Addict (drugaddict) wrote,
Addict
drugaddict

IN BLACK AND WHITE

In 1963, LeRoi Jones, a twenty-eight-year-old poet from Newark, New Jersey, sat down and wrote a play. Titled “Dutchman,” Jones’s one-act work was more or less finished twenty-four hours after its inception. In his 1984 autobiography, the author (who, in 1967, prompted by Malcolm X’s assassination two years earlier, abandoned his “slave name” to become Amiri Baraka, or Blessed Prince) wrote, “I can see now that the dramatic form began to interest me because I wanted to go ‘beyond’ poetry. I wanted some kind of action literature.” The “action literature” that he created would likely have made the great Thespis yelp. In “Dutchman,” he not only picked up some of the themes that Strindberg had explored in “Miss Julie,” his hallucinatory 1888 examination of class and gender, but added that other great taboo: race.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/theatre/articles/070205crth_theatre_als
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