Black on Black

By T.E. Kalem

THE RIVER NIGER

by JOSEPH A.WALKER

In the past couple of seasons, the plays presented by off-Broadway's Negro Ensemble Company have taken on the shape of consciousness-raising sessions. More and more, they are specifically and unselfconsciously aimed at black audiences. The plays seem to be asking blacks to alert themselves to what has been done to them in the past, what they are doing to and for themselves in the present, and what they should hope for in the future. The dramas still represent Whitey as a bitter, hateful obscenity on the face of the earth, but that is not where their ultimate emphasis lies. Black dramatists and other thoughtful blacks are gradually shifting away from defining blacks vis-`a-vis whites and embracing the more arduous job of defining blacks vis-`a-vis blacks. The search for identity begins at home, amid one's own family, one's own people, one's own race. The task of forging a self is solitary, beyond the help or hindrance of color.

At its loftiest level, that is what The River Niger is about. It infrequently reaches that lofty plain. Most of the time it is on the level of a noisy Harlem family brouhaha, copiously drenched with sentiment and melodrama. Item: a sweet, devoted mother (Roxie Roker), dying of cancer. Item: her returned Air Force lieutenant son (Les Roberts), who regards his military insignia as bars of servitude and may revert to gang war. Item: a hilarious lush of a grandmother (Frances Foster), who claims American Indian blood and can hide her firewater better than she can hold it.

These and other characters have been given a touching humanity by Playwright Joseph A. Walker in his third full-length play. They have also been generously lathered in the soap-opera suds common to Clifford Odets' beleaguered Jewish-family protest sagas of Depression days. Nowadays, an emotional bath is a novelty in our theater and rather bracing. .T.E. Kalem

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