Rolling Thunder

Some actors occupy the stage; a few rule it. Some actors hold an audience; a few possess it. Some actors light up a scene; a few ignite the play. These combustible few blaze with the x factors of acting--intensity, intelligence, and authority. Theirs is a royalty apart from role, and when an Olivier, Gielgud, Nicol Williamson or Irene Papas treads the stage, their fellow actors are as rapt as the audience. Though the marquees of Broadway do not bear his name, Moses Gunn is of this regal breed.

Gunn is black and Broadway is still, racially speaking, the great white way. Nonetheless, Gunn's employment record is enviable. Since he arrived in New York from Louisiana in 1962, he has appeared in 18 productions, counting off-Broadway and Shakespeare-in-the-Park. Rarely, if ever, during that time has he received less than glowing notices in plays ranging from Genet's The Blacks to the gore-glutted Titus Andronicus in which Gunn played what he calls "the black Iago," Aaron the Moor. He will play the classic Moor, Othello, this summer at Stratford, Conn.

Assured Masculinity. Physically, Gunn is a lean six-footer who bends slightly forward from the waist as if he were bracing himself against a brisk wind. His long tapered fingers shape the air with the aristocratic command of a symphony conductor, and his voice has a resonant precision that quells any incipient coughers in the audience. Psychically, his stage personality is one of intensely contained, almost glacial calm. He understates like distant rolling thunder. Even now, many blacks are playing the professional Negro on stage, parody Uncle Toms or militant minstrels, and thus catering to the applause and approval of guilt-intoxicated whites. Gunn never does this. At 40, he has an assured masculinity that lies in his bones and not his skin.

Of all the tests that an actor has to face, range is crucial. Gunn impressively demonstrated his range in two vastly different off-Broadway performances. In Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, he played a middle-aging bull of a canecutter foreman who loses his job and his virile stud appeal at about the same time. Gunn made the man a blinded, shorn, bewildered Samson who wrenches at the pillars of his doom in one last mighty agony. In Daddy Goodness, a play about a religious con artist, Gunn fashioned a composite portrait of a store-front Father Divine, a Harlem dandy and an irresistible lecher, boozer and rogue.

The two plays were produced by the Negro Ensemble Company, founded two years ago by Actor-Playwright Douglas Turner Ward, Actor Robert Hooks and Producer Gerald Krone. The company is the apex of a genuine black breakthrough that occurred off-Broadway during the 1960s. The small theaters, mostly below 14th Street in Manhattan, were the training or proving grounds not only for Moses Gunn but for James Earl Jones (The Great White Hope) and Diana Sands (The Owl and the Pussycat"), as well as for Gloria Foster, Clarence Williams III, Cicely Tyson, Barbara Ann Teer, Rosalind Cash, Lou Gossett, Vinie Burrows, Yaphet Kotto, Hattie Winston, Nathan George, Roscoe Lee Browne and many more. Simultaneously, a band of black playwrights got their first chance to render and explore black experience to increasingly black audiences. In a sense, it has been a drama of exorcism, a casting out of white devils from black minds. LeRoi Jones' Dutchman is a prime example. A sexy, sassy white girl in a subway car flaunts herself before a softspoken, conservatively dressed black boy, goads him into venting his pent-up fury at whites, and then knifes him to death. Jones achieved his own symbolic revenge soon after in his play The Toilet where a group of black boys pummel a white boy to death and leave him with his head dangling in a high school lavatory.

Other plays have shown the depth of Negro travail. Lonnie Elder Ill's Ceremonies in Dark Old Men focuses on a pitiably poor father who tries to rear his sons in honesty only to find that the survival value of honesty in his situation is very low. In Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody, a savvy young man who idolizes an ex-con man tries to form his own black Mafia and dies in the attempt.

As Moses Gunn sees it, all of this is a great deal more than a spontaneous eruption of black playwriting talent. He feels it was always there: "What we have done is simply put a poker iron up people's behinds and have said, 'We write too.' It is said of blacks that they don't have enough training to be playwrights. But the theater is not an area that has much to do with education. It has to do with craft. Blacks have had the craft, but if a man with a potential has enough barriers put in front of him, naturally he won't develop that potential."

