Amiri Baraka's (Le Roi Jones's) most widely known dramatic work, Dutchman was first presented at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York City in March 1964. This explosive examination of race relations in America, easily the most talked about play of the year, brought its writer the Village Voice's Obie Award in recognition of the play being the most outstanding Off-Broadway production of the year. This highly controversial play was given film treatment in 1967.
Because of its lean, parable-like quality, Dutchman has frequently been compared to the work of Edward Albee, perhaps the leading American dramatist of the period. Several critics have emphasized the similarities between Dutchman and Albee's The Zoo Story in particular. A masterful example of the writer's handling of fundamental dramatic conventions, Dutchman moves, like the train of its setting, with powerful bursts of energy and periodic lulls. Marked by a number of dramatic reversals and rapidly accelerating tension, this play is also characterized by an effective synthesis of realistic and naturalistic tendencies, as well as the suggestion of such mythical influences as the Flying Dutchman, Adam and Eve, and Lilith.
Dutchman must be seen as a highly provocative theatrical handling of the thematic concerns treated in the poems of The Dead Lecturer (1964), the volume of guilt-ridden, self-conscious lyrics produced to ward the close of Baraka's Beat period. Evidencing the strong influence of Howard University sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, author of Black Bourgeoisie (1957), Dutchman is a sharply focused indictment of those African Americans who desire to assimilate into mainstream American society. In doing so, these individuals deny all vestiges of the racial past and make every effort to distance themselves from the reality of black existence in America. Given symbolic treatment in the character Clay, such individuals seek validation in the acceptance of white America, as symbolized by the character Lula. As his name implies, Clay is the black American who allows himself to be molded into the image of white, middle-class society. His tragic end, however, at the hands of Lula, evidences the suicidal nature of his longings.
An equally important focal point of Dutchman is that of the proper orientation of the black artist, a matter of preeminent concern in the poetry of The Dead Lecturer and various essays written by Baraka during this period. In search of a legitimate and thoroughly engaged black art, Baraka frequently derides what he perceives as the derivative and evasive creative efforts of black writers, himself included. In “The Myth of a Negro Literature”, for example, he urges the black writer to write unapologetically, from “the point of view of the black man in this country: as its victim and its chronicler.” Referring to himself as the “great would-be poet” of “some kind of bastard literature,” Clay places himself clearly in the rear guard of the movement toward a black sociopolitical consciousness as well as artistic authenticity.
Despite the numerous works that followed Dutchman, it remains Baraka's best-known and most critically acclaimed effort. Unequaled in its taut handling of the most pervasive and persistent of national issues, Dutchman secured Baraka's reputation as an important American dramatist.
Bibliography
- C. W. E. Bigsby, “Black Drama: The Public Voice,” in The Second Black Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature, 1980
Henry C. Lacey
