BLACK DRAMA STUDY
NOTE
Tom Dent's one-act Ritual
Murder (1967), first performed in 1976, is a classic of Black South drama .
Dent minimized plot and depended on the
Narrator's investigation and the
individual testimonials of type-cast
characters (the wife, the public school teacher, the boss, the
anti-poverty program administrator, the mother and father, the chief of police, a black psychiatrist,
the victim and the murderer) to sketch a
communal story. His verbal economy is
effective. The only action is focused speech.
Spectators can experience the play as an investigative tool, a
device for analyzing a familiar
event in modern life: African American men killing African American
men. Ritual
Murder figuratively incorporates its audience. It provokes them to speak at the end of the
performance. Even spectators who refuse
to speak become characters in a theatrical ritual. Ultimately, Ritual Murder is metadrama, i.e., a play
that explains how a play may have a socially engaged purpose. It is an example
of how a play can create a temporary, democratic community.
It is judiciousness that Dent remixed
of some elements of tragedy as described in Aristotle's Poetics with some of the dark, biting humor Bertolt Brecht used in writing the libretto
for The
Threepenny Opera (1928), for which Kurt Weill wrote the atonal music. The
aesthetic effect of Ritual Murder is cool and unsettling. It does not provoke fear and pity; its
performance does not lead spectators to have any feeling of catharsis, of being purged and cleansed
. On the contrary, because one witnesses
the collection of opinions about the crime rather than any visual details about
Joe Brown's knifing his friend James Roberts on a Saturday night, one feels
moved to have compassionate disinterest.
One does experience, however,
the frustration involved with clarifying a recurring social problem that defies
resolution.
That Ritual Murder
exposes its own architecture and pricks what might be called
"consciousness of social paralysis" with maximum economy makes it one
of the more unusual examples of black drama written for communal consumption
during the Black Arts Movement. One-act
plays by Ben Caldwell, Marvin X, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Ted Shine; longer plays
by Alice Childress, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins; the acclaimed works
of August Wilson and Ntozake Shange and
Suzann Lori-Parks might seem more typical of the diversity which characterizes
black drama from the Black Arts Movement to the present.
Since the 1960s, when
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and others formulated ideas regarding a
revolutionary theatre, black drama has
successfully defied easy classification.
It has not succeeded in revolutionizing contemporary audiences. It has exploited the futurism of mixed
dramatic genres, structures that are
neither purely tragic nor comic nor overtly realistic . Spectators are often uncertain whether a
given play is designed to entertain, to propagandize or politicize, to induce outrage
or to inform, or to achieve all these aesthetic
ends simultaneously. And few of them
would give a damn about contemplating what black drama means. Spectators are
most often happy with the thrills provided by exaggerated spectacle, thrills
which undermine revolutionary potentials.
Scholarly study of black drama, on the other hand, can
require that we account both for the
formal or textual treatment of subject matter in scripts as well as potential
or actual performance, that we conjoin analyses which bespeak ideological disharmony,
and that we put drama in historical perspectives. The highly visualized, recent instances of
black drama as film or television programs, when we would be active rather than
passive spectators, obligate us to use combinations of visual, literary or verbal,
and aural literacies. We have daunting work to do when the drama is a
translation from fiction into film, as is the case with Their Eyes Were Watching God, Beloved, The Color Purple, Long Black
Song, and PUSH transformed into Precious . The difficulty
of the task may explain, in part, why scholarly discussions of black drama seem
to be remarkably few in number when they
are counted against either standardized
or innovative criticisms of black poetry and black fiction. It is easier to witness instances of black
drama than to articulate what one has witnessed. And it must be noted that witnessing black
drama by way of television or cinema is more common than attending a live
performance. Electronic or digital commercialization of black drama encourages a
certain passivity, a loss of desire to explore nuanced differences between the
dramas of everyday living and crafted, oppositional drama which defamiliarizes what we take for
granted and provokes discomforting thought. The integrity of the drama as script
counts for little under the current pressures of satisfying audiences and earning
profits. And the path most often taken
is a reductive discussion of black drama as narrative rather than as
exceptionally complex mimesis.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
November 2, 2015
