Ed Bullins

Bullins, Ed (b. 1935), born Edward Artie, African American playwright and pioneering artist of the Black Theater movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In the typical Ed Bullins play, characters move through a gritty existence toward little that can be called self-realization or existential triumph. Indeed, these traditional outcomes have little to do with the world Bullins conceives, which is a world created by the “natural”—not naturalistic, as Bullins cautions—style of his drama.

Much of the tension and energy of Bullins's plays comes from his memory of the tough North Philadelphia neighborhood where he was raised. As a youth he developed an early association with street life, whose bootleg whiskey, gang violence, and sudden deaths—Bullins himself was nearly fatally stabbed but miraculously recovered—have strong reverberations in much of his work. In 1952 Bullins dropped out of high school to join the Navy; this experience also commands attention in his plays, as recurrent characters Cliff Dawson and his half-brother Steve Benson are former Navy men.

Bullins moved to Los Angeles in 1958 after having returned from the Navy to a still dangerous Philadelphia. “I went to Los Angeles because it was the farthest I could go,” he says. At Los Angeles City College Bullins took courses and began writing in 1961; he also founded a campus literary magazine, the Citadel. Restlessness, however, caused him to travel around the country to learn more about how African Americans lived. He returned to California in 1964, this time to San Francisco, and there he began writing plays. The one-act play How Do You Do? was his first, and Bullins's own pleasure with it convinced him to remain with theater. But because many critics thought his work obscene, he could not find a producer. He staged his own plays in almost any available space, and finally his small company took their talents to coffeehouses and pubs in the San Francisco area.

The plays of LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), notably Dutchman and The Slave, perhaps saved a despairing Bullins from giving up playwriting entirely. Jones's plays, using elements of Absurdist theater to portray the irony of African American life, greatly influenced Bullins and also fueled a revolutionary spirit among other African American artists in the San Francisco area. Bullins joined them to form Black Arts West, a militant cultural and political organization; he later became the cultural director of the Black House Theater in nearby Oakland. Among the participants in Black House were Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and Huey Newton—three actors who, as revolutionaries, would shortly enter the national consciousness as leaders of the Black Panther Party, of which Bullins became minister of culture.

Bullins's commitment to art over ideology was in early evidence when the Black House experienced a schism between members who wanted to use theater for revolutionary propaganda and those who saw theater's potential for cultural change. While writing agitprop plays to satisfy the revolutionary wing, he also developed his own theatrical ventures but soon found that the radicalized cultural atmosphere of the African American West Coast would not support his efforts. Bullins left Black House in 1967, was thus unconnected to any production support, and was preparing to leave the United States. Robert Macbeth, who directed the New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, had read a copy of Bullins's Goin’ a Buffalo (1968), a circumstance that forestalled Bullins's departure. Upon deciding to produce Bullins's In the Wine Time, Macbeth brought Bullins to New York to aid in the running of the theater, whose reputation thereafter was founded principally on Bullins's own work.

Bullins's most ambitious dramaturgical project has been his Twentieth-Century Cycle, a proposed series of twenty plays on the African American experience that deals not with race relations but primarily with the everyday lives of African Americans. Though both Clara's Ole Man (1965) and Goin’a Buffalo are considered noncycle plays, they nevertheless exhibit the characteristic of detailed African American life to be found in the five plays common to the Cycle; additionally, Bullins's intimation about the placement of Goin’a Buffalo in a 1972 New York Times interview with Clayton Riley suggests its later admission to this group, which canonically lists In the Wine Time (1968), In New England Winter (1971), The Duplex (1970), The Fabulous Miss Marie (1971), and Home Boy (1976).

The “natural” style of Bullins's plays is evident in his choice of having his characters reveal themselves to one another and to the audience, but disclosing only what they wish. Bullins never imposes his own view upon the action, an approach apparently consistent with the demands of a Black Aesthetic, the code for an African American naturalness and heightening of sensibility. Music is a very important part of a Bullins play, particularly the Cycle plays; the popular jazz and rhythm-and-blues recordings of the time in which the plays are set ensure a fidelity to everyday African American life not found in more stylized productions. The music that is part of In the Wine Time, for example, comes from a radio, which has its own role written into the script; art here imitates life or, perhaps more accurately, merges with it.

The idea of naturalness also informs one of his most expressive contributions to drama. In the essay “A Short Statement on Street Theatre”, Bullins prescribes the “short, sharp, incisive” play that “subliminally broadcasts blackness”; to masses of African Americans, the immediacy of the skit or short political farce is designed to convey great communicative power. “Each individual in the crowd,” writes Bullins, “should have his sense of reality confronted, his consciousness assaulted.” Similarly, the stage plays, as portrayals of African American life startling in their immediacy, seek to challenge the audience with elements of violence, alcoholism, and infidelity—components of a determinism that is finally a species of naturalism. It represents not only life as Bullins knew it but also depicts the psychosocial anger of African American culture, a culture in opposition to prevailing Euro-American mores and structures of power.

