheart and Black Mass, by Amiri Baraka. New York Times 30 Sept. 1972: 18.

Harris, William. J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985.

Hudson, Theodore. From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works. Durham: Duke UP, 1973.

Johnson, Helen. "Black Influences in the American Theater: Part II 1960 and After." Black American Reference Book. Ed. Mabel Smythe. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1976. 705-40.

King, Woodie. "Bringing An End to the Theft of Black Art." Black Theatre: Present Condition. New York: Publishing Center for Cultural Resources, 1981. 12-19.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding the Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Moyers, Bill. A World of Ideas. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Nesmith, Eugene. "What's Race Got to Do with It?" American Theater Mar. 1996: 12-17.

Sullivan, Dan. "Black Panther Benefit Is Held in East Village: Three Theater Troupes Perform--LeRoi Jones Speaks." New York Times 21 May 1968: 42.

Twain, Mark. "How to Tell a Story." American Literature: The Makers and the Making. Ed. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. New York: St. Martin's P, 1973. 1292-94.

Verde, Paul. "Pursued by the Furies." Commonweal 88 (28 June 1968): 441.

Wilson, August. "The Ground On Which I Stand." American Theater Oct. 1996: 26+.

Sandra G. Shannon is Professor of Drama in the Department of English at Howard University. She is a leading scholar on the works of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, having lectured often and published extensively on his work. Her book The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson (Howard UP, 1995) traces the playwright's evolution from his boyhood fascination with the sounds of words to his phenomenal success as an adult at writing plays chronicling the black experience. Her second book, August Wilson's Fences: A Reference Guide (Greenwood 2003), is a companion piece to Wilson's much acclaimed 1950s' play. Shannon's dissertation, "Baraka, Black Ethos and the Black Arts Movement," examines thirteen of his so-called revolutionary plays written between 1964 and 1969. Her interview "Baraka On Directing" is published in African American Review.