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| Robin Braxton, Demond Wilson, Noorma Darden, Sam Singleton. (Photos: Zodiac) |
UNDERGROUND [Drama/One-Acts/Race] D: Walter Jones; S: Leo Yoshimura; C: Theoni V. Aldredge; L: Ian Calderon; P: New York Shakespeare Festival; T: Public Theater/Other Stage (OB); 4/18/71-5/16/71 (38)
“Jazznite” [Art/Crime/Drugs/Family] A: Walter Jones; “The
Life and Times of J. Walter Smintheus” [Drugs/Hospital/ Prostitution] A: Edgar
White
“Jazznite,” the more
appreciated of the two Black plays on this bill presented by the Cornbread
Players, had a low-action plot presented in a style suggestive of a jazz
improv. Dudder (Demond Wilson), who has risen from the ghetto to become a
distinguished art professor at Yale, visits his slum-dwelling, married sister,
whose husband has abandoned her and her half-dozen kids. The successful
intellectual encounters there an interesting assortment of family members and
acquaintances.
Clive Barnes observed, “‘Jazznite’ is a brief, fascinating
and seemingly authentic vignette of black ghetto life. It has a beautiful feel
for reality, a heightened sense of the world around it. Mr. Jones involves us with
his people—their casual attitude to crime and drugs, their assertiveness for
life at the level they find it and, in a few instances, their determination for
life at a better, easier level.”
“The Life and Times of J. Walter Smintheus” deals with another
intellectual, the title character (Dennis Tate), a man from a well-off Southern
family struggling to come to terms with his racial identity. He is first
seen as an amnesiac in a hospital, his life to this point being enacted in
fragmentary flashbacks. The audience sees how his aloof, ivory-tower lifestyle
did not prevent him from being drawn into physically and emotionally harmful
relationships with a whore (Robin Braxton), who gave him syphilis, and Robert
(Walter Jones, the playwright/director), a fellow student at Cornell. Robert is a drug
addict who dies in prison. These and other issues resulted in his present zonked-out condition.
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| Robin Braxton, John Gallagher, Dennis Tate. |
Barnes asked, “Could anyone be quite so uptight as
Smintheus? Perhaps, but there is a naiveté to him that is difficult to believe.
But Mr. White's play does offer an ironic comment on the rich black boy missing
it in a white man's world.”
Do you enjoy Theatre’s
Leiter Side? As you may know, since New York’s theatres were forced into
hibernation by Covid-19, this blog has provided daily posts on the hundreds of
shows that opened in the city, Off and on Broadway, between 1970 and 1975.
These have been drawn from an unpublished manuscript that would have been part
of my multivolume Encyclopedia of
the New York Stage series, which covers every show, of
every type, from 1920 through 1950. Unfortunately, the publisher, Greenwood
Press, decided it was too expensive to continue the project beyond 1950.
Before I began offering these
1970-1975 entries, however, Theatre’s Leiter Side posted over
1,600 of my actual reviews for shows from 2012 through 2020. The first two
years of that experience were published in separate volumes for 2012-2013 and
2013-2014 (the latter split into two volumes). The 2012-2013 edition also
includes a memoir in which I describe how, when I was 72, I used the
opportunity of suddenly being granted free access to every New York show to
begin writing reviews of everything I saw. Interested readers can find these
collections on Amazon.com by
clicking here.
Next up: Uhuruh