Les Blancs (7 page)

Thus, when
A Raisin in the Sun
opened in 1959, it must have puzzled many—though not those who knew the author—that out of the lips of a Southside chauffeur in his first moment of envisioned (if drunken) grandeur on the Broadway stage, should suddenly spurt the call to greatness of an African chieftain to his “Black Brothers … [who] meet in council for the coming of the mighty war!” Or
that the chauffeur’s teenage sister should march on stage in a full-fledged Afro. Or that, most baffling of all, into their ghetto tenement home should stride an African student with dreams of “freedom,” “revolution,” and the solidarity of colored peoples—to sweep the sister off her feet and become, in the process, the playwright’s most articulate spokesman.

But
Raisin
was only the precursor. For, two weeks before it opened, Lorraine Hansberry, in her first formal public address as a writer, defined the course that, for her, lay ahead:

From these words to
Les Blancs
—the first major work by a black American playwright to focus on Africa and the struggle for black liberation—the path was inevitable.

Les Blancs
first began to form in the playwright’s mind sometime in the late spring or summer of 1960. Her earliest workbook jottings refer to “the return of Candace for her mother’s funeral” and the confrontation between her brother Shembe (as she spelled it then) and Abioseh over the funeral. (Interestingly, “Candace” was also the name she gave the heroine of her semiautobiographical novel
All the Dark and Beautiful Warriors
.) The notes indicate that Tshembe was a committed revolutionary as first conceived; they describe a confrontation with an American newspaperman, and conclude with
a projected scene in which Eric, the youngest brother, “chooses Shembe and with sister blows up Mission—and the past.”

It was not, however, until May 1961 that the elements began to move into focus and the play to find its final shape and title. This was in immediate visceral response to Jean Genet’s celebrated drama
Les Nègres
(
The Blacks
), which had its American premiere that month. The title was chosen half in jest, for the work-in-progress bore no direct relation to the Frenchman’s tour de force, not in style or technique, nor certainly in the events and characters depicted. Yet the pun masked a deeper concern. More than anything else, she considered
The Blacks
“a conversation between white men about themselves.” A
needed
conversation perhaps, important in that for the first time it dared to face the depths of the problem and the hatred which three hundred years of the rape of Africa had produced. But nonetheless a conversation haunted by guilt, and too steeped in the romance of racial exoticism to shed much light on the real confrontation that was coming:

Whereas:

In
Les Blancs
, Lorraine undertook to write that drama.

As much as anything in life, and increasingly in these years, she
felt the urgent need for dialogue and concerted action if the coming struggle for power in the world, the struggle for liberation, were not to degenerate into, in effect, a racial war.

It is part of the point of
Les Blancs
that, in spite of the three hundred years, men must talk; they must establish a dialogue whose purpose is neither procrastination nor ego fulfillment but clarity, and whose culminating point is action: to find the means, in an age of revolution, to reduce the cost in human sacrifice and make the transition as swift and painless as possible.

At the turn of the century, Du Bois had written the words which ironically undergird and echo through every agonizing moment of contemporary history: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”
Les Blancs
was an effort to examine in dramatic terms—in terms of individual human responsibility—precisely what that meant. It was an effort to come to grips on the highest possible level with the problem of color and colonialism not just here in America, not even in Africa, but on a world scale: to determine to what degree color was—and was
not
—the root cause of the conflict. And thus to confront head-on the impending crisis between the capitalist West and the Third World.

Lorraine considered
Les Blancs
to be potentially her most important play and hoped originally that it might precede
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window
to the stage. Yet though a number of drafts were written, the strict demands of craftsmanship sufficient to the theme were, in her eyes, not satisfied.

In 1963, what was to remain essentially Act One, Scene Three, was staged for the Actors Studio Writers’ Workshop by Arthur Penn, with Roscoe Lee Browne as Tshembe, Arthur Hill as Charlie, Rosemary Murphy as Marta and Pearl Primus as the Woman Dancer. The stunned response of the audience of actors and writers—I am told it was one of the most extraordinary sessions ever held at the Studio—confirmed her sense of the power of what was already on paper, but also confirmed some of her doubts. A good deal remained to be done.

