New Plays in Manhattan

Native Son (produced by Orson Welles & John Houseman). Playwright Paul Green has helped Negro Novelist Richard Wright turn his best-selling Native Son into by all odds the strongest drama of the season. Broadway drama critics generally agreed that the book's pain-by-pain account of the Negro hero's tortured mind was more powerful than the play. But in ten scenes, framed within forbidding brick walls, played without intermission, the play says plenty.

The story is of Bigger Thomas (Canada Lee), a brooding, violent Negro whose father was killed in a Southern race riot, who lives with his mother, sister and kid brother in one room in the Chicago slums. With his pals he indulges in fantasies of machine-gunning white enemies. Through an unctuous social worker, Bigger gets a job as chauffeur to the wealthy landlord of the tenement he lives in. The landlord's handsome daughter (Anne Burr) is a neurotic, alcoholic Fellow Traveler who adopts an intimate manner toward Bigger.

One night after Bigger has driven the girl home from a party, he helps her stagger to her room. She drunkenly insists on his staying there a while. The girl's blind mother enters and, in desperately trying to prevent the girl from giving his presence away, Bigger accidentally smothers her to death. A reporter later discovers that Bigger has burned the girl's body in the furnace, and the Negro is captured in an empty house. A Darrowesque lawyer (Ray Collins) makes a plea for Bigger's life on the ground that racial oppression must inevitably lead to twisted, savage psychologies. And Bigger is convicted, sentenced to the chair.

In the lawyer's speech the play shifts from art to propaganda. For obviously the true defense of Bigger would lie in considering the actions of the neurotic victim of his accidental crime. But the play's propaganda, like its art, is telling.

Canada Lee, a Negro fighter, musician and actor of the order of Robeson, got his euphonious name from the late, famed prizefight announcer Joe Humphreys, who couldn't be bothered with Canada's real name: Lionel Canegata. Canada was born of West Indian parents in Manhattan's seamy San Juan Hill district (the Sixties near the Hudson). As a boy he got a reputation for licking toughs, including members of a Harlem gang called "the syndicate," and studied the violin under Negro Composer J. Rosamond Johnson. While still in grammar school, Canada ran away from home, became a stable boy and jockey in Canada, moved back to Harlem after a couple of years. He won 90 out of 100 amateur fights and the national amateur lightweight title, turned pro in 1926, was heading for the welterweight title in 1930 when he got socked so hard in the left eye that today it is almost blind. He had made $75,000 fighting, had blown it away big-timing in Harlem. Afterwards he led an unsuccessful jazz band, hit the breadlines, got into Harlem's Y. M. C. A. theatre and later the Federal Theatre. He first played under Orson Welles's direction as Banquo in the Federal Theatre's Negro Macbeth.

Since then he has been commentator on the radio program of John Kirby's swing band and opened a fried-chicken joint--The Chicken Coop--in Harlem. "You know how it is," he says, "if I had my life to live over again I'd go back to the ring."

My Fair Ladies (by Arthur L. Jarrett & Marcel Klauber, produced by Albert Lewis & Max Siegel) tries hard to be funny about the kind of social climber who now uses Bundles for Britain as steppingstones. It doesn't succeed.

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