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April 24, 1964
Theater: 'Blues for Mister Charlie' By HOWARD TAUBMAN
ames Baldwin has written a play with fires of fury in its belly, tears of anguish in its eyes and a roar of protest in its throat.
"Blues for Mister Charlie," which stormed into the ANTA Theater last night, is not a tidy play. Its structure is loose, and it makes valid points as if they were clich�s. But it throbs with fierce energy and passion. It is like a thunderous battle cry.
On a larger scale it resembles "Waiting for Lefty" of three decades ago, when Clifford Odets rallied labor to its rights. "Blues for Mister Charlie" is a summons to arms in this generation's burning cause--the establishment in this country of the Negro's full manhood, with all the perquisites of that simple and lofty station
You need only to open the program to discover what is on Mr. Baldwin's mind. For there he tells you that his play is "dedicated to the memory of Medgar Evers, and his widow and his children, and to the memory of the dead children of Birmingham."
The title also informs you of Mr. Baldwin's viewpoint. "Mister Charlie" is the phrase the Negro uses for the white man. His play sings the blues for the white man's moral crisis as much as for the Negro's frustration and agony.
There is a moment midway in the play when this point is made with cutting sharpness. The reserved, dignified Rev. Meridian Henry, pastor of the Negro church in a small Southern town, dares to ask the hard question of Parnell, the one decent white man: Have they been friends because Parnell thinks of Meridian as his favorite Uncle Tom? And then the minister warns that truth must be faced--for the white man's sake, not the Negro's.
Using a free form, which weaves in and out the present and the past, Mr. Baldwin is telling the story of Richard Henry, the pastor's son, and of his shooting by a poor, dull- witted redneck. Although Mr. Baldwin has a courtroom for much of his last act, he does not worry about the niceties of legal procedure. Similarly throughout the play he does not bother with routine devices of realism and suspense.
The fundamental forces that lead to such a crime are what concern him. Even more he seeks to express the outraged thoughts and emotions that blazed within seemingly placid Negroes for so many deceptive years. He reaches his most searing moment of preachment at the end of the second act when the Reverend Henry speaks a eulogy over his son's coffin.
Percy Rodriguez reads this speech with consuming intensity. For it is not a lamentation but the wrath of the prophet. "What shall we tell our children?," he cries in a voice of doom. "Learn to walk again like men," he shouts, like a trumpet call. "Like men! Amen!"
In a crucial scene between Richard and Lyle, the redneck, Mr. Baldwin remembers his duty as a dramatist not to take the easy course. Al Freeman Jr. is a Richard who has come back from a stay in the North seething with rebellion. He enters Lyle's store, and challenges Rip Torn's proud, stupid Lyle with an insolence that would infuriate a better white man or even a dark-skinned one. Both men play their roles admirably, and they charge this scene with electricity.
Mr. Baldwin knows how the Negroes think and feel, but his inflexible, Negro-hating Southerners are stereotypes. Southerners may talk and behave as he suggests, but in the theater they are caricatures.
On the other hand, Parnell, played with touching decency and humility by Pat Hingle, has a tender and harrowing recollection of his love for a Negro girl of 17 when he was 18 and of the terrible moment when her mother, a servant in his house, discovered them. This is Mr. Baldwin at the top of his form.
There are memorable dramatic fragments scattered through "Blues for Mister Charlie." Among the best are the vignettes in which key characters speak their thoughts aloud before they testify.
Diana Sands as the girl Richard loved has an impassioned incantation to the fulfillment he has brought her, and she reads it with shattering emotion. Ann Wedgeworth as Lyle's frightened wife, Rosetta Le Noire as Richard's wise, unforgetting grandmother and John McCurry as a Negro who runs a bar perform with touching credibility.
Burgess Meredith's staging of this novelistic script with its constantly shifting episodes and times has admirable fluidity. The changes have the smoothness of a dance. Moods are counterpoint impressively, the white folks meet in Lyle' parlor on a Sunday morning and spew out their sweet poison while in the rear the Negroes surround the coffin and chant somberly "God's walkin' on the water."
Feder's simple open stage is perfectly suited to this treatment, and his lighting is a powerful dramatic agent.
The Actors Studio Theater, which has been stumbling in darkness all season, finally has arrived at something worth doing. Although Mr. Baldwin has not yet mastered all the problems and challenges of the theater, "Blues for Mister Charlie" brings eloquence and conviction to one of the momentous themes of our era.
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