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| Diane Oyama Dixon, Hilary Jean Beane, Adeyemy Lythcott. (Photos: Friedman-Abele.) |
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| Robbie McCauley, Dianne Oyama Dixon, Adeyemi Lythcott. |
Artistic director/producer Joseph
Papp’s program of Shakespearean revivals at the Newhouse ended when he offered
this transfer from Off-Off Broadway’s New Federal Theatre. Deemed “the most
significant new American play in a long while,” by Douglas Watt, The Taking of Miss Janie was a major
Black theatre event of the decade.
It was described by
playwright Ed Bullins as a sequel to his The
Pig Pen, and like that work was set at a racially mixed California party in
the mid-60s. The play’s ultimate purpose was to view in semi-allegorical terms
the racial life of America during the 60s as seen from a Black perspective. As
the party proceeds, fragmentary scenes from the past intrude. To mingle past
and present, the play makes use of various formalistic devices, including long monologues
for each important character, choral dialogue, and a considerable amount of
recorded music.
Janie (Hilary Jean Beane) is a young, white, liberal WASP who has met Black writer Monty (Adeyemi
Lythcott) at college and, for over a decade, remained his close friend. She has
not, however, despite his desires, had sex with him. Now Monty and two Black
friends are having a party to which white and Black acquaintances, Janie among
them, are invited. Most of the whites are Jewish. The play’s free-ranging
structure introduces each character in detail, among them Lonnie (Sam
McMurray), a white jazz musician who performs with Blacks and used to be Janie’s
lover; Peggy (Robbie McCauley), Monty’s Black ex-wife, who turns to lesbianism
after a failed second marriage to a white guy; Rick (Kirk Kirksey), a
chorus-like, white-hating militant roommate of Monty’s, destined to be
killed in a shootout; Len (Darryl Croxton), another Black roommate, an
intellectual, who marries the hippie Sharon (Lin Shaye); the
drug-addicted, beatnik poet Mort Silverstein (Robert B. Silver), who gets
soundly beaten by Monty; and Flossy (Dianne Oyama Dixon), another Black woman
with a yen for Monty.
The play begins and
ends with the rape of Janie by Monty, who for years has wanted to “take” her
despite her wish to keep their friendship “pure.” During the final scenes, the
evening’s pathos is pointed up by the projection on a scrim of the faces of
four martyred leaders of the 60s, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Malcolm
X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Blood gradually smears their faces as the action
proceeds to its climax. “The rape is, to some degree, an image of the anarchic
violence of the ‘60s,” thought T.E. Kalem.
Drug abuse, partial
nudity, and obscene language were ingredients in Bullins’s play, the point of
which, wrote Edwin Wilson, is to express how “these restless creatures of the
1960s were looking desperately for improvement and salvation, but too often in
the wrong places; in drugs, in intermarriage, in political militancy.” “[T]he
play makes trenchant observations,” said John Beaufort, “about the recent past
and that segment of the youth community whose personal failures paralleled the
tragic disorders and breakdowns of society.”
Several critics
argued with the drama’s structural awkwardness. John Simon even claimed that
Bullins, for all his work’s comedic and dramatic virtues, had not written a
play. He thought the ideas “too simplistic” and the characters cartoon-like.
Martin Gottfried took issue with the schematic nature of Monty and Janie, but he and most others believed the people were real in an almost
documentary way. Clive Barnes declared that the work was “sensitive, . . . with
vivid dialogue, a sensibility towards time and place, and possesses an
intellectual and emotional density,” despite its need for “a sharper focus.”
Gilbert Moses, who
had reconciled with Bullins after their widely publicized brawl over another
play, The Duplex, was generally
commended for his direction, for which he won an OBIE. The Taking of Miss Janie won the New York Drama Critics Circle
Award for Best American Play, and also received an OBIE.
NEXT UP: The Tale of Cymbeline
