Word: white
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Share the guilt" seems to be the theatrical slogan of the hour. The Man in the Glass Booth asks playgoers to share guilt for the massacre of the Jews. The Great White Hope asks playgoers to share guilt for the oppression of the Negro. Both are dramas of contrition with little internal life; they would scarcely stir, except for the borrowed adrenaline of newspaper headlines, past history, and the emotional sympathies of the already converted. For the price of a mea culpa, the audience is made to feel good by feeling...
...Great White Hope, by Howard Sackler, is a sprawling, episodic semi-documentary that traces the rise and fall of Jack Johnson, the first Negro heavyweight champion of the world. In the play he is called Jack Jefferson, and James Earl Jones roars through the role with the jungle magnetism and pride of a lion. In a concentrated off-Broadway apprenticeship, Jones often played a kind of jolly brown giant; here he plays an avenging black one. Jones is not the kind of actor who buries himself in a part. Instead, he devours the part and then radiates its presence...
From the time that Jefferson becomes champion, he appears to threaten and diminish the white world, in and out of boxing. Corrupt promoters begin scurrying around for a "great white hope" to restore racial supremacy. Full of arrogant self-regard and a casual contempt for blacks as well as whites, Jefferson all too easily stokes the hostility of his foes...
...subtlest and most infuriating affront is sexual. He loves a white girl, who lives and travels with him as his common-law wife. Jane Alexander invests this role with the tenderness, passion and loyalty of a star-crossed Desdemona. When Jefferson is convicted of a Mann Act charge, he jumps bail and flees to Europe. A hounded exile, he drifts from country to country, reaching a kind of symbolic degradation when he shuffles through the role of Uncle Tom in a Budapest cafe and is booed. Still, he rejects a standing offer to throw the championship fight in return...
Hardest of all was the use of color. Sporadically, through the years, Kline tried and failed. Black and white, the nouns and verbs of his paintings, could talk to each other in a stately pidgin English, but colors, the adjectives and adverbs, often garbled the conversation to an incoherent babble. Only in his last years did Kline make color do his bidding. Orange and Black Wall, one of his later paintings, lunges upward and off the canvas like a giant rocket, rising up on the strength of its flaming boosters. Red Painting mounts an enigmatic black rectangle in a morning...