Word: gunn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Assured Masculinity. Physically, Gunn is a lean six-footer who bends slightly forward from the waist as if he were bracing himself against a brisk wind. His long tapered fingers shape the air with the aristocratic command of a symphony conductor, and his voice has a resonant precision that quells any incipient coughers in the audience. Psychically, his stage personality is one of intensely contained, almost glacial calm. He understates like distant rolling thunder. Even now, many blacks are playing the professional Negro on stage, parody Uncle Toms or militant minstrels, and thus catering to the applause and approval...
...tests that an actor has to face, range is crucial. Gunn impressively demonstrated his range in two vastly different off-Broadway performances. In Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, he played a middle-aging bull of a canecutter foreman who loses his job and his virile stud appeal at about the same time. Gunn made the man a blinded, shorn, bewildered Samson who wrenches at the pillars of his doom in one last mighty agony. In Daddy Goodness, a play about a religious con artist, Gunn fashioned a composite portrait of a store-front Father Divine, a Harlem dandy...
...Actor-Playwright Douglas Turner Ward, Actor Robert Hooks and Producer Gerald Krone. The company is the apex of a genuine black breakthrough that occurred off-Broadway during the 1960s. The small theaters, mostly below 14th Street in Manhattan, were the training or proving grounds not only for Moses Gunn but for James Earl Jones (The Great White Hope) and Diana Sands (The Owl and the Pussycat"), as well as for Gloria Foster, Clarence Williams III, Cicely Tyson, Barbara Ann Teer, Rosalind Cash, Lou Gossett, Vinie Burrows, Yaphet Kotto, Hattie Winston, Nathan George, Roscoe Lee Browne and many more. Simultaneously...
...Moses Gunn sees it, all of this is a great deal more than a spontaneous eruption of black playwriting talent. He feels it was always there: "What we have done is simply put a poker iron up people's behinds and have said, 'We write too.' It is said of blacks that they don't have enough training to be playwrights. But the theater is not an area that has much to do with education. It has to do with craft. Blacks have had the craft, but if a man with a potential has enough barriers...
...have the barriers remained so high? Says Gunn: "Power and influence on Broadway are in the hands of whites. They feel threatened at letting others get involved. Discrimination is not diabolical in intent. It is extremely difficult to adjust to the new situation, to get over ingrained prejudices and to realize that black people, whom they have labeled 'inferior,' can do the same thing that they do or do It better...