Requiem for the '60s

By T.E. Kalem

THE TAKING OF MISS JANIE by ED BULLINS

This play begins with a black man raping a white woman. Strangely enough, it is less a brutal physical act than the saddest of requiems. The play ends with the figures of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X on a rear stage scrim being spattered with gobs of blood. Thus the rape is, to some degree, an image of the anarchic violence of the '60s.

It is also a double requiem for the defeated hopes of the '60s. As a black girl who has become a lesbian puts it: "We all failed ... and by failing ourselves we failed in the test of the times. We had so much going for us ... so much potential ... Do you realize it, man? We were the youth of our times ... And we blew it. Blew it completely. Look where it all ended ... We just turned out lookin' like a bunch of punks and freaks."

Yet it would be quite wrong to think of The Taking of Miss Janie as a dirge. Black Playwright Ed Bullins often uses a party as the central structure of his plays, and he does it again here. Even when it is slightly sick, a Bullins party jives. The people talk a vivid street idiom with the fluent opulence of jazz. Their moods dance. They make hot, sly, funny, drunken, sexy scenes together that have the cumulative impact of a seduction. Then they fall apart in revealing stop-motion monologues as if a petal were trying to be a flower.

Street Stud. The petals are all bruised in Miss Janie: an ice-cool, second-rate white guitarist; a cocky, unconsciously comic black nationalist; an ex-beatnik Jewish poet adrift on drugs; a dutiful black wife two-timed by her best friend, who comes through the back door every time she goes out the front.

In the same ways, the white heroine Janie (Hilary Jean Beane) is the most pathetic of all. Bullins has drawn a masterly portrait of a befuddled, innocent, college-educated liberal. She professes to admire the poems of Monty (Adeyami Lythcott), her eventual rapist. But it is clear that she is drawn to a black man as by an intoxicating musk and a not-so-fantasied danger. Bullins' Monty is a street stud who has climbed out of the ghetto without shedding his skin. With "Miss Janie," as he tauntingly calls her, Monty does not so much wish to make a score as to even it.

In a beautifully modulated performance, Hilary Jean Beane makes an acting debut of striking promise. Dropping her real middle name is the only improvement one can think of. Adeyami Lythcott plays Monty with swaggering ease and power, and the entire supporting cast is exemplary. This is an auspicious beginning for Joseph Papp's plan to bring fresh plays into Lincoln Center's Newhouse Theater, some by black and Hispanic playwrights. . T.E. Kalem

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