Word: negroness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 of guilt-intoxicated whites. Gunn never does this. At 40, he has an assured masculinity that lies in his bones and not his skin...
...plays were produced by the Negro Ensemble Company, founded two years ago by 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...
Other plays have shown the depth of Negro travail. Lonnie Elder Ill's Ceremonies in Dark Old Men focuses on a pitiably poor father who tries to rear his sons in honesty only to find that the survival value of honesty in his situation is very low. In Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody, a savvy young man who idolizes an ex-con man tries to form his own black Mafia and dies in the attempt...
...five, and off-Broadway from nine to 17. A more impressive development has been the country-wide rise of black theater groups. An issue of The Drama Review (summer 1968) lists 38 such companies. A key problem for these groups is to encourage blacks to attend the theater. The Negro Ensemble Company has achieved gratifying results along this line. In its first season ('67-'68) audiences were 70% white and 30% black. In the two intervening years, the proportion has been exactly reversed...
...blacks have special emotional problems? Medical science has no division known as black psychiatry; the psyche cannot be segregated. The best psychiatric opinion holds that the same kinds of emotional problems are found among virtually all the world's peoples though with varying frequency. For the American Negro the problems of being black are often merely the problems of being a minority and being poor. Says Harvard Sociologist Lee Rainwater, author of a book on the black ghetto to be published this fall: "The most central generalization is that when the total situation of being lower-class...