Though by 1977 Bullins had written more than fifty plays, his efforts to be staged on Broadway were forever to be thwarted. His closest and most heroic attempt was The Taking of Miss Janie (1975), whose story of an interracial relationship that culminates in a rape explores the conflict between blackness and white liberalism. It won the prestigious New York Drama Critics Circle Award and was called the best American play of the year. Other awards include three Obie awards for outstanding drama, one National Endowment for the Arts grant, four Rockefeller Playwright grants, the distinguished Vernon Rice Award (for Clara's Ole Man), and a Creative Artists Public Service Program award. In 1972 Bullins headed the playwright's workshop at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and when the New Lafayette was in danger of closing in 1973, Bullins became a playwright in residence at the American Place Theater.

Bullins's notable attempts in other genres include a collection of his early short stories, The Hungered One (1971), and a novel, The Reluctant Rapist (1973), in which the character Steve Benson, a veteran of several Bullins plays and widely regarded as Bullins's alter ego, embodies the twin senses of disillusionment and bewilderment that mark so many of the plays. As guest editor of a special African American theater issue of Drama Review (Summer 1968), Bullins featured not only his own work but also that of Jones, Ben Caldwell, Ron Milner, and others; Larry Neal's “The Black Aesthetic”, the landmark essay of the period, also appeared in this number.

Known in both theatrical and political circles for the incisive race consciousness with which he fashioned his work, Bullins made news in 1977 by having collaborated with white composer Mildred Kayden on the musicals Storyville and Sepia Star. This did not, however, lead to a departure from established philosophy. The tragic accidental death of his son Edward, Jr., in 1978 led to Bullins's return to the West Coast and the establishment of the Bullins Memorial Theatre, whose Black Theatre Newsletter not only featured news of productions of plays by other prominent African American playwrights but also listed some forty-four Bullins plays available for production.

Despite an apparent reluctance to acknowledge the influence of playwrights other than Baraka earlier in his career, Bullins later confessed to a broader eclecticism; he sees the dramaturgy of Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett as having been additional significant influences and also notes that African American novelist Chester Himes and Iranian poet Idris Shah have had their own profound effect on his work. These writers lend elements of suspense and lyrical renditions of the absurd to later plays by Bullins, notably A Teacup Full of Roses (1989) and Dr. Geechee and the Blood Junkies (1991), both antidrug plays. Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam (1990), a play on the life of the celebrated Black Panther activist, was published in the collection Best Short Plays of 1990. After a tempestuous thirty-year odyssey through art, culture, and politics that began on the West Coast, Bullins seemed to have come full circle; with playwright Jonal Woodward, he headed the Bullins/Woodward Theater Workshop in San Francisco, which stages plays, teaches playwriting seminars, and holds theater workshops. By September 1995, however, Bullins left the workshop to accept a professorship in theater at Northeastern University. Boy x Man (1995), the latest addition to the Twentieth-Century Cycle, was staged in October 1995 in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The complex themes of revolution that characterized the African American stage of the 1960s and 1970s are easily measured and shaped by the work of Bullins; the efficacy of the rueful defiance he brought to this stage is reflected in his complete domination of Off-Broadway theater for more than a decade. Bullins's natural style and codification of the period's African American dramaturgical techniques are a historical and logical development of the techniques of the Free Southern Theater, which sought to use drama as a means of organizing African Americans in the South. The rawness of the Bullins plays, however, makes them seem to some to be a leap through tradition. If the critical response to the plays appears uneven—if their perceived greatness is mixed with an interpretation of African American anger deemed to be antiwhite by some, and even anti-American by others—then the debate, which Bullins's work perforce extends, as to the synergy of art and a consciousness of insurrection and its possible consequences must continue.

