Black folks have grown weary of trying to educate white folks about racism. Aside from those black people who consider it a waste of time, others are suspicious that Whitey is seeking power, which, in the motto of the military, is “Know your enemy.”

As a member of that discredited class, the white liberals, I harbor the droll notion that a proper education may correct human error and, further, that it is the white man's burden to educate himself about himself. One of th,e best mirrors a white man can find is the glass of black-and-white theatre history. The misshapen images found in this cracked mirror makes it all the more valuable. White people can see themselves clearly awry, distorting the image of the black man into grotesqueries.

For many years California has been considered a land of Canaan for black people. As one of the last frontiers in this country, the Golden State has been viewed as a place of unending sunshine, opportunity, and material fulfillment. The use of blacks in the Hollywood-based film centers was frequently viewed as opportunity rather than exploitation. It took the social turmoil of the 1960's to awaken many blacks in California to the fact that their plight was little different from that of their Southern relative or Eastern brother, that their sunlit cities were becoming crumbling ghettos ringed by white suburbs.

Black-run theatres were the answer of some, as the arts became a vehicle for informing, unifying and inspiring black people. Between the years 1964 and 1968, a number of groups were established, many still functioning today. This report is based on eight of these groups, all originally located in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas during the late sixties and early seventies.

It is difficult to write on the National Black Theatre for this theatre cannot be categorized. To categorize it would limit its function and hinder its performance. For The National Black Theatre is not just a theatre. It is much more. It is a “Temple of Liberation, designed to preserve, maintain and perpetuate the richness of the black life-style.” This “temple” is partly formed by the resident acting company and liberation workshops, which are designed to promote positive black values. The workshops offer courses in evolutionary movement/dance, meditation, spiritual release, liberation theory and practice, numerology, astrology and ideology. Certainly, this is an indication that the scope of The National Black Theatre encompasses more than performance. Every Sunday, the theatre gives a symposium in which they present major artists, thinkers and scholars to the Harlem community.

Black theatre ain't no easy thing. That's the first problem. Mainly because it means a whole group of black people coming together for a long time to decide on what a black theatre is and then to get one going. And to keep it going. Now I'm not trying to come down on any of the myriad number of small groups that are no longer with us today, but let's face it, the reality of black theatre has got to be more than a gleam in some director's eye.

It's people. Simple as that. It can't be the sets, because street theatre takes place virtually without any. It can't be the plays because some of the new rituals have a decidedly impromptu and spontaneous nature. It can't be the foundation grants—if it were that, we'd really be in trouble! It's people.

Film has become a threat to small community theatre groups, such as those in Harlem. Even a group like the New Lafayette, which has an international reputation and presents three to four major plays a year, has found its best productions playing to half-empty houses. Despite maintaining high artistic standards, black theatre groups have encountered tremendous frustration in trying to develop a large, black audience that will come back show after show. The fact is that black theatre today is not thriving—only surviving. And movies can assume a great deal of the blame.

It is estimated that blacks spend $120 million annually at the film box offices in the United States. Some 50 feature films aimed at a black audience were produced between 1970 and 1972. And an average of four a month were released over this past summer. Down the street from the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where Don't Play us Cheap spent three months, the effect of the so-called “black film boom“ on Broadway was overwhelming.

The theme of the 1936 Olympics, which was held in Berlin with considerable political overtones, was assigned to the Gruppo Sperimentazione Teatrale. The scenario that reached Mario Ricci in Rome early in 1972 called for the use of recordings, television, huge puppets, and a chorus to depict that Olympics. When sent to Ricci, the scenario had the official approval of the Olympic Arts Committee. The Italian director (with the aid of two artist friends, Carlo Montesi and Claudio Previtera) set about enthusiastically to create what he hoped would be a controversial piece. The 1972 Olympics, after all, were the first to be held in Germany since ‘36, and a great deal of European attention would naturally focus on the work and its conception.

In the portraying of athletic events, the scenario called for the repetition of such phrases as: “A (Hitler Youth) youngster must be tough as leather, hard as Krupp steel.”

The Mixed Media Company from Berlin, headed by Frank Burckner, based their piece on the work of Robert Jungk, the Austrian futurologist. The central intent of the piece was to create a debate in the mind of the spectator as to whether the world will end in disaster by the year 2000, or whether there will be international peace.

Burckner's group, numbering about 20, was especially formed for the Spielstrasse program and consisted of actors, students, workers, dancers, musicians, and puppet players. He started his piece (1976) on a platform near the Multivision Center, where the performers began to assemble the parts of what would later be a large, three-headed monster puppet. This figure symbolized capitalism, militarism and politics. The performers—some wearing elongated gold masks, military uniforms, and helmets, and others in various circus, athletic and other costumes—carried on a dialogue with the spectators, warning that the working man had to struggle to prevent his brain from being turned into a computer by the forces represented by the three-headed puppet.

Any report on Olympic Theatre would be incomplete without mention of the tremendous amount of theatre activity generated throughout West Germany by the occasion of the Games. For the most part, this activity—some of it officially connected with the athletic events through a huge program called “Olympic Summer”—involved conventional theatre fare, ranging from productions of Brecht's Mother Courage, Büchner's Danton's Death, Wedekind's The Love Potion, Hochhuth's The Midwife, to Walcott's The Dream on Monkey Mountain (performed by the Negro Ensemble Company), the Chinese shadow play San mei hua pan ying, Genet's The Balcony, and Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Although every major German city had a full Summer production schedule, most of the abovementioned plays were staged in or near Munich, Berlin, Augsburg, and Kiel.

The purpose of this piece, however, is not to survey all the theatre activity that took place in West Germany this past Summer, but to report in brief note form on some of the more interesting information I gathered on productions, playwrights and directors during the “Olympic Summer.”

Tramp, one of the recent productions of the Théâtre Laboratoire Vicinal of Brussels, clearly exemplifies the main concern of the group: a tendency toward abstraction embodied in a nonexplicit use of language/sound and an emphasis on objects and the physicality of the actor. Although related to the work of Grotowski in the austere “poverty” of its means and its attempt to exploit as fully as possible the physical presence of the performer, Tramp is quite different in its approach to literary content. While story and character have provided a core or focus for Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theatre presentations, the Vicinal has abandoned these elements almost totally. According to Frédéric Flamand, the director of Tramp and an actor in it, “the strength and magic of the play come from the concentration into a unified energy of almost-abstract scenic moments ….”

Mouchoir de Nuages (Handkerchief of Clouds) by Tristan Tzara, the leader of the Dada movement, was staged in 1924 as Dada was dying. Perhaps, as Michel Sanouillet suggests, the movement was already dead, but the first manifesto of Surrealism, the movement that replaced Dada, was not to be published until the Autumn of 1924. Handkerchief of Clouds was first performed on May 17, 1924, at the Theatre de la Cigale as part of the “Soirées de Paris,” sponsored by Count Etienne de Beaumont.