the
reluctant warrior
by Douglas Messerli
Lorraine Hansberry Les Blancs / Rogue Machine Theatre,
performed at The Met Theatre, Los Angeles / the performance Howard Fox and I
saw was on Sunday, June 4, 2017
Les Blancs
(The Whites) was Lorraine Hansberry’s last play, and she left it uncompleted at
the time of her early death of cancer at the age of 34. The play was finished
by her husband Robert Nemiroff and produced for a short 1-month run on Broadway
in 1970, five years after her 1965 death.
Like many contemporary critics, I knew the history of this play, but
having never actually seen a production or even having read it, I presumed it
was simply the failure that critics of the
original had deemed it. And, yes,
the play is rough and even incomplete in some parts, and is polemical
throughout—Hansberry was, after all, a playwright of ideas—but how fortunate
that Los Angeles’ Rogue Machine Theatre determined to revive it (a production
of the play also occurred at London’s The National Theatre last year), for even
with its obvious imperfections, I’d argue this is a far more ambitious and
energetic piece than her classic realist drama A Raisin in the Sun, which I saw again a few years ago (in 2012) at
Culver City’s Kirk Douglas Theatre.
The well-crafted Raisin perhaps
deserves its classic status, but the very rawness and incompleteness of Les Blancs pushes the boundary of
theater of its day, and shows its remarkable author as moving away from her
realist roots. Referencing the famed Jean Genet play, The Blacks: A Clown Show which premiered in 1959, the years in
which Hansberry was writing her work, the author pursues a more expressionist
course rather than Genet’s surreal and absurdist perspectives.
Like The Blacks and the lesser
known Aime Cesaire play of 1966, A Season
in the Congo, Hansberry’s work is located in Africa, in her case an unnamed
African country with similarities to the struggles of black natives in Ghana
and Kenya, with its strongest reverberations coming from the 1960 revolution in
Congo, where, just as in Hansberry’s play, several white missionaries were
slaughtered.
It is hard for me to even imagine an
American playwright of the Kennedy era (he became president, one recalls, in
1961), particularly one suffering from the last stages of cancer, reaching out
to African cultural traditions and the battles between blacks who sought to
assimilate with white settlers and those determined to free themselves with
violence—positions represented by the two extremes in the American black
community by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X—in order to create a dialogue
between the two visions.
Certainly as early as A Raisin in
the Sun, Beneatha, the Younger daughter, reaches out to embrace all things
African. But the intellectual maturity of Hansberry’s debates in this play—and
indeed we might define this work as in the Socratic tradition, a series of
debates between
figures representing its various viewpoints—sprinkled
throughout with humor and pathos, lifts this work to a near spiritual level.
The central struggle of the play is between the white imperialists—who
have treated the African native populations as backward children who, they
claim, will never come to the wisdom without their help—and the black
tribesmen—who unsuccessfully seek justice and fairness in the white legal
systems, and, ultimately, demand total freedom. Yet the major verbal battles of
this work are between the blacks themselves, particularly between Tshembe
Matoseh (Deasean Kevin Terry)—a partially assimilated black man educated in the
West, married to a white wife, with a new baby, who has returned only briefly
for his tribal-leader father’s funeral—and his totally assimilated brother,
Abioseh (Matt Orduña) who has become a priest. Between them is their uneducated
younger brother, Eric (Aric Floyd), who divides his time between the white-run
mission and his tribal hut where he excessively drinks.
Neither of the white-educated brothers wants violence, and both hope
that the current African ambassador to England, Amos Kumalo, will return to cut
new agreements between the tribes and the settlers. Yet, Tshembe is simply too
intelligent to see this as a solution, and, although he denies it, he hates the
walls whites have created in relationship to his own race, which his profound
discussion with a white hanger-on journalist, Charlie Morris (Jason McBeth)—come
out to Africa to write a piece about the famed mission—reveals. At issue is the
difference between race and racism, between reality and effect:
Tsembe: I said racism is a
device that, of itself explains
nothing. It is
simply a means. An
invention to
justify the rule of some men
over others.
Charlie: But I agree with you
entirely! Race hasn’t
a thing to do with
it actually.
Tsembe: (with pleased
perversity) Ah—but it has!
Charlie: Oh, come on, Matoseh.
Stop playing games!
