Genet's The Blacks: A Director's Viewpoint

A lot has happened to theatre since you graduated from Harvard. As a student/actor in the '50's, were you involved in productions comparable to The Blacks, either in form or content?

Certainly not in content. If you mean avant-garde plays by "form," I produced and acted in Deathwatch here in Boston.

Did you do plays around then that dealt with race relations?

Uh-uh. Nobody'd touch it.

What was the first race play that you did?

The Blacks, which back then, you see, was a very controversial thing. I remember when the play was first to be done, there were distinct camps of black actors, some of whom said, "By no means should we do this play." They thought it was an essentially anti-black play. Others felt that it definitely wasn't.

There were prominent black actors who refused any involvement in it?

Yes. And that was only about ten years ago.

Considering how much people's perspectives have changed since you left Harvard, are the things that you as an actor want to get out of your work basically the same as they were thirteen years ago?

No. I think when you're young, you dream things. I wanted to be a star. And that's no longer really a consideration to me. I want to work, I want to do things that I think are constructive, that have immediacy to the moment, and hopefully have meaning for the people who are watching it.

Have external events in this country in the last ten years influenced the way you personally look at your acting, your objectives for being in the theatre?

No, I don't think I could say that they have. I think I always wanted to be an actor because I thought I had a "third eye" where life is concerned, something the average person has but doesn't develop. I was always fascinated by why people do things the way they do them, why they walk a certain way, talk a certain way, or have a tick. I've always tried to take any character that I've played and tried to find the beauty in him, even if it's the most arch-villian role ever written. Richard III is not an evil man because he's an evil man; something made him that way. He speaks of the mountain on his back and the withered arm. He's hideous-looking, and so he compensates for his looks by what he does with his looks by what he does with his life. I think that any actor has to understand psychological disturbances, because any role that's interesting is going to have a psychological aspect to it that you're going to have to investigate before the character comes to life. And I always tried as an actor to hold the mirror up to nature, to reflect as accurately as I could the things that I observed about life, whether they were pleasant or unpleasant.

And to personally identify as a human being with a character like Richard III?

Yes, some aspect of him.

The value that you put on understanding is naturally going to be reflected in your teaching. What are you trying to give a child when you teach him to express himself dramatically?

I'm real glad you asked that. The biggest problem that I've had with the Board of Education and the parents of the kids is that they become immediately fearful that I'm presenting such a romantic picture of the theatre-you know, with the bright lights and the grease-paint and all that-that I'm "making actors." I'm no more trying to do that than a math teacher is trying to make mathematicians or a physics teacher is trying to make a scientist. I simply feel that if the performing arts were investigated at a public school level, we wouldn't have such trivia written today, because the audience level of intelligence and demands would not permit it. So I'm really trying to teach the aesthetic of the art through practice. In other words, by working on a play and relating to another human being with an audience, you can communicate a great deal more than you can sometimes with a game of stick-ball in the street, because it's focussed.

So you're really dealing with future audiences at least as much as with future actors?

More so. I wouldn't want anyone that I taught to go into the theatre. It's a hideous life. I think if I had ever anticipated some of the things that I would have to contend with, I wouldn't gone into it. But when you find yourself ten or twelve years at something, you look around and say "Jesus God, what else can I do?"

"Mother always wanted me to be a doctor."

Exactly. What else can I do, or what else can I do as well as I do what I've done this long? It's frightening really, how much I focussed on it, even here, I think the CRIMSON published a statistic at some time that I'd written, directed, produced, or acted in over thirty plays in the four years that I was here. So that in my senior year, I just flopped right out at Lamont with mono. I had focussed that much attention on learning what I wanted to do, on learning how to act and direct and produce well.

Not a screaming recommendation to aspiring actors.

Not one.

Being black in a predominantly white society is going to effect your acceptability in some dramatic circles, and perhaps impede your freedom as an actor, teacher, and director. What are the problems, first of all, of being a black actor in New York?

Working. Finding jobs. And, you know it's interesting. I'm as much for the use of the word "black" as opposed to "Negro," I suppose, as anybody, though I sometimes wonder if we're not over-emphasizing the difference.

Well, when you were in college, it was "colored." Are you talking about the current vogue?

