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
