Authors: Lorraine Hansberry
Les Blancs (21 page)
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.
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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.
—R
OBERT
N
EMIROFF
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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.”
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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.
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Which is not the same thing at all, it should be noted, as saying that a
good
review can assure success.
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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.
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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!
My mother first took us south to visit her Tennessee birthplace one summer when I was seven or eight. I woke up on the back seat of the car while we were still driving through some place called Kentucky and my mother was pointing out to the beautiful hills and telling my brothers about how her father had run away and hidden from his master in those very hills when he was a little boy. She said that his mother had wandered among the wooded slopes in the moonlight and left food for him in secret places. They were very beautiful hills and I looked out at them for miles and miles after that wondering who and what a “master” might be.
—L
ORRAINE
H
ANSBERRY
,
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
The Drinking Gourd
was the first play ever written for national television that attempted seriously and without sentiment to explore “what a master might be.” It was commissioned for NBC by producer-director Dore Schary to initiate a series of ninety-minute television dramas commemorating the Centennial of the Civil War. It was commissioned in 1959, a year before the first student sit-in against segregation in the South, the formation of SNCC and the wave of nonviolent protest that filled the South’s jails with modern-day counterparts of Hannibal and Sarah, and the nation’s TV screens with real scenes of cattleprods and firehoses, dynamite and bullets. It was a time when the essential patterns of this country’s black-white relations—and the accompanying myth of the “contented”
black—had not changed much in half a century. A time before the “freedom rides,” the Birmingham riot, the “Mississippi Summer” voter registration campaigns, James Meredith at Ole Miss, the Marches on Washington and Selma—and, of course, before the new mood of mingled despair and militancy, revolution and separation that rose from the flames of Watts and the bullet-punctured bodies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. A time, in short, when the tenor of the country was perhaps best summed up in the statement to Congress of President-elect John F. Kennedy that, while he favored Civil Rights legislation, it was not a “priority” part of the New Frontier.
It was in such a year that NBC proposed to celebrate the Centennial of the Civil War with a series of “five special shows” which, according to the announcements, “promise to be one of the most important events of coming TV seasons”—a series which, apart from its unusual content, was to be written by prominent playwrights whose participation was, among other things, intended to mark the return of serious drama to the airwaves. Lorraine Hansberry’s
The Drinking Gourd
was to open the series. It was the only script actually completed. Its subject was slavery, its subtitle “The Peculiar Institution,” and unlike most writers on the subject, its author brought to it some quite private and intimate insights of her own. Insights which could be traced back as far as a child’s trip South and her first “startled” view of her grandmother:
All my life I had heard that she was a great beauty and no one had ever remarked that they had meant a half century before! The woman that I met was as wrinkled as a prune … and always seemed to be thinking of other times. But she could still rock and talk and even make wonderful cupcakes which were like cornbread, only sweet … She died the next summer and that is all that I remember about her, except that she was born in slavery and had memories of it and they didn’t sound anything like
Gone with the Wind.…
The Drinking Gourd
did not sound anything like
Gone with the Wind
either. And that fact cannot be separated from what happened to it.
In a symposium on the “Negro Writer in America,” a freewheeling discussion recorded by radio station WBAI at the start of the Centennial Year, January 1, 1961, with James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Alfred Kazin, Lorraine Hansberry, Nat Hentoff and
Emile Capouya as the participants, Lorraine Hansberry told a little of the story:
… They asked me for it. They paid me for it—and if I may say so, in contradiction of everything that we have said, Langston, rather
well
—and then I read in the newspaper that some studio official—a vice president … had attached a notation to it saying, moreover, that they thought it was “superb” …
and then they put it away in a drawer.…
What happened to
The Drinking Gourd
was not, of course, unique. On one level it can be viewed as simply one more in the long and, by now, traditional line of casualties of the Great Wasteland. Yet on another, there is more to the story. For the drawer that closed on
The Drinking Gourd
also managed to slam shut on every other publicly announced network plan to seriously commemorate the single most important event of our national life in the second half of the nineteenth century—the war that freed four million Americans, cost the lives of several million others, opened the floodgates to our economic transformation into the nation we have become, and dominated our politics directly for a generation and, indirectly, ever since.
In that light, the fate of
The Drinking Gourd
was and is relevant for reasons that are worth examining.
In the symposium cited earlier, Lorraine Hansberry took the occasion to amplify why she had agreed to write the play in the first place:
… You said, I thought rather beautifully, a number of times how this question—the Negro question—does tend to go to the heart of various and assorted American agonies, the Negro question does, beginning with Slavery itself. And I am so profoundly interested to realize that in these 100 years since the Civil War very few of our countrymen have really
believed
that their Federal Union and the defeat of the slavocracy and the negation of slavery as an institution is an admirable fact of American life. So that it is now possible to get enormous books on the Civil War and to go through the back of them and not find the word “slavery,” let alone “Negro.”
We’ve been trying very hard—this is what Jimmy and I mean when we speak of guilt—we’ve been trying very hard in America to
pretend that this greatest conflict didn’t even have at its base the only thing it had at its base: where person after person will write a book today and insist that
slavery
was not the issue! You know, they tell you it was the “economy”—as if that economy was not based on slavery. It’s become a great semantic game to try and get this particular blot out of our minds, and people spend volumes discussing the
battles
of the Civil War, and which army was crossing which river at five minutes to two, and how their swords were hanging, but the slavery issue we have tried to get rid of. To a point that while it has been perfectly popular, admirable, the thing to do—all my life since
Gone with the Wind
—to write anything you wanted about the slave system with beautiful ladies in big, fat dresses screaming as their houses burned down from the terrible, nasty, awful Yankees … this has been such a perfectly acceptable part of our culture that the first time that I know of that someone came to
me
and asked me to write ninety minutes of television drama on slavery—which, if you will accept my own estimate, was not a propaganda piece in either direction but, I hope, a serious treatment of family relationships by a slave-owning family and their slaves—
this
is controversial. This had never been done.…
Yet one man, at least, believed it
could
be done. And so Dore Schary, long one of the more socially committed producers in Hollywood and on Broadway, had asked Lorraine to a meeting and assured her that, controversy or no, she would have full freedom to confront the historical truth. The series, he explained, was to be an honest, objective dramatization of the issues underlying the war. It was to begin with (1) her portrait of slavery, and follow with works based on (2) the confrontation of pro- and anti-slavery forces in the U.S. Senate in the decade preceding secession; (3) the origins of the Confederacy; (4) the mobilization of the Union; and (5) the drawing of first blood. How frank could it be? “As frank as it needs to be,” said Schary.
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