NOWHERE TO RUN,
NOWHERE TO HIDE [Drama/Crime/Drugs/Race] A: Herman Johnson; D: Dean Ireby;
C: La Donna Harris; L: Sandra Ross; P: Negro Ensemble Company; T: St. Marks
Playhouse (OB); 3/26-74-3/31/74 (8)
Joyce Hanley, Todd Davis.
Produced as the second of four pays in the Negro Ensemble
Company’s special “Season-Within-a-Season” series of one-week runs, Herman
Johnson’s play offered a “rewarding, although unfulfilled” evening of theatre,”
said Clive Barnes. Overlong and with a plot insufficiently developed, it
nevertheless had many powerful elements.
Circling around the plight of Willie Stewart (Todd Davis),
an 18-year-old Harlem student, are a number of excellently etched characters
and scenes. The episodic plot concerns a pair of Black cops (Leon Morenzie and
Frankie Faison) who deal drugs to the kids at a Harlem high school. They murder
their school connection (Roland Sanchez) and then attempt to pin the rap on
Willie, a troubled, rebellious kid with a pregnant girlfriend and a mother who
runs with a young hoodlum.
Atmosphere, dialogue, characters, acting, directing, and dramatic
tension were all present, inviting Edith Oliver to find it “always convincing." Among the better-known cast members were Samm(-Art) Williams.Robert Christian, and Michele Shay.