New Play in Harlem

Anna Lucasta (by Philip Yordan; adapted by Harry Wagstaff Gribble and Abram Hill; produced by the American Negro Theater). The night was sweltering. The "theater" was an oven of a public-library basement. The seats were hard camp chairs. The company was a small, experimental, rehearse-after-work group. The play itself was billed as the one about the prostitute who attempts to go straight. It looked as if the audience and actors alike were in for an awful beating.

The curtain rose on the prologue--the girl's family coming to a crummy Brooklyn bar for clues of her whereabouts. The audience ceased squirming. The story flashed back three years upon the girl's family after they had pitched her out--a varied clan portrayed with crude, lusty humor. The audience forgot to fan themselves with their programs. Then, back at the bar again, the girl herself (Hilda Moses Simms) swished in. What stopped them first was her beauty. But what held them the next minute was her born stage presence, and as the scenes unfolded, the skill to create a character. The girl found a decent boy who married her; loving him and knowing her own perverse, unquenchable nature, she left him, went back to the streets, died classically by throwing herself in the river. More of the time than seemed possible, she remained persuasive. And an unusually talented company backed her up.

But the play had something, too. Anything but a good play, fissured with faults, encrusted with crudities, it was yet vivid theater. It had also, along with the sprawl, some of the scope of a novel. Its characters did too much and sometimes talked too fancily, but--escaping the prison of a rigid stage technique--they had an absurd, audacious vitality. Best of all, perhaps, Playwright Yordan cared about his people, and in his fumbling way saw life a little as greater writers have seen it--not just as a problem or struggle, but as a changing and clouded dream.

Founded four years ago, the American Negro Theater wants, above all, to deal realistically with its race. "With few exceptions," it insists, "plays about Negroes have been two grades above the minstrel stage--the cork is missing, but the spirit is there." Many of the company, including Actress Simms, have been at universities but never on Broadway. Most of them are war workers who have kept the A.N.T. alive with a slice of their earnings. Last April, however, the Theater was saved from shoestringing along for a while by a $9,500 grant from the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Along with problem dramas, A.N.T. has produced the current Broadway farce, Three's a Family and has gaily spoofed Strivers' Row, Harlem's uppity Park Avenue. Says A.N.T.: "When a race can laugh at its own foibles, it has really become civilized."

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