Word: minstrell
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...from striped pools. Gilbert Stuart's Flautist is a man cut off from that silence, from wife and children, village, home. He sits soulnaked, haltered in other men's finery. Stuart, the master ironist who gave us a grandmotherly George Washington, here portrays a burnt-cork-face minstrel in reverse. This is a handsome black musician masked, glassed, in a transparent nightmare of snow white. The score before him is withered moonlight. The snakes who wove a raft to carry him have fled away beneath the sea. He holds his flute still, as a drowning man clutches...
BLACKFACE is out; homos are in. Everywhere homosexuals are in. On the stage, they have become the sixties' equivalent of minstrel show niggers. Yes, fellas, step right up and see 'em smile, see 'em singin' and dancin,' and jokin' too, lawdy how they do joke! And laff! How they laff...
Damn, but I wish plays like this didn't make it so easy for us to laugh at homosexuals. Thankfully, Fortune and Men's Eyes is somewhat unique in this respect. It is more honest than the average minstrel show. Before it ends, it shows us a true hell where the whole world is a prison, where the homosexual must fight brutally so that he can stay...
From its rather conventional first act, Fortune and Men's Eyes develops into an exceptional play. Given the power of its final minutes, minstrel shows may soon be gone entirely. It may not be possible for us to laugh away the homosexual for as long as we managed to laugh away the black...
...Negro Ensemble Company seems to be forging a dubious tradition of brilliantly staging mediocre material. The intentions of Playwright Ray Mclver to make a cutting satire of black-white relations in the U.S. unfortunately outrun his wit. But the players, under the direction of Michael A. Schultz, endow this "minstrel-morality play" with a lively inventiveness and bounce...