Michael Alcide, Fernand Auguste, Ryan Jillian Kilpatrick, Chima Chikazunga, Darren Jerome Lamb, Cherith Scott.                       Photos by Gerry Goodstein

                                                        by Eugene Paul

There’s a prideful fervor in this Atlanta Black Theater Festival production of Dutchman which goes beyond the fact that Obie winner Dutchman is having yet another showing in the place that spawned it, New York City, the play still full of its ugly, splendiferous, righteous rage, still smack in the faces of bosom buddies and bigots alike. Amiri Baraka was not yet Amiri Baraka, he was still endearing Leroi Jones, suffering friends and family who were seething in sympathy with him as well as against him for his deliberately provocative brazen behavior, most of it in words on paper where it stuck, where it was hard to ignore. This is his last work as Leroi Jones.

This new, rampagingly incoherent staging by director Woodie King Jr. is right in keeping with the play’s fifty year history. If anything, although director King’s efforts lend little enlightenment to Jones’s still potent rage, it clearly carries the message that nowhere near enough has happened to promote healing and probably never will. Jones, ever the chameleon, came down firmly on both sides, at war with the white world he spurned yet cashing in disdainfully using the core enemy, capitalism, for his purposes.  Separately, he loved his half white, half Jewish children, -- he divorced his white, Jewish wife, Hettie Jones, --, separately, he loved his black on black children by his second wife, Amina Baraka, but he couldn’t separate his life from his work.

Michael Alcide, Steven Palmore, Cherith Scott

Dutchman is basically a one act, two character play set in the heat of summer in the sweltering environment underground of the human cargo carrier, the subway, a setting meant to remind us of the cruelly packed slave ships which transported their suffering cargo to the New World. Ironically, set designer Chris Cumberbatch gives us a wide open surrealistically simple subway car in which Clay (Michael Alcide) rides, representing the modern, 1960’s acclimated Negro, groomed, educated, polite.  He is alone in the spacious car, until other riders, in white masks, representing the ghosts of white passengers, enter.  There is no interaction until a woman he has seen on the platform comes into the car.  She is Lula (Ryan Jillian Kilpatrick), a white woman as indicated by her cute, white mask and platinum hair, sullenly flirtatious, capricious, amoral.  She represents white, dominant America.

She flirts with him, toys with him, seduces him, scorns him for his capitulation to white ways, breaks him. He bursts into a tirade reverting to primitivism.  The war between the races, the war between the societies, becomes the ever present war between the sexes.  And for solutions?  Jones gives none. Except murder.  As he has both sides express it: the blacks must kill all the whites before the whites kill all the blacks.

The Jones play is now the Amiri Baraka play, part of curricula world wide. Dutchman put Baraka and his rage on the world stage.  He began the Black Nationalist Movement, eager to match the standing of Malcolm X.  When that did not happen, he switched to Marxism. Among his inconsistencies was the single consistency: a devotion to “words that kill”. As he grew older, he became a grand old man, Dutchman his flagship, accommodated by, accommodated to that whole white world he wanted to kill.  Or did he? He already knew his legend was in place.  What better ending?  He died, January 9, 2014, the stories still swirling.  He is a figure of Black pride. 

Director King, long at work in black theater, separate, Balkanized, goes out of his way to support this separateness.  He has cast lovely Ryan Jillian Kilpatrick as Lula, the evil white goddess, killer of black men, although we remain fully aware that Kilpatrick is not white. Costume designer Carolyn Adams has dressed her in red, white and blue, another much more obvious comment. The confusions, thus enhanced, are truly Baraka agit prop placed by King in the hands of his willing but unpolished company, diminishing the power of Jones’s rage in a myriad of details he has not attempted to conquer.  The best, truest, sweetest moment is the unabashed delight the cast demonstrates at curtain bow. The Castillo Theatre, in its handsome location, provides a caring production and a courteous, welcoming staff.  It’s thirty years on and growing.  Try them.                                                    

Dutchman. At the Castillo Theatre, 543 West 42^nd Street. Tickets: call toll free: 866-811-4111.  Thru Mar 8.