One of the Black consciousness plays of Ed Bullins's Twentieth-Century Cycle, Goin’a Buffalo first appeared as a staged reading at the American Place Theater in June of 1968.
The play features the tough, streetwise Curt and his nubile wife Pandora, who sells her body to bring Curt money; Curt's friend Rich; Mamma Too Tight, a young white woman who is wholly dependent upon her pimp, Shaky; and Art, a quiet, seemingly naive sort who, after having saved
Curt in a prison fight, is befriended by him. Though some of these decide to leave the hostility of Los Angeles, it is Curt who decides on Buffalo as an actual destination, hoping that he and Pandora can start a legitimate business there. As the play proceeds, however, this goal dissolves in a mixture of violence, manipulation, and deception.
Leitmotifs of prison, money, drugs, and sex expose the gritty urban life and fragmented individual lives of the characters. Money for a sexuality based in violence (e.g., the play's manifold sexual connotations based on ““Pandora's ‘box””’) is the governing equation in a world without love. The play moves through a long middle sequence in a neighborhood nightclub where Pandora sings; there, the Bullinsian element of violence controls every interaction between characters, the cast by now having been augmented by unpaid, disgruntled musicians who are both white and African American. This sequence ends in a bloody brawl as Deeny, the club's disreputable manager, arrives to announce that the show is closing and that no one will be paid. Though the issue of racial tension is obvious in a play about African Americans at odds with poverty and with the criminal justice system, Bullins as playwright interestingly adds greater dramaturgical possibilities by writing stage directions that allow Deeny, the Bouncer, and a customer to be cast as whites—possibilities through which, Bullins writes, “there might be added tensions.”
The game of chess is also a metaphor; it opens the play as Curt customarily beats Rich. Art, too, prevails at chess but also deftly manipulates the feelings, fears, and aspirations of these desperate characters, especially Mamma and Pandora. Through his machinations, the city of Buffalo itself becomes the object of the endgame in the play's surprise ending.
The scenes in Curt's apartment and in the nightclub are enclosed spaces from which the stricken African American spirit must emerge; Buffalo represents the unrealizable wide-open space of freedom. Robert Tener finds that these spatial boxes are themselves placed within the larger ““box”” of the American metropolis, which is itself a construction of whiteness that engulfs these characters. Geneva Smitherman sees instead a conscious self-awareness in these and other Bullins characters, one in which their humanity sometimes leads to heroism. This divergence of views is almost certainly due to the fact that Bullins, rather than determining a moral perspective in presenting the lives of his characters, instead allows their movement in and through their particular milieu, thus revealing his execution of naturalistic technique.
Bibliography
- Geneva Smitherman, “Everybody Wants to Know Why I Sing the Blues”, Black World
23 (Apr. 1974): 4–13. - Robert L. Tener, “Pandora's Box: A Study of Ed Bullins’ Dramas”, CLA Journal
18 (1974–1975): 533–544
Nathan L. Grant