Why have the barriers remained so high? Says Gunn: "Power and influence on Broadway are in the hands of whites. They feel threatened at letting others get involved. Discrimination is not diabolical in intent. It is extremely difficult to adjust to the new situation, to get over ingrained prejudices and to realize that black people, whom they have labeled 'inferior,' can do the same thing that they do or do It better."

Heinous or Good. What would be a just portrayal of the Negro onstage? Gunn's answer is "the totality of black experience, to be shown as heinous or as good as they are on the basis of their humanity. In the casting of a play like The Owl and the Pussycat--and I have the highest regard for Diana Sands' performance--the white boy is a bookseller and the black girl is a prostitute, and that caters to the white man's notions about the black woman. I want to see the black woman portrayed in all the facets of her existence. In a play or a film I want to see a black man and a black woman seriously presented as falling in love and making love. We have white character actors. Why don't we see the life of Negroes over 40 portrayed onstage? Whole areas of our lives are treated as if they did not exist."

Since black roles are limited and too often trivial, should black actors strive to play traditionally white roles? Gunn feels that the term itself is misconceived: "When Shakespeare is done in South America or in India, do you believe that anyone thinks of the parts as 'white roles'? In school, everyone is taught about the universality of these roles. Yet when a black goes to theater and sees an all-white cast, he is bound to feel, 'what does this have to do with me?' You cannot imagine the psychological damage that has been done to a group who on TV, films and the stage never saw themselves represented at all. When I played Capulet, several black kids came up to me after the show and one 15-year-old said, I like that. We've never seen a black man play a role as commanding as that, and we could identify with you.' It touched me."

As to the seeming incongruity of Juliet's having a black father, Moses Gunn disputes it: "I think people are more sophisticated nowadays, and they accept that that could happen." In a sense, it has happened to Gunn. His wife Gwen is white and his daughter Kirsten, 9, is the child of his wife's former marriage.

Abiding Obsession. Moses Gunn grew up in St. Louis during the '30s, the eldest of seven children. His father was a junkman, or "ragpicker," as Gunn puts it. His mother died of pneumonia when Moses was twelve, and the family was splintered. At 17, he went to live with Mr. and Mrs. James Richie, and his foster mother Jewel Richie, an English and diction teacher, had profound and lasting influence on him. Says she: "Our house is full of books and Moses would devour them. He read books like someone who eats a loaf of bread--eats a couple of slices and then takes another. I taught him to have clipped, clear speech. I told him, 'Get your ds and ts straight. You may speak with a sort of Southern accent, but speak so that people can understand you clearly.' " Gunn regards Jewel Richie as typical of the educated middle-class blacks who would spur on a boy with talent, and help give the ghetto a sense of community. Says he: "I don't believe in making a lot of bones about poverty and the downtrodden black child and all that. Most of us didn't have an 'identity problem.' "

At high school graduation, six scholarships awaited him, and he chose all-black Tennessee State University in Nashville, where he majored in speech and drama. During one summer he helped organize a student troupe called Footlights Across Tennessee, and the group toured the black colleges of the South and Midwest playing the classics, modern plays and little-known comedies by black playwrights written in Negro dialect. Gunn was halfway through his master's thesis on "The Negro in the Theater, 1840-1960" and teaching at Louisiana's Grambling College when the itch to further his acting career won out. He went to New York and signed on as an understudy in The Blacks at $15 per week. He has been part of the off-Broadway ferment ever since.

From Visibility to Variety. On another performing front, Gunn will be seen in three films to be released this year. In The Great White Hope, he plays a prophetic black nationalist named Scipio. In a Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward film, Hall of Mirrors, Gunn will play a venal funeral director with powerful connections at city hall. He becomes one of Napoleon's generals (Gourgaud) in Eagle in a Cage, a film with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.

In the theater, it may be said that during the '60s the black actor and the black playwright achieved visibility. In the '70s, they may well achieve variety, both in probing the scope of black experience and in playing the entire canon of dramatic literature. If that happens, then by virtue of his gifts and his diligence, industry and fortitude. Moses Gunn will be a name widely known and fully honored.

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