Bar Stool in a Black Hell

Here is a black panther of a play. No Place to Be Somebody stalks the off-Broadway stage as if it were an urban jungle, snarling and clawing with uninhibited fury at the contemporary fabric of black-white and black-black relationships.

The milieu is virtually the message, and Playwright Charles Gordone knows it like the black of his hand. The setting is a small West Village bar. If one imagines a corrosively militant Saroyan writing a play called The Time of Your Death, the atmospherics of the place will be grasped immediately. But "Johnny's Bar" is no oasis for gentle daydreamers. It is a foxhole of the color war--full of venomous nightmares, thwarted aspirations and trigger-quick tempers, a place where the napalm of hurt has seared each man's skin. The jukebox rumbles with hard rock; a dope-addled white simp serves drinks when he is not rattling drumsticks along the bar in a syncopated frenzy.

Charley Fever. This hell away from hell is run by Johnny Williams (Nathan George), a black pimp who is as cold and dangerous as a switchblade. His whores saunter in and out between tricks, and the white one loves him. Johnny wants to challenge the Mafia, which is crimping his style, by assembling a "Black Mafia" to rule his own turf. An ex-con father figure who has gone straight (Walter Jones) warns Johnny that he has contracted "Charley fever" --that is, trying to beat the white man at his own game. The fever inevitably proves fatal, and finally the stage is as loaded with corpses as the bloodiest Elizabethan tragedy.

The mechanics of melodrama infest the story to its detriment. The tough white whore (Susan G. Pearson) commits suicide offstage out of unrequited love for Johnny, an event that is distinctly implausible. At times the play meanders without a visible sense of direction. Despite such flaws, the drama ticks with menace and, for such an abrasive subject, is unexpectedly and explosively funny. Gordone has expertly oiled the sly and sassy tongues by which black puts down his fellow black, and the cast's phrasing of these expletives is impeccable.

If the characters are not quite solidly realized, their sentiments most emphatically are. A frustrated actor (Ron O'Neal), who is light enough to cross the color line but not dark enough to be hired as a token Negro in a Broadway show, delivers a bravura monologue on what whites expect of blacks that is hilarious, yet drenched in the acid insights of a people inured to pain. Gordone is too honest to lie about a bright brotherly tomorrow, but in thunder and in laughter he tells the racial truth about today.

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