Ben Caldwell

Caldwell, Ben (b. 1937), dramatist of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, known particularly for the sardonic style he employed in examining the lives of African Americans. Born in Harlem, Ben Caldwell had an early engagement with the arts. Having come of age in the 1960s, he was one of many sensitive and creative young African Americans to have been influenced by the work of Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), who read Caldwell's plays and encouraged him.

During 1965 and 1966 Caldwell lived in Newark, New Jersey, with Baraka and several other artists; he refers to this time as his “Newark Period,” in which he wrote Hypnotism (1969) and his most critically acclaimed work, The Militant Preacher (1967), which later appeared in A Black Quartet: Four New Plays under the title Prayer Meeting, or The First Militant Minister (produced, 1969; published, 1970). The remaining plays are by other outstanding Black Arts playwrights: Baraka, Ron Milner, and Ed Bullins.

Caldwell's plays uniquely satirize not only the racism and the naïveté of whites, but also those African Americans who seek either to emulate whites, be unduly materialistic, or anchor themselves to stereotypes. Some of these works also employ revolutionary rhetoric common to the period, but as Stanley Crouch suggests, Caldwell's movement to agitprop from a deftly crafted concatenation of satirical moments renders the whole formulaic, clinical, and trite.

Many of his works are very short one-act plays; four of these, appearing in a special issue of Drama Review (vol. 12, 1967–1968), occupy only eleven pages. Caldwell's great power, however, is his ability to communicate racial issues with both mordancy and a superb economy of dramaturgy. The revolutionary spirit compromised through materialism is the theme of Riot Sale, or Dollar Psyche Fake Out, as a weapon that shoots currency makes rioting African Americans stop to gather the money and run to nearby stores; Top Secret, or A Few Million after B.C. focuses on a secret meeting between the President and select members of his cabinet to discover a method of imposing birth control on African Americans. The method: convincing African Americans, many of whom wish to emulate whites anyway, that having more than xsxsxtwo children is uncivilized.

One of his more mature efforts in this vein is The King of Soul, or The Devil and Otis Redding (1969), in which the theme of materialism is further complicated by both the history of the exploitation of talented entertainers such as Redding and by the inclusion of Redding and the Faustian bargain he makes—though never understands. This kind of pithy acidity helped earn Caldwell a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970.

After 1970, Caldwell wrote essays and poetry in addition to drama. As late as 1982, the Henry Street Settlement's New Federal Theater had staged The World of Ben Caldwell, a series of sketches that attempted to reveal the absurdity of the American dream. In one of these comic sketches, actor Morgan Freeman portrayed risqué stand-up comedian Richard Pryor; actors Reginald Vel Johnson and Garrett Morris alternated portrayals of actor-comedian Bill Cosby. Mel Gussow, reporting in the New York Times, wrote that Caldwell showed such deftness and caustic cleverness in these sketches that he might well consider writing material for Pryor.

Since 1968 Caldwell has run the Third World Cultural Center in New York's South Bronx, where plays, poetry readings, and various other artistic activities are staged. By the early 1980s, Caldwell's interests had turned increasingly to the visual arts; in 1983 in New York's Kenkeleba Gallery he participated in an exhibit that connected the media of painting and jazz with such artists as Camille Billops, Norman Lewis, Faith Ringgold, and Romare Bearden. In 1991, however, a fire swept through his Harlem apartment, destroying more than forty years’ worth of manuscripts, paintings, and memorabilia. Undaunted, Caldwell is returning to writing the acerbically witty monologues and sketches that won him notoriety in the late 1970s and early 1980s; his most frequent writing of these has been for African American humorist and political activist Dick Gregory.

Though his particular brand of satire is far less in evidence in today's African American theater, Caldwell's central themes represent his unalloyed gift to this period of revolutionary drama. The short skit or one-act play whose most compact and devastating message with respect to the spirit of African American revolution was the exposure of African American self-hatred and self-deception is a gift considered by some to have been given with the left hand. But while some may decry it as antirevolutionary, it appears nevertheless to have an important and inexorable progressive aspect: while enumerating the evils of the adversary, it courts reflection on the foibles of the insurgent.

Bibliography

• Charles D. Peavy, “Satire and Contemporary Black Drama”, Satire Newsletter 7 (Fall 1969): 40–49.
• Ronald V. Ladwing, “The Black Comedy of Ben Caldwell”, Players 51.3 (1976): 88–91.
• Stanley Crouch, “Satireprop”, Village Voice, 27 Apr. 1982, 104.
• Mel Gussow, “Federal Office ‘World of Ben Caldwell,’” New York Times, 10 April 1982, 13

Nathan L. Grant