Sisters Under Their Skins

James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie is a hard play for a white man to take. Brutally and sometimes eloquently, it tells every white man how much every Negro hates him, and enough of them have stayed away from the ANTA Theater to put Mister Charlie in imminent danger of folding.

But two young matrons who saw the play last week were so moved that they rushed backstage after the final curtain and donated $5,000 apiece on the spot to keep Charlie going. One was Mrs. William J. Strawbridge Jr., 25; the other was her older sister, who is married to the Rev. Robert L. Pierson, a dedicated civil-rights advocate who was arrested in 1961 for participating in a bus station pray-in in Jackson, Miss. Both are daughters of New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and their generous and spontaneous gesture won't do Candidate Rockefeller any harm with the Negro vote.

What probably most moved the sisters was a raging soliloquy by a young actress named Diana Sands. Her lover has been murdered by a white man. Standing alone in a spotlight with the stage dark behind her, her pretty face turns visibly gaunt with agony as she hurls her love-born hate at God's "icy snow-white heaven! If He is somewhere around this fearful planet, if I ever see Him, I will spit in his face! In God's face! How dare He presume to judge a living soul . . . Oh, let me be pregnant, let me be pregnant, don't let it all be gone!"

Diana Sands is a very promising young actress, and she has had the luck to emerge at a time when, at long last, Negroes can be actors or actresses, not just entertainers or character actors playing bit parts as Uncle Toms or Mammies. In the recent past, the great Negro names in lights are identified with song and dance--Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Ethel Waters, Lena Horne--and the dramatic roles open to Negroes have generally been stereotypes or slim pickings. But suddenly there is a new range of Negro roles and a new generation of Negro actors to fill them--Sidney Poitier, James Earl Jones, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and now Diana Sands.

A handsome girl with high cheek bones, liquid eyes, and a voice like the woodwind section of an orchestra, Diana was blessed with good parents. Both her carpenter father and her milliner mother encouraged Diana in her ambition to become an actress, enrolling her in Manhattan's High School of Performing Arts. She sharpened her skill on an enviable series of supporting parts, won awards for her performance in Raisin in the Sun as a zany coed running a high fever in her frontal lobes and raves from the critics for her performance as a whore in last season's Tiger Tiger Burning Bright. She labored in television's well-trampled vineyard, in roles ranging from one on Outer Limits ("I played a beige monster") to a brilliant characterization of a bereaved mother on East Side, West Side. Next fall she will have her first Broadway lead, in a new play called Wedding Band by Negro Playwright Alice Childress--about an interracial love affair.

Diana is so serious about her work that she was even pleased when a voice in the audience booed her recently during a curtain call. "That's somebody I've reached," she said. Smiling at herself, she added: "I'm not saying that booing is my favorite sound. I also like it when they applaud."

They do plenty of that.

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