Spasms of Fury

The Toilet and The Slave, by LeRoi Jones, are one-act spasms of fury. Naked hate, like naked love, is very hard to project or sustain on a stage, but Negro Playwright Jones can do it with venomous intensity.

The Toilet takes place in the lavatory of a boys' high school. There are seven urinals. A Negro boy begins the play by using one of them; near the play's end, a white boy's bloodied head lies in one of them. In between, Jones makes it abundantly clear that he would gladly consign every white man's bloodied head to that identical place.

The form of the play is an act of vengeance. The white boy, Karolis (Jaime Sanchez), has written what can only be construed as a homosexual love letter to a Negro boy named Foots (Hampton Clanton). Foots's eight Negro buddies brutally punch, kick and stomp on Karolis. Directed with nightmarish brilliance by Leo Garen, the play moves like a street-gang rumble. Even mock games with rolls of toilet paper seem to crackle with terroristic menace. The Negroes spew the vilest of obscenities at Karolis and each other. On any absolute scale, the dialogue is air pollution of the highest scatological and pornographic density ever recorded on a U.S. stage. Relative to the play, it is an act of verbal violence, matching and intensifying the drama's physical violence. Just before the play ends, Foots cradles Karolis in his arms on an otherwise empty stage and bathes his battered face, as if to imply that this is an interracial love that dares not speak its name.

The Slave is essentially a kind of Greenwich Villagey talkfest. War has broken out between Negroes and whites, and with the sound of machine-gun and artillery fire in the near distance, a Negro military leader (Al Freeman Jr.) revisits his former white wife, who is now married to a white history professor. Ostensibly, he has come to see his two daughters, possibly to kill them, but mostly to gloat and watch the whites cringe before his oft-waved pistol. At one point, the professor asks if there will be more love or beauty or knowledge in the world after a Negro victory. "That was not ever the point," the Negro retorts. "The point is that you had your chance, darling; now these other folks have theirs."

Jones's plays belong to a relatively new dramatic genre that has been called the theater of cruelty. The theater of cruelty aims to punish an audience, flog it, and maybe even make it sick at its stomach. But which audience? Jones seems like a man who needs an enemy so badly that the nearest friend will do. His true target in these plays is the well-intentioned liberal intellectual with namby-pamby notions of cozy, overnight, instant brotherhood. The Toilet's depiction of Negroes as semi-cretinous urban cannibals is calculated to affront precisely those white racial ameliorators who passionately argue that Negroes are not like that at all.

Like Jean Genet, Jones, who is rnarried to a white woman, has the gift for projecting his fantasy life directly onto a stage. His chief fantasy is retaliation. In these plays, the Negro has the gun. He gives the orders, he slugs, he kills, he wins. Dramatically, the virtue of this is that action follows idea like a dagger thrust without the shadow of explanations, descriptions and rationalizations that fall on drama like a blight.

Jones is an excitingly gifted playwright, but as a Negro writer he is edging toward three pitfalls. The first danger is white tolerance, the avid desire of the white masochists to be openly reviled for the indignities and injustices they feel whites have visited upon the Negro. The playwright who falls into the trap of doing the reviling loses his intellectual honesty and ends up practicing prejudice in reverse. Secondly, a playwright cannot afford to fall into his own foaming rage. To translate experience into art, he must achieve the same detachment from his own wounds that a surgeon would show. Finally, he must be leary of topical sensationalism. A playwright whose moving finger writes only of the temper of his times will find that all his passion will not bring back to life a single word he wrote, once the temper of that time has cooled.

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