In terms of vouge, yes. You always latch onto the word that is most dramatic, since Madison Avenue has trained us for that, in order to make an image sear the brain. To some degree, "black" has done that. Unfortunately, I think that white society has taken the use of the word "black" so literally that hundreds of actors who, like me, don't happen to be darkcomplexioned, and who in a T.V. commercial or on a stage, don't necessarily read "black," because there's nothing "racial" or "Negroid" (and I mean those words in the derogatory sense) in my voice unless I choose it to be there. It makes it even more difficult for me to function than Godfrey Cambridge, because if you use him for a commercial, no one can question that you're using a black man for your product. But if you use me, you run the risk of someone thinking, maybe he's Puerto Rican, or maybe he's black, or just what is he? And I think until we get past that whole thing of making a point of saying "Sec? I'm using a black man, I've got my quota," nothing can be done. Because as long as that's a problem, people are going to go out to find the blackest, most obvious person. And we come in all sizes, shapes, and shades.

You have it coming from both sides.

Right. It's hideous. Evelyn Holly really knocked the hell out of the thing when she wrote an article for the New York Times called "How Black Do You Have to Be?" In other words, if you've had the black experience in this country, I don't care whether you're yellow or checked, you've had it. That's the only qualification you need to declare yourself a black actor or human being, a black man.

So this reverse discrimination can really cut down on the number of roles that are open to you.

Black roles, it limits. On the other hand, you see, I have spent most of my life doing a great deal of classical work as well. You throw a wig and a costume on me and no one would necessarily know the difference. I've done Lear here, and Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. The Othello required more make-up for me than the Lear, simply because I had to be made visually black, and have my hair dyed black and teased, which was more work than the Lear, because then I was under so much wig and beard that there was very little skin left to see.

When you're considering whether or not to accept a role that has been offered to you, do your personal politics enter into your decision? Particularly if you're to play a black man.

By "politics," do you mean what's going on with the government, or what's going on with the social revolution, or my politics as a human being in terms of getting work in the society? In other works, if I'm a Democrat or Republican? I don't understand what you mean, really.

If a character is purposefully written in as being black, at least in terms of where professional theatre is now, he's being used to make some point about social politics. Do you evaluate the point that is being made before you decide whether or not to take a part?

Sometimes. I really don't think I've been faced with the problem often enough for it to be a consideration. But the play that I'm doing now, The Boys in the Band. I had initially turned down. I didn't feel that the author had delineated the black man in the play carefully enough. I felt he was too weak. When I returned to the play, I told them I would be delighted to do it if they would strengthen his fight, if he wouldn't go under quite so easily.

Did they?

No, they didn't. But they changed it visually, which I hadn't anticipated. As I read the play, I saw a guy who, on top of being black, was homosexual, who was faced with a situation in an all-white, upper East Side party. He was the first and most crucial victim of the telephone game that goes on in the play, and he makes, this call, and the only thing he does then is proceedto get stoned, to get drunk, and then to pass out on the floor. Well, when I first looked at that, I thought, uh-uh. I can't make that statement. Subsequently I saw the play when they asked me to do it again. I saw, within the framework that Bob Moore [the director] had staged, how, if they would allow me to do it, by playing it differently, I could make a much stronger statement.

A black man finished a phone call, got stoned, got drunk, and passed out, and yet by the visual staging, you were able to bring him across as a character of strength?

You see, what happens is, he puts himself down all night. Other people put him down, including the most screaming queen in the play. And I thought, Jesus, I just can't do it. I'd go out of my tree doing that to myself every night. But watched it, and discovered that if put myself down more , and I do, far more than is indicated in the script-in terms of doing jokes and things in dialect-getting far more laughs out of the part than are in it, but within the framework of the play. I could come up with something.

Let's look at your more immediate work. The Blacks is clearly an important play to you; you were in it on Broadway and have chosen to direct it for the Boston Theatre Company. When you first performed in it, did it strike you as something you wanted to direct?

No. I didn't understand it when I first read it, any more than my actors, God bless them, when they first picked it up. I think they thought I'd gone crazy.

Genet gives detailed stage directions for almost every scene in the play. Have you pretty much followed them?

Yes, I have. I've tried to do it much more so than was done in the original production. Most pointedly in the fight between the white and black queens at the end. The director in New York, whose concept of the play was, I think, brilliant, didn't trust that you could let two people just talk that long. Genet's stage direction is something like "To be done like two ladies exchanging recipies." I've tried very much to get that quality into it. In New York it was done with all kinds of movement. I liked the movement, but I never thought he trusted Genet's way. I don't know, maybe it won't hold that way. We'll know with an audience.

Directions that are detailed obviously limit your prerogatives. Do you ever feel that the playwright is stepping on your toes as a director?

