Dark Side of the Masque

The escaped convict in this week's production of The Desperate Hours at the Mineola Playhouse on Long Island is a Negro--Sammy Davis Jr. When first seen on Broadway seven years ago, he was white--Paul Newman. Davis' talents give the role a snarling power it has seldom had since Newman played it, and it scarcely matters that the convict has changed his race. All the same, Davis' presence in the play is remarkable; it is one of the very few times that a Negro actor has stepped into a part specifically written for a white man. Negro actors are almost always type-cast by skin color alone, denied parts well within their talents and within an audience's capacity to find them believable.

Negro Heavies. There are signs that the barriers may at last be breaking down.

While Davis was rehearsing with a mixed cast on Long Island, Dorothy Dandridge made her debut at the Highland Park, III., Music Theater as West Side Story's Anita, a Puerto Rican role. Such occasional successes only heighten the general sense of frustration that Negro actors share. Dorothy Dandridge and Sammy Davis in summer stock can be accounted for by their great box office appeal. But for the journeyman Negro actor--and even for such established Negro stars as Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil and Diahann Carroll--there is a disconcerting scarcity of parts. "It's very discouraging," says Miss Dandridge. "Sometimes they'll hire actresses and shade them with makeup until they're down to the color I am to play a role I could play as well." Negroes of undeniable talent are welcome in opera--no one thinks it odd to find Leontyne Price singing Tosca, despite the white singer in the romantic lead opposite her. The ballet, too, has recognized Negro talent and given dancers parts that ignore their color: at the New York City Ballet Arthur Mitchell dances a wide range of the repertory, including pas de deux with white ballerinas. The historical distance and artistic level of the classics give roles an existence apart from those who play them, an advantage that modern theater unavoidably lacks.

But despite its tradition of realism, modern American theater--stage, films and television--has been slow to grant Negroes a place. One in every ten Americans is Negro, yet most scripts call for no Negroes at all. "How can you have a play called Subways Are for Sleeping" protests Sammy Davis, "and not have Negroes in it? The subways are full of Negroes." Reluctance to cast Negroes has two chief sources. "Either the producers are worried about how the South will like it," Davis says, "or they're afraid to make a Negro a 'heavy' because they think the N.A.A.C.P. or somebody won't like it.

It's equally stupid on both sides." The roles that remain are scarce and sometimes harmful to the actor, and many Negro actors can find no work at all. "Qualified people are not even allowed to audition," says Diahann Carroll, star of the Broadway musical, No Strings, which owes its faint critical success entirely to her.

Extra Cats. Negroes do not want parts that would be visually ludicrous or uncomfortable. Casting a Negro in a romantic movie opposite a white star would unquestionably demand that the script explain his presence, if not concentrate on it. A Negro actor playing the part of a president of a major corporation would probably require "white face" to be realistic--a clearly ridiculous possibility. But many roles remain: doctors, detectives, soldiers, salesmen--all the postures and places in which a Negro might logically expect to find himself. "The actors are there, they're waiting, they could do it, but they never get a part," Davis says.

"The way you got to do it is bring a couple of guys with you. I'm a star. I can make some demands, and one of them always is to make room for a couple other cats." Davis has had more luck than any other Negro in playing major roles that have little or nothing to do with race. He played the title role in Broadway's Mr.

Wonderful six years ago ("It shocked a lot of people, but then they said,--'Yeah, O.K.' "), as he will next year in a musical version of Clifford Odets' Golden Boy.

"There's a basic fairness in this country the audiences have had right along," he says. "But only a few producers are hip to it."

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