Word: white
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first of these one-acters, Israel Horovitz's Morning, is black in every sense. The set and costumes are black, the people are black (or white, as I'll explain in a second), the humor is black. It is a strange play, one that insecure whites and Uncle Toms will call racist. Don't believe them...
Horovitz has set the work in Harlem, on one particular morning when a black family of four wakes up to find themselves as white as the sun outside their 125th Street window. They achieved this color transformation, you see, with the help of some amazing pills sold to them by a Jewish pawnbroker who got them from God (who is black), (Or maybe you don't see- it doesn't matter...
...only hitch in this family's freedom is a white liberal, Tillich ("I've seen Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," he say. "Twice!" ), who arrives on this morning to murder some "black bastard" who knocked up his daughter. Tillich is rather upset to discover that the black boy he had expected to kill is now white. And, as he and the family play some explosive power politics during the course of the play, the family gradually arrives at the conclusion that "black is beautiful" after...
PLAYWRIGHT Horovitz lets everyone have it in Morning. The play's language- explicit and, as they say, coarse- will probably send a good deal of people out of the theatre within a few minutes after the house lights dim. And the playwright's handling of dialects (The white actors switch back and forth between Harlemese and East Side-esque.) is bound to scare a lot of whites into silence as the play goes on its hysterically funny...
Indeed, I suspect particularly uptight whites in the 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...