My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Seite 67

So did Amiri Baraka’s theater go dark
after Dutchman? I asked his producer
Woodie King, Jr., somebody who
knows what he’s talking about and
somebody who is not merely poised to
pull the wool over the eyes of people
who know less than he. He writes
that “after the Obie award-winning
Dutchman (1964), white critics refused
to focus on his work because Baraka
focused on Black Arts and The Black
Arts Movement. His work at The Black
Arts Repertory Theatre (1965-66) in
particular incensed the downtown
critics.” Baraka would not deal with
Edward Albee, Richard Barr & Clinton
Wilder (his producers on Dutchman).
He changed from LeRoi Jones to Amiri
Baraka and did not give his plays to
many non-black theatres. The exception
might have been The Life and Life of
Bumpy Johnson with music by Max Roach
at the San Diego Repertory Theatre in
the late ‘90s. But from the late 1960s
to the present, it was mostly Rome
Neal and me who produced numerous
Baraka plays.

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I, for example, produced the following
Amiri Baraka plays: Great Goodness of
Life (A Coon Show) (1970) — part of A
Black Quartet (1968) directed by Irving
Vincent; Slaveship – music by Archie
Shepp (1968/69) nyc/Paris/Zurich; A
Recent Killing (1975/76) directed by
Irving Vincent; Boy & Tarzan Meet in
a Clearing (1981/82) directed by George
Ferenz; Sidnee Poet Heroica (1974/75)
directed by Amiri Baraka; Remembering
WeSelves (2002/3) directed by Elizabeth
Van Dyke; The Toilet (2008/9) directed
by Rony Clanton; The Most Dangerous
Man in America — a play about WEB
Du Bois in development for 6 or 7
years, first read at the Schomburg with
Ossie Davis as WEB.

Now, with a grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts (nea), Paul
Carter Harrison directs Rome Neal’s
brilliant work on two of Baraka’s plays
scheduled for November 2014. I had
the opportunity to see Meeting Lillie
at the Nuyorican Café which was
so well received that it was selected
for presentation at the National Black
Theatre Festival.
Given such a prolific catalog, why
does Gates and the post-race crowd
reduce Baraka’s career to Dutchman?
Incidentally a revival of Dutchman
was called “deeply misogynistic” by a
Village Voice feminist who has now
been brought uptown to carry on her
vendetta against black men at the
Times while letting members of her
ethnic group slide.9 Adjoining this
review was a report about Philip
Roth’s appearance at the ymha. San
Francisco Chronicle columnist, Jon
Carroll, says that he was introduced
by Claudia Roth Pierpont who “clears
Roth’s work of charges of misogyny,
pointing out the variety and depth of
Roth’s female characters,” a glowing
tribute to Roth who once told Esquire
“F- The Feminists,” when asked whether
a novel of his would offend feminists,
and told a Swedish publication that
being called a misogynist was like being
called a communist in the 1950s.
He’s right, but his and Saul Bellow’s
depictions of black men as flashers is
reminiscent of the way that the Nazi
media showed Jewish males.10
Predictably, this woman who clears
Roth of the charge of misogyny, a
career-ending indictment in the United
States, gave the brothers a hard time
in a recent issue of The New Yorker,
in which she wrote a profile of singer,
Nina Simone, the feminist double
standard about which bell hooks
warned us years ago. She showed up at
the Harlem Book Fair and praised
William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat
Turner, while the black panelists sat
there in silence.

Black male writers took a big hit in
the marketplace as a result of this
unprecedented pitting of the genders
against each other. For some reason
Gates’s 1987 blast at black male writers
has been removed from the Times’s
archives. Maybe because Gates’s review
violated the Times policy. Normally
‘The Book Review’ would not assign a
book to a critic who had frequently
disparaged its author’s work, or one
who had a personal relationship,
positive or negative, with the author.11
Gates and Mary Helen Washington,
whose book he reviewed in the notorious
1987 blast at black male writers, had
worked on projects together. After
having snuffed black males with the
Gates’s article, Ms. Sinkler enraged
an important “sexist” named Norman
Mailer by assigning his enemy,
John Simon, to review a book of his.
Norman Mailer raised a stink and
soon afterwards Ms. Sinkler was gone
from the book review.
Moreover, art is not like baseball where
one arranges a grudge match between
competing teams. One great artist
might tower above members of both
genders. There is only one Sarah
Vaughan, Abbey Lincoln or Betty
Carter. I hear Charlie Parker’s licks in
most saxophone artists, but there was
only one Charlie Parker. Gates continued
his assault on black male writers by
denying them patronage, and omitting
them from the Norton, which has
become the go to black cannon anthology
for the textbook industry.