speech

Specifically, 1964

From the New Historical approach to literature, a literary work (in this case a play) can be approached as one more document that reflects something of the mood and attitude of a certain period in history. Below are four articles that appeared the very same year that Dutchman was first produced by The Cherry Lane Theater in 1964. Please read each article, because they will make up the historical foundation on which you build your video review.

Please note that some of these articles are long and will require a block of time to sit and read, specifically "The Ballot or the Bullet" and "The Negro's Middle-class Dream". I should also mention that the term 'Negro' was commonly used in the 1960s, which today may strike us as rather awkward and even unenlightened, but such were the times, problematic as it may be.

· MLK Nobel Peace Prize Speech (Dec. 10, 1964) : https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/king/26142-martin-luther-king-jr-acceptance-speech-1964/

· The Ballot or the Bullet (April 3, 1964) : http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/malcolm_x_ballot.html

· “Three At the Cherry Lane” (Feb 1964)

It is altogether likely that the folk who go down to the Cherry Lane Theatre to see the three one- act plays now being given there are witnesses to a signal event, the emergence of an outstanding dramatist – LeRoi Jones.

His is a turbulent talent. While turbulence is not always a sign of power or of valuable meaning, I have a hunch that LeRoi Jones’s fire will burn ever higher and clearer if our theatre can furnish an adequate vessel to harbor his flame. We need it.

He is very angry. Anger alone may merely make a loud noise, confuse, sputter and die. For anger to burn to useful effect, it must be grounded by an idea. With the “angry young men” of England one was not always certain of the source of dissatisfaction nor of its goal . With LeRoi Jones it is easy to say that the plight of the Negro ignited the initial rage – justification enough – and that the rage will not be appeased until there is no more black and white, no more color except as differences in hue and accent are part of the world’s splendid spectacle. But there is more to his ferocity than a protest against the horrors of racism.

Dutchman, the first of Jones’s plays to reach the professional stage, is a stylized account of a subway episode. A white girl picks up a young Negro who at first is rather embarrassed and later piqued by her advances. There is a perversity in her approach which finally provokes him to a hymn of hate. With lyrical obscenity he declares that murder is in his and every Negro’s heart and were it to reach the point of action, there would be less “singin’ of the blues,” less of that delightful folk music and hot jazz which beguile the white man’s fancy, more calm in the Negro soul. Meanwhile, it is the black man who is murdered.

What we must not overlook in seeing the play is that, while this explosion of fury is its rhetorical and emotional climax, the crux of its significance resides in the depication of the white girl whose relevance to the play’s situation does not lie in her whiteness but in her representative value as a token of our civilization. She is our neurosis. Not a neurosis in regard to the Negro, but the absolute neurosis of American society.

She is “hep”; she has heard about everything, understands and feels nothing. She twitches, jangles, jitters with a thin but inexhaustible energy, propelled by the vibrations from millions of ads, television quiz programs, newspaper columns, intellectual jargon culled from countless digests, panel discussions, illustrated summaries, smatterings of gossip on every conceivable subject (respectable and illicit), epithets, wisecracks, formulas, slogans, cyncisms, cures and solutions. She is the most “informed” person in the world and the most ignorance (The information feeds the ignorance.) She is the bubbling, boiling garbage cauldron newly produced by our progress. She is a calculating machine gone berserk; she is the real killer. What she destroys is not men of a certain race but mankind. She is the compendium of little of the universal mess.

If Dutchman (a title I don’t understand) has a fault, it is its completeness. Its ending is somewhat too pat, too pointed in its symbolism. If one has caught the drift of the play’s meaning before its final moment, the ending is supererogatory, if one has failed to do so, it is probably useless.

Dutchman is very well played by Jennifer West and Robert Hooks.