No. Generally my approach to the stage directions of every play is that I take them as the playwright guiding me as to what his intention was in the play. Sometimes I feel that I can do more effectively what he indicated too literally in the stage directions because he isn't an actor, he's after all a playwright. I knew this play so well in my head that I automatically followed almost all of his directions. In some places, though, he gives some stage directions that don't seem to mean anything. When I say "mean anything" they're just like dead silence, you know. And I have tried to use other techniques to fill the silence without ignoring that silence is what he meant. There's one section where the two characters that are the love interest are supposed to be whispering to each other below, and we don't hear it. This goes on for a considerable length of time. I know exactly what he means by it, and I've done it another way. I've added quite a piece of music and a "form" of pas de deux that they do instead of just remaining static. And I hope that if he saw it, he would say, "Hey, yeah, that's the kind of thing I had in mind." Though it had not occurred to him to use this particular piece of music or put a pas de deux there.

I'd like to look at the play politically. Genet seems to approach race antagonisms much more stylistically, and thus perhaps less directly, than American playwrights, like Leroi Jones, James Baldwin, and , more recently, Ed Bullins...

I think it's much more direct, and this is the chief thing I've tried to do with this production. In 1961, I don't think black people understood as fully as we do today the difference between anger and hatred. Genet uses the word "hatred" constantly in this play. Anger is the kind of thing Ed Bullins is writing about, and Leroi Jones, with "eighteen muthah-fuckahs" and "I'm gonna kill yoah ass" and all that. Which is perfectly valid, and thef're absolutely right in what they're writing about. But Genet has gone one step behind, after the auger, when a man no longer says "I'm gonna kill yoah assi" He can sit back and say "I'm going to kill you." And smile, and smile, and be a villain, as the man said. An it's much more frightening. In 1961, when we did it in New York, anger and hatred were the same thing, and that play erupted on the stage, violently, because we'l all contained all this for so long. But if you look very carefully at the script. Genet has given you guides not to anger but to hate. He says, for instance, that our ideas must spring from hatred, or that politeness must be raised to such a pitch that it becomes monstrous. "Let Negroes persist to the point of madness in what they're condemned to be in their ebony, and their yellow eyes, and their cannibal tastes." That is what I tried to do in the production, to get this ice-cold hatred. To me, it's much more truthful to what the man wrote, and much more directly antagonistic than the stuff that's going on in this country.

Because it's a later evolutionary state?

To me it is, yes.

Isn't this post-anger hatred evident to you in, say, Jones's Slave? Do you see any of that detached, not passionate, not seething...

No.

You think it distinguishes Genet?

Yes, I do. I think that Jones is still about what he was about in Dutchman. "Bitch, I'll snatch your right tit off!" Which is anger. Valid anger.

Do you think Genet's perspective in The Blacks reflects the fact that he's white?

No. I was talking with the cast about this the other day. Genet is a criminal who has lived more of his life in jail than out of it. He's an overt homosexual and has lived his entire life that way.

So that he's socially a nigger?

Yes, someone who didn't fit. He's lived around blacks a great deal in prison life, and became fascinated with them. I wouldn't attempt to go into all the psychological reasons behind that. But in the sense that he's lived all his life as a misfit, and outcast as it were. I think he understands motivations of black hatred, as well-or perhaps because he's not black and he's not involved in the anger, and can deal with the hatred alone, perhaps better-than the black writers who have dealt with it.

He says, in a blurb at the beginning of the script, that it's absolutely necessary that at least one white man be in the audience for every performance. He should be greeted, if the audience is otherwise black, with a ceremony that includes keeping a white spotlight on him throughout the play. What does this mean to you in terms of the actorfaudience relationship that he wants to develop?

Two things. One, the play is not to be performed-when I say "not to be," it wasn't written to be performed for white people. Secondly, the premise of the play is, as Archibald, the master of ceremonies for the evening, safe at the beginning. "We must establish distance, a distance that is basic, and thereby make communication impossible." You have to have, if that confrontation between white and black is to take place and the entire stage is filled with black people, ideally, an all-white audience, in order for this exchange to take place.

Would you consider literally following Genet's instructions?

Yes. I was even going to have some of the black file into the audience with write masks, to say essentially, "Dig it, man, this is for white folk." But after I saw the size of the theatre, I decided to forget it.

If a white Harvard student or professor came to see this show, what impressions would he come away-with if you succeed in what you're trying to do?

I haven't the foggiest idea. I'm not copping out on the question, but I just don't know. It depends on what the climate is in Cambridge now, in 1970, and that's something I'm still trying to figure out. But I'll be looking for the reaction, because I'm interested in finding out.