At the same time, Africa itself was changing from what had been yesterday’s dreams into today’s reality. Clearly this did not affect the perspective, but it did change the shadings, bringing to the fore,
for example, conflicts of method between the capitals of Europe and the white settlers of Africa, and putting into bolder relief internal antagonisms among the blacks as the struggle for formal independence, once achieved, became transformed into a more fundamental struggle for control of one’s own economy, resources, destiny. The character Abioseh loomed larger in the scales as the death of Lumumba in the Congo, and the rise of men like Moise Tshombe, Kasavubu and Mobuto, made inescapable what had always been implicit: the tenacity of Western capital interests and the fact that blacks could be as opportunistic and dangerous in serving them as whites.

All through her last year and a half, then, as
Sidney Brustein
proceeded toward production, Lorraine kept at
Les Blancs
—at the typewriter when she could, in notes and discussion when she couldn’t. She carried the manuscript with her into and out of hospitals—polishing, pondering, rethinking a scene here, refining a relationship there, but above all, seeking a multileveled structure, taut yet flexible enough to contain and focus the complexity of personalities, social forces and ideas in this world she had created. In her last working months she cracked the problem to her own satisfaction and outlined in our discussions (during these sessions, I acted as soundingboard-advocate-critic) the major structural and character developments she envisioned. After her death, as literary executor, I continued the work: synthesizing the scenes already completed throughout the play with those in progress, drawing upon relevant fragments from earlier drafts and creating, as needed, dialogue of my own to bridge gaps, deepen relationships or tighten the drama along the lines we had explored together.

In 1966, a preliminary draft was completed. Then, as the play moved toward production, I was fortunate in having the assistance of a number of friends and associates whose critical and creative contributions proved invaluable: Ossie Davis, actor, playwright, activist, who worked with me in preparation for a first—and as it turned out, abortive—production; Charlotte Zaltzberg, who came as a secretary but, in short order, became an incisive collaborator in the preparation of all of Lorraine’s work for production and publication; Konrad Matthaei, the producer who, with his wife Gay, brought the play to the stage out of a deep and unstinting belief in
what it had to say; Joseph Stein, author of
Fiddler on the Roof
, whose vast skill helped to solve crucial problems in the final weeks of production; Sidney Walters, the director who cast the play, gave it its overall look and interpretation and was responsible for some of its most memorable moments; and John Berry, the director who brought tremendous vitality and artistry to the process of compression and heightening out of which the play emerged in its final form on stage.

Somewhere in these pages each of these individuals has left his mark. Yet, except in the sense that all theater is—to one degree or another—collaborative, neither their contributions nor my own should obscure the paramount fact that
Les Blancs
in its conception, characters, events and ideas, its most penetrating speeches, the great bulk of its dialogue—and in the vision that informs it throughout—is the work of Lorraine Hansberry.

—R
OBERT
N
EMIROFF
, 1972

A Note about the 1983 Edition

An off-Broadway showcase production in 1980 provided the opportunity to take a fresh look at
Les Blancs
on stage—in particular, to reconsider some material which had been cut from the original production for reasons relating less to text than to the dynamics of that particular mounting—and to sharpen the focus of some passages with small cuts and clarifications. The present edition incorporates these changes.

—R.N., 1983

A Note about the 1994 Edition

Les Blancs
has been presented in major productions since 1980: at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in 1988 and at Huntington Theatre in Boston in 1989. The play continues to evolve onstage. The present literary text, however, is the final product of Robert Nemiroff’s editing in 1983.

—JGN, 1994

LES BLANCS
was first presented by Konrad Matthaei at the Longacre Theatre, New York City, on November 15, 1970, with the following cast: