Word: playing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...audience will search for a black in the theater- and wait for him to laugh before they do the same. This is because many whites simply don't know how to react to blacks as people yet. When most liberals hear the black-cum-white characters in Horovitz's play putting on Butterfly McQueen accents, a sign lights up in their minds saying "Racial Stereo-types. . . Gone With the Wind. . . Racist" -and the liberals freeze...
...that is the whole point of the play. Race relations in this country have still not advanced past the point where most whites can conceive of blacks as anything other than types, whether they be "good types" or "bad" ones. Blacks are placed in a "Stepin Fetchit" box or a "Stokely Carmichael" box or a "white" box or a "Sidney Poitier" box. The thing is that no black- or no human being, for that matter- ever fits into any box. As Morning's family changes its voice from an Amos'n' Andy inflection to a John Lindsay or Wilson Pickett...
...Many old liberals will be so hung up on their knecjerk reactions to dialect that they will fail to deal with these people on the basis of anything but those superficial bases for which they have Pavlovian responses. The audience will be too screwed up-and frightened-by the play's complex inverted humor to listen to the words- or laugh...
...perhaps a cruel joke Mr. Horovitz is playing on the theatregoer- but a necessary one. It is exactly the kind of communications impasse he is dealing with that spawns the rhetoric that leads to real racism, law-and-order candidates, blacklash and violence. It is no surprise that his play ends with a grotestquely scary and ecumenical ("Kill the white man! Kill the black man!") chant of murder...
...NIGHT, the final play of the trilogy, is in every way the third act of the evening. It is an answer to the chaotic world depicted in the first two plays, a goodbye-to-all-that farewell to the sixties. It is both devastating and exhilirating, and even bigger mind-blow than Morning or Noon...