Black Monarch

By T.E. Kalem

PAUL ROBESON by Phillip Hayes Dean

This is the first play in recent memory to be denounced by a committee prior to being appraised by the critics. The National Ad Hoc Committee to End the Crimes Against Paul Robeson took a two-page ad in the Jan. 11 issue of Variety to proclaim: "We in the Black community have repeatedly seen the giants among us reduced from REVOLUTIONARY heroic dimensions to manageable, sentimentalized size. If they cannot be co-opted in life, it is simple enough to tailor their images in death." Signatories included a virtual Who's Who of black artists, educators and political figures. Among them: James Baldwin, Julian Bond, Nikki Giovanni, Alvin Ailey and Coretta Scott King.

Paul Robeson Jr., who has led the protest, feels that his father is portrayed in the play as a buffoon rather than a serious artist: "They can't portray a black hero of Robeson's proportions, so they cut him down to much smaller size so it'll play in Peoria and Boston."

Blacks are divided as to the protest. "It depresses me," says Critic Clayton Riley, "that some people who signed the statement haven't seen the play. That's just insupportable if they haven't seen the work." The man who wrote Paul Robeson, Black Playwright Phillip Hayes Dean, feels an understandable resentment: "We're getting into a very dangerous thing when we have a committee on un-black activities. They wanted a photograph and I gave them a painting."

Actually, Paul Robeson, at Broadway's Lunt-Fontanne Theater, is neither a photograph nor a painting, but more like a sidewalk artist's quick sketch that captures a credible likeness without achieving the dimensions of art. In fairness to Dean's work, witness a recent attempt to depict a white of heroic proportions onstage. If ever there was a trivialization of one of the world's heroines, consider the stage portrait of Golda Meir in Golda, from which only Anne Bancroft emerges with honor. The world may be a stage, but the movers and shapers of the world are too remote from a playgoer's experience to grip one onstage. Knowing that, Playwright Dean--who has a fine play. The Sty of the Blind Pig, to his credit--tried to humanize Robeson (James Earl Jones), and to some extent, he succeeds. One gets a strong sense of the passion of a slave's son to elevate his people and bring them the dignity all men should possess.

Unfortunately, the format of this one-man show resembles a 25th-reunion class yearbook, a precis of achievements: third black student to attend Rutgers, All-America football player. Phi Beta Kappa, brilliant Columbia law school graduate hidden in the rear offices of a prestige firm so that it would not lose face (white), vocal monarch of the concert stage and compelling actor, Soviet enthusiast, victim of the House Un-American Activities Committee at the onset of the McCarthy era, but unbowed in courage.

Jones falters as a singer but is formidable in all else. Pity his understudy if he has one. Jones trivializes nothing, but even a giant could scarcely shoulder this particular load. -- T.E. Kalem

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