Bibliography

• Ed Bullins, ed., Drama Review 12 (1967–1968).
• Ed Bullins, interviewed by Marvin X, New Plays from the Black Theater, ed. Ed Bullins, 1969.
• Ed Bullins, introduction to The Theme Is Blackness, 1972.
• Clayton Riley, “Bullins: ‘It's Not the Play I Wrote,”’ New York Times, 19 Mar. 1972, 1.
• Jervis Anderson, “Profiles—Dramatist,” New Yorker, 16 June 1973, 40–79.
• Richard Scharine, “Ed Bullins Was Steve Benson (But Who Is He Now?),” Black American Literature Forum 13 (Fall 1979): 103–109.
• Genevieve Fabre, Drumbeats, Masks and Metaphor, 1983.
• John L. DiGaetani, In Search of a Postmodern Theater, 1991.
• Nathan L. Grant, “The Frustrated Project of Soul in the Drama of Ed Bullins,” in Language, Rhythm, and Sound: Black Popular Cultures into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Joseph Adjaye and Adrianne R. Andrews, 1997, pp. 90–102.
• Samuel A. Hay, ed. Bullins: A Literary Biography, 1997

Nathan L. Grant

• Born: 1935

Playwright Ed Bullins began his professional career in 1965, when his plays, How Do You Do, Dialect Determinism (or The Rally) and Clara's Ole Man were performed in San Francisco. As Resident Playwright and Associate Director of Robert Macbeth's New Lafayette Theater in Harlem, NY, he headed the Black Theater Workshop, and edited Black Theater Magazine. Bullins directed the Writer's Unit Playwrights Workshop for Joseph Papp at the Public Theater, and is in the Cherry Lane Mentor Project. A recipient of the Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award, Bullins also won both an Obie and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for The Taking of Miss Janie in 1975, as well as Guggenheim Fellowships, and grants from various artistic organizations.

Bullins is the author of some 50 plays.

Most Famous Works

• Clara's Ole Man (1965)
• The Fabulous Miss Marie (1971)
• The Taking of Miss Janie (1975)
• Daddy! (1977)

playwright; educator

Personal Information

Born on July 2, 1935, in Philadelphia, PA, son of Edward and Bertha Marie (Queen) Bullins.
Education: Attended Los Angeles City College, San Francisco State College (now University), B.A., Antioch University, 1989; M.F.A., San Francisco State University, 1994. Has written under pseudonym Kingsley B. Bass, Jr.

Career

Playwright. First play produced, Clara's Ole Man, 1965; involved with Black Panther party, 1965-67; served briefly as Black Panther Minister of Culture; joined New Lafayette Theatre, New York, 1967; became playwright-in-residence, 1968, and associate director, 1971; became playwright-in-residence, American Place Theatre, 1973; guest instructor, various colleges and universities, 1970s; instructor in playwriting and dramatic performance, City College of San Francisco, 1984-88; lecturer, Sonoma State University and University of California at Berkeley, 1988-95; Professor of Theater, Northeastern University, Boston, 1995-.

Life's Work

Beginning his career in the politically turbulent San Francisco Bay area of the 1960s, Ed Bullins created plays that often reflected the militant spirit of the times. Viewed as a whole, however, his body of work embodies more universal themes. His violent dramas of individuals enmeshed in spirals of destruction and self-destruction have resonated with theatergoers of all races, for they explore the feelings of people trapped in a hostile society that offers no wider sense of community. Bullins, the angry young playwright of the 1960s and 1970s, saw his work take on near-classic longevity by the end of the century, with the appearance of new productions and a book-length study of his writings.

Born July 2, 1935, Bullins grew up in a tough neighborhood in north Philadelphia. His mother was a government worker, and for the most part his childhood was a peaceful one; he excelled as a student in a mostly white grade school, and the family took vacations in rural Maryland. However, Bullins attended an inner-city junior high school, where he became involved with a street gang. In one confrontation he was stabbed, and his heart temporarily stopped. Bullins later wrote about this near-death experience in his sole novel, The Reluctant Rapist; though few of his dramas were overtly autobiographical, they often take violence as a subject.

Bullins dropped out of high school and entered the U.S. Navy in 1952, remaining in the service until 1955 and continuing his education through avid reading. He was also a formidable lightweight boxer. After leaving the Navy he returned to Philadelphia, married, and had several children, but he was restless, and in 1958 lit out for Los Angeles, leaving his family behind. He finished a high school equivalency degree and enrolled at Los Angeles City College, where he studied for several years and began to write short stories, briefly editing a campus literary magazine. Some of Bullins's stories were collected in the volume The Hungered One: Early Writings, published in 1971.

Realizing that the African American audience he hoped to reach did not have a strong tradition of reading fiction, Bullins turned instead to drama in the early 1960s. At first, his tumultuous works were too far out of the decorous mainstream of the day to even get a hearing. "Nobody would produce my work," he later told The New Yorker. "Some people said my language was too obscene, and others said the stuff I was writing was not theatre in the traditional sense." Bullins persisted, inspired in part by the pioneering short dramas of playwright LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), then just beginning to transform black theater with their heated intensity. He moved to San Francisco in 1964 and enrolled in a writing program at San Francisco State College.

