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| Earle Hyman, Rosanna Carter. |
Note: Several entries beginning with the letter H were
inadvertently overlooked when their turn came to be posted. They are now being
posted, albeit belatedly and out of alphabetical and numerical order.
HOUSE PARTY
[Revue/Race/Politics] B: Ed Bullins; M: Pat Patrick; D: Roscoe Orman; CH: Clay
Stevenson; S: Kert Lundell; L: Roger Morgan; P: American Place Theatre; T:
American Place Theatre (OB); 10/16/73-11/24/73 (42)
Subtitled “A Soulful Happening,” House Party was a musical, comic, and dramatic revue, including a
series of acted, sung, and danced soliloquies, all of it set in a gaudy Harlem
nightclub, with a runway into the auditorium. Locales necessary for the action
were flashed on a round projection screen.
Some of the material came from an earlier Ed Bullins work, Street Sounds, seen Off-Off Broadway at
La Mama. In its varied scenes, Bullins culled from the black American past and
present diverse topics relating to subjects of black life. Slavery, race riots,
black theatre critics, black politicians, revolution in the West Indies, black
poetesses, street corner characters, and so on were depicted by the a company
that counted Mary Alice, Rosanna Carter, and Earle Hyman among its nine members. The actors
delivered their soliloquies accompanied by a musical background provided by a
five-piece jazz combo. Some of the material was mildly satirical, some was more
pointedly emotional.
The evening failed to ignite much critical fire because it
often seemed facile and insufficiently developed to reach its full potential. “[D]ramatic
incisiveness and vigor” were not its strong points, wrote Clive Barnes, nor,
added Walter Kerr, was originality.
