Like The Blacks and the lesser known
Aime Cesaire play of 1966, A Season in the Congo, Hansberry’s work is
located in Africa, in her case an unnamed African country with similarities to
the struggles of black natives in Ghana and Kenya, with its strongest
reverberations coming from the 1960 revolution in Congo, where, just as in
Hansberry’s play, several white missionaries were slaughtered.
It is hard for me to even imagine an
American playwright of the Kennedy era (he became president, one recalls, in
1961), particularly one suffering from the last stages of cancer, reaching out
to African cultural traditions and the battles between blacks who sought to
assimilate with white settlers and those determined to free themselves with
violence—positions represented by the two extremes in the American black
community by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X—in order to create a dialogue
between the two visions.
Certainly as early as A Raisin in the Sun, Beneatha, the
Younger daughter, reaches out to embrace all things African. But the intellectual
maturity of Hansberry’s debates in this play—and indeed we might define this
work as in the Socratic tradition, a series of debates between
figures representing its various
viewpoints—sprinkled throughout with humor and pathos, lifts this work to a
near spiritual level.
The central struggle of the play is
between the white imperialists—who have treated the African native populations
as backward children who, they claim, will never come to the wisdom without
their help—and the black tribesmen—who unsuccessfully seek justice and fairness
in the white legal systems, and, ultimately, demand total freedom. Yet the
major verbal battles of this work are between the blacks themselves,
particularly between Tshembe Matoseh (Deasean Kevin Terry)—a partially
assimilated black man educated in the West, married to a white wife, with a new
baby, who has returned only briefly for his tribal-leader father’s funeral—and
his totally assimilated brother, Abioseh (Matt Orduña) who has become a priest.
Between them is their uneducated younger brother, Eric (Aric Floyd), who
divides his time between the white-run mission and his tribal hut where he
excessively drinks.
Neither of the white-educated brothers
wants violence, and both hope that the current African ambassador to England,
Amos Kumalo, will return to cut new agreements between the tribes and the
settlers. Yet, Tshembe is simply too intelligent to see this as a solution,
and, although he denies it, he hates the walls whites have created in
relationship to his own race, which his profound discussion with a white
hanger-on journalist, Charlie Morris (Jason McBeth)—come out to Africa to write
a piece about the famed mission, reveals. At issue is difference between race
and racisim, between reality and effect:
Tsembe: I said racism is a
device that, of itself
explains nothing. It is simply a
means.
An intention to
justify the rule of some
men over others.
Charlie: But I agree with you
entirely! Race hasn’t
a thing to do with it
actually.
Tsembe: (with pleased
perversity) Ah—but it has!
Charlie: Oh, come on, Matoseh.
Stop playing games!
Tsembe: I am not playing
games! I am simply saying
that a device is
a device, but that it also has
consequences:
once invented it takes on a
life, a reality of its own. So, in
one century,
men invoke the device
of religion to cloak
their conquests. In
another, race. Now in
both cases you and I may recognize the
fraudulence of the device, but
the fact
remains that a man who has the sword run
through him because he refuses to become
a Muslim or a Christian—or who was shot
in Zatembe or Mississippi because he is
black—is
suffering the utter reality of the
device.
And it is pointless to pretend it
doesn’t exist—merely because it is a lie.
The fact that these very same words might
be spoken about a great many of the situations today, makes clear just how
brilliantly perceptive Hansberry was, and how she was attempting to create a
new kind of art that might speak to the truth: an art of music, expression, and
dance that nonetheless spoke intensely to thought. Tears almost well up in my
eyes when I realize how, if she had lived longer, important her art might have
been to the later 1960s, when the same kind of explosions represented in this
work came to happen as well in the US, with the murders of so many of our
leaders and inner-city riots.
Throughout Les blancs, the well-meaning Charlie stomps across the floorboards
of the crumbling mission, just hoping to talk. But no one, black or white,
really wants to “talk,” the words having already all been spoken and having
failed. If Charlie wants to “build a bridge” between the cultures, the people
in this backwards spot recognize the bridge has never been completed by white
culture, only promised, and that “open communication” between the races has
become almost meaningless. Charlie’s rightful cries of intellectual prejudice
fall on deaf ears.
Even the renowned mission Charlie intends
to write about, as the mission doctor Willy DeKoven (Joel Swetow) reveals, late
in the play, is all a lie. Its founder, Dr. Nielsen (a man who has gone cross
the river, but, like Godot, never shows up for his appointments, having been
already murdered by the natives), although devoted to saving lives and
converting souls, has, as DeKoven clarifies, devoted the life’s-work to
genocide and the status quo. Even as he saves lives, he continually patronizes
and even laughs away the demands from the local chief for equality. Despite his
insistence that the clapboard shack appearance of his hospital is an attempt to
make the natives feel at home, a completely up-to-date white-walled and
antiseptic clinic only a few miles away serves the natives far better. The
mission itself, accordingly, becomes a kind of device to keep the local natives
in bondage. Is it any wonder that most of the tribal leaders have stopped
visiting?
Far worse, what the always-drinking
(indeed more alcohol is consumed on this stage than any play in memory since
Williams’ The Night of the Iguana)
and highly sarcastic DeKoven reveals, is the hypocrisy of Nielsen’s faith. When
the good Nielsen discovers that the wife of the local chief, father of the
play’s major protagonists, has been raped by the local white army officer,
Major George Rice (Bill Brochtrup), he allows her to die in childbirth; the
child is saved, despite his desires, by his own wife serving a midwife
(beautifully performed by Los Angeles’ noted actor Anne Gee Byrd): the boy is
Eric, Tshembe and Abioseh’s unwitting brother.
And DeKoven, it is hinted, is not only
plying Eric with regular bottles of alcohol, but encouraging the boy’s
experiments in female sexuality, perhaps even abusing the naive boy.
No one, in this fallen world, in short,
is innocent; and even the young idealist, Tshembe, inevitably, because of his
natural-born ability as a leader, is drawn into the conflict. In a touching
discussion with Mrs. Nielsen, as she sits beside the casket of her husband, he
realizes mid-sentence, with her own urging, that he cannot return home, but
must become the “warrior” who will help free his people of white domination.
The play ends in the tragic murder by
Tshembe of his own brother Abioseh, with Mrs. Neilsen—having long ago accepted
her fate—being gunned down in the cross-fire. Tshembe too has now given up his
ideals, abadoning his desires, like “Orestes…Hamlet…the rest of them,” to
simply walk away to “so many things we’d rather be doing.” This is a world of
the doomed, a slightly Frankenstein-like world in which the monster must be
continually created and recreated.
The acting of Desean Kevin Terry and Anne
Gee Byrd in this production is particularly moving, but everyone involved,
including the play’s percussionist (Jelani Blunt) and the beautiful mythic
dancer (Shari Gardner) are remarkable.
For those truly interested in living
theater instead of embalmed dramatic classics, I suggest you hurry over to The Rouge Machine production (at The
Met Theatre) to see this play before it closes on July 3, 2017.
Los Angeles, June
5, 2017
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