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| Bill Cobbs, Adolph Caesar, Graham Brown, Samm-Art Williams. (Photo: Bert Andrews.) |
Silas Jones’s “nightmare
comedy,” as he called it, examines the plight of a simple, young Black man,
Virgil (Reyno). He is believed by the white folks of Deliverance, Mississippi,
to have raped a white girl. In consequence, Virgil shelters in a church basement
where he spends the frightened moments as a lynch mob gathers outside. He
fantasizes that he will be saved by Black Freedom army, led by Mongo, when it
launches its invasion of the South.
Virgil imagines his
boot to be a field telephone and talks to his wished-for savior on its wave
length. The preacher of the church (Bill Cobbs) takes the role of the heroic
Mongo in his dreams. Scenes of reality involving various Black townspeople
alternate with Virgil’s hallucinations. In the former, the author introduces
two amusing female gossips (Babe Drake Hooks and Barbara Montgomery), a teacher
(Ethel Ayler), and others. In the end, the KKK captures Virgil and lynches him.
The play’s attempt at
contrasting illusion with reality was obvious, but Jones’s technique failed to
clear up all ambiguities for Edith Oliver and several others. The effect was
mildly confusing. Mel Gussow enjoyed the spectacle of certain Black stereotypes
being satirized as a covert danger to other Blacks.
Adolph Caesar and Samm-Art Williams were in the cast.
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unpublished manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of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: The Web and the Rock.
