Brechtian Harlem

By T.E.K.

When the dim lightning of mediocre minds strikes the same place twice, that place is invariably Broadway. Two weeks ago, the first musical ever based on a record album, the less than divine Jesus Christ Superstar, opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre. Last week the second musical based on an album, Melvin Van Peebles' Aint Supposed to Die a Natural Death, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Catastrophes traditionally come in threes, but let us pray that the real Jesus Christ will spare us that.

Aint is a jumbled-up, quasi-Brechtian Harlem re-do of Elmer Rice's Street Scene. Manhattan has grown seedier, in or out of Harlem, since Rice wrote. The people talk tougher now, and are more frantic, more terribly frustrated.

Van Peebles, famed for his movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (TIME, Aug. 16), has brought his bile into the theater, but left his craft at the stage door. Aint is a series of street sketches featuring pimps, whores, hustlers, drug addicts, corrupt cops, Panthers and jailbirds--all the characters who would be promptly denounced as racist stereotypes if a white playwright dared to suggest their existence. Inevitably, there are quite a few moments of truth, a quite poignant one when a country boy (Ralph Wilcox) finds out that his sister (Barbara Alston) who fled to the city has become a prostitute. But the book is torpid, the music is undistinguished and the words are undistinguishable, thanks to a faulty sound system and a resolutely amateurish cast.

To try to dramatize the agony of black confinement is fair enough, but nowadays the ghetto can be as chic as Fifth Avenue. In their self-indulgent militancy, black playwrights of Van Peebles' frenzied stamp like to think that they are raising welts on The Man's conscience. Actually, they are catering to a masochistic mea culpa claque and assorted liberal breast beaters.

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