The wide-open cultural atmosphere of the Bay Area in the middle 1960s proved congenial for Bullins, and it was there that one of his plays was first produced in 1965. That play, Clara's Ole Man, actually went on to gain wide acclaim for Bullins after a 1968 New York production. Like many of Bullins's plays, it is set in a slum area in the 1950s. Its main character is a young man who goes to visit a woman in her apartment, thinking that her "ole man" is away. The "ole man," however, turns out to be a lesbian named Big Girl; the protagonist encounters various grotesque characters and is finally beaten severely by members of a street gang. The work anticipated Bullins's characteristic creation of an atmosphere of simmering, senseless, almost random violence.

In San Francisco Bullins was closely associated with a group of militant black intellectuals, including Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, that soon took shape as the Black Panthers. Bullins even served for a time as the organization's Minister of Culture, and wrote several plays that embodied black nationalist aims, explicitly directed at blacks and shunning any attempt to appeal to white audiences. In 1970's The Gentleman Caller, a maid murders her mistress and her visitor, and then answers the mistress's phone with apocalyptic pronouncements: "It is time for Black people to come together ... to form a nation that will rise from our enslaved mass and meet the oppressor ... meet the devil and conquer and destroy him."

But Bullins always maintained a certain distance from revolutionary rhetoric, and even parodied it at times. Despite his rejection of the validity of their judgments of his work, Bullins's plays appealed to many white critics, who praised the raw power of his ghetto dramas, finding in them elemental examples of the tragic power of theater at its best. Bullins moved to New York, where in 1968 he became involved with the New Lafayette Theatre, an organization based in the Harlem neighborhood that attempted to build a solid tradition of theatrical repertory in a black urban setting. It was a major institution of the so-called "black arts" movement. The theatre closed in 1973, but not before Bullins had written a dozen plays for it, often considered the greatest among his more than fifty works.

In the early 1970s Bullins reached what was probably the high-water mark of his career in terms of popular success. He won numerous awards, including three Obie awards, a New York Drama Critics Circle award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship--something that would have been anathema to the Black Panther adherent of just a few years earlier. Bullins became playwright-in-residence at New York's American Place Theatre, and the drama departments of prominent Eastern educational institutions began to seek him out for guest lectureships.

In the late 1970s, Bullins suffered a decline in the frequency with which his plays were produced in New York, resulting in part from attacks on his work by feminist critics dismayed at the aspect of sexual violence that they often contained. Bullins entered a prolonged period of what seemed to be creative silence, although he continued to teach, for a time at prestigious Amherst College, Columbia University, and Dartmouth College. He returned to school himself, finally earning a B.A. degree from Antioch University in 1989, and going on for a Master of Fine Arts degree at San Francisco State University, granted in 1994.

In the 1990s it emerged that Bullins, though occupying the spotlight less than before, had continued to write and to live a creative life. Some of his earlier dramas had been conceived as a large group that Bullins called the Twentieth-Century Cycle; he continued work on the cycle, which centered loosely on a group of core characters. (The first cycle play was Bullins's very first full-length play, 1968's In the Wine Time.) In 1993 he issued a printed collection of his works, New/Lost Plays by Ed Bullins, and in 1997 his play Boy x Man ("Boy Times Man"), was produced. His eventful life itself also came full circle: in 1994 he was involved in an auto crash that once again brought him to the brink of death.

Awards

Selected Awards: Rockefeller Foundation grants, 1968, 1970, and 1973; Obie awards for distinguished playwriting, 1971 and 1975; Black Arts Alliance award, 1971; Guggenheim fellowships for playwriting, 1971 and 1976; National Endowment for the Arts playwriting grants, 1972 and 1989; New York Drama Critics Circle award (for The Taking of Miss Janie), 1975.

Works

Selected works

• Clara's Ole Man, 1965.
• The Theme Is Blackness, 1966.
• In the Wine Time, 1968.
• The Gentleman Caller, 1969.
• Street Sounds, 1970.
• The Duplex: A Black Love Fable in Four Movements, 1971.
• The Reluctant Rapist (novel), 1973.
• The Taking of Miss Janie, 1975.
• The Mystery of Phyllis Wheatley, 1976.
• Boy x Man, 1997.

Further Reading

Books

• Bowman, John S., The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, volume 73, Gale, 1999.
• Hay, Samuel A., Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography, Wayne State University Press, 1997.
• Riggs, Thomas, Contemporary Dramatists, sixth ed., St. James Press, 1999.
• Smith, Jessie Carney, ed., Notable Black American Men, Gale, 1999.
• Valade, Roger, ed., The Schomburg Center Guide to Black Literature from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Gale, 1996.

• New Yorker, June 16, 1973.

— James M. Manheim

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