Feeling Good by Feeling Bad

"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 bad.

The 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 in him.

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.

His 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 for the commutation of his jail sentence. Broody, badgered and in a kind of psychic agony, he finally turns on his white woman as the symbol of all his woes and throws her out. In a sequence of tear-jerking melodrama rather than honest emotional power, she commits suicide. Cowed and crushed, Jefferson accedes to his arranged defeat in Havana.

The play has the aspect of a minor saga, but Edwin Sherin has directed it like a stampede: all decibels and no deftness. Either everyone shouts, or everyone postures in animated tableaux that look like posters left over from some social-protest movement of the '30s. Ostensibly pro-Negro, the play peculiarly caters to the stereotyped image of the Negro as forever singing, dancing, fighting, drinking and wenching. As for the question of racial injustice, the play provides a kind of false catharsis. It is the equivalent of appointing a congressional committee to investigate an air crash. It eases the conscience without facing the tragedy.

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