New Play in Manhattan

Set My People Free (by Dorothy Heysvard; produced by the Theatre Guild) rewrites a forgotten episode of history--an aborted Negro uprising in early 19th Century Charleston. It is honest and occasionally eloquent. Yet the drama it promises never quite blazes forth, and its large themes are never really vitalized.

The play tells of Denmark Vesey (Juano Hernandez), a slave who earned his freedom and conspired to set his people free. Secretly gaining thousands of followers, he particularly sought out an influential head slave named George Wilson (Canada Lee), who was torn between his race and a kind master. In a nightmare of conflicting loyalties, George blurted out the plot and betrayed his people.

The co-author of Porgy, far from providing here a crude checkerboard of right & wrong, shows a humane understanding of both blacks and whites, of liberator and deliberator. At its strongest, in the well-acted clashes between Denmark and George, the play becomes resonant and vivid. But, itself a slave to history, it sprawls and jerks across twelve years and ten scenes, and, lacking a center, becomes a lumpy mixture of chronicle, drama, melodrama and tragedy. What is most effective is the conflict between the two men, but what arouses most interest is the conflict within one of them. The main trouble is that the play seems "written," that it lacks the body heat of reality.

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