Tsembe: I am not playing
games! I am simply saying
that a device is
a device, but that it also has
consequences:
once invented it takes on a life,
a reality of its
own. So, in one century, men
invoke the device
of religion to cloak their
conquests. In
another, race. Now in both cases
you and I may
recognize the fraudulence of
the device, but
the fact remains that a man who
has the sword run
through him because he
refuses to become
a Muslim or a Christian—
or who was shot
in Zatembe or Mississippi
because he is
black—is suffering the utter
reality of the
device. And it is pointless to
pretend it
doesn’t exist—merely because it
is a lie!
The fact that these very same words might be spoken about a great many
of the situations today, makes clear just how brilliantly perceptive Hansberry
was, and how she was attempting to create a new kind of art that might speak to
the truth: an art of music, expression, and dance that nonetheless spoke
intensely to thought. Tears almost well up in my eyes when I realize how, if
she had lived longer, important her art might have been to the later 1960s,
when the same kind of explosions represented in this work came to happen as
well in the US, with the murders of so many of our leaders and inner-city
riots.
Throughout Les blancs, the
well-meaning Charlie stomps across the floorboards of the crumbling mission,
just hoping to talk. But no one, black or white, really wants to “talk,” the
words having already all been spoken and having failed. If Charlie wants to
“build a bridge” between the cultures, the people in this backwards spot
recognize the bridge has never been completed by white culture, only promised,
and that “open communication” between the races has become almost meaningless.
Charlie’s rightful cries of intellectual prejudice fall on deaf ears.
Even the renowned mission Charlie intends to write about, as the mission
doctor Willy DeKoven (Joel Swetow) reveals, late in the play, is all a lie. Its
founder, Dr. Nielsen (a man who has gone across the river, but, like Godot,
never shows up for his appointments, having been already murdered by the
natives), although devoted to saving lives and converting souls, has, as
DeKoven clarifies, devoted the life’s-work to genocide and the status quo. Even
as he saves lives, he continually patronizes and even laughs away the demands
from the local chief for equality. Despite his insistence that the clapboard
shack appearance of his hospital is an attempt to make the natives feel at
home, a completely up-to-date white-walled and antiseptic clinic only a few
miles away serves the natives far better. The mission itself, accordingly,
becomes a kind of device to keep the local natives in bondage. Is it any wonder
that most of the tribal leaders have stopped visiting?
Far worse, what the always-drinking (indeed more alcohol is consumed on
this stage than any play in memory since Williams’ The Night of the Iguana) and highly sarcastic DeKoven reveals, is
the hypocrisy of Nielsen’s faith. When the good Nielsen discovers that the wife
of the local chief, father of the play’s major protagonists, has been raped by
the local white army officer, Major George Rice (Bill Brochtrup), he allows her
to die in childbirth; the child is saved, despite his desires, by his own wife
serving as midwife (beautifully performed by Los Angeles’ noted actor Anne Gee
Byrd): the boy is Eric, Tshembe and Abioseh’s unwitting brother.
And DeKoven, it is hinted, is not
only plying Eric with regular bottles of alcohol, but encouraging the boy’s
experiments in female sexuality, perhaps even abusing the naive boy.
No one, in this fallen world, in short, is innocent; and even the young
idealist, Tshembe, inevitably, because of his natural-born ability as a leader,
is drawn into the conflict. In a touching discussion with Mrs. Nielsen, as she
sits beside the casket of her husband, he realizes mid-sentence, with her own
urging, that he cannot return to Europe, but must become the “warrior” who will
help free his people of white domination.
The play ends in the tragic murder by Tshembe of his own brother
Abioseh, with Mrs. Neilsen—having long ago accepted her fate—being gunned down
in the cross-fire. Tshembe too has now given up his ideals, abandoning his
desires, like “Orestes…Hamlet…the rest of them,” to simply walk away to “so
many things we’d rather be doing.” This is a world of the doomed, a slightly
Frankenstein-like world in which the monster must be continually created and
recreated.
The acting of Desean Kevin Terry and Anne Gee Byrd in this production is
particularly moving, but everyone involved, including the play’s percussionist
(Jelani Blunt) and the beautiful mythic dancer (Shari Gardner) are remarkable.
For those truly interested in living theater instead of embalmed
dramatic classics, I suggest you hurry over to The Rogue Machine (at the Met
Theatre) to see this production before it closes on July 3rd.
Los Angeles, June 5, 2017
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2017).
