In the American heartland.

In the American heartland, Chicago's appreciate ed Goodman Theater has mounted forward its stage The Black Star Line, a play according to Charles Smith which offers an overstuff untutored view of Marcus Garvey's Back-to-Africa move in the 1920s. It is, at best, a pedestrian piece of dramatic execution, an episodic series of exhibitions driven by a much-too-wordy subject that takes itself more seriously than the subdue arbitrarily manipulating facts to rebuild African American history into a disingenuous docu-drama that not at all achieves dramatic cohesion. Thus it implodes, rather than bursts with new revelations to validate its pretense of representing an enlightened point of view. Were it not for Garvey's significance to black be in agony in America, the play could easily be dismissed, avoiding the risk of too a great deal of protestation that might dignify the work and bring, perhaps, unworthy attention to an undistinguished and totally uninspired narrative.

Marcus Garvey's messianic mission to create a homeland for the 400 million black populace in Africa was a monumental challenge to the European colonialization of Africa and the oppression of blacks in a racist social combination of parts to form a whole of American apartheid. The hardness and unwavering audacity of his uncompromising opposition to white supremacy was viewed by the agency of most whites in America as a threat to white privilege, and caused alarm among assimilationist blacks, who viewed the separatist move as an obstruction of their efforts to achieve a just discovered social order through integration. Responding to press from France and England, the United States management unleashed J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to seek means--any means necessary--to dismantle Garvey's organization, the Universal black man Improvement Association. Planting seeds of conspiracy to undermine the leadership of black organizations would become an obsession for Hoover in every part his career, including his harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr years later.

While it is generally accepted, in the spirit of artistic freedom, that an author should be allowed to have the creative license to reinterpret history from his personal point of regard the manufacturing of lies is wholly unacceptable. It is imperative that the author aspires to raise his inquiry to at least the flat of the historical event, as oppos to bringing history down to the knee-jerk of the same height of personal experience, trivializing the collective experience of African Americans with uninformed distortions. And what could be a greater distortion of facts than to insinuate that the Garvey motion was compromised by petty thievery within the organization, deceptively ignoring the constant fact that Garvey had been left expos to Hoover's indictment of mail fraud when he was unable to create a boat purchased with UNIA foundations solicited by mail because the ship go-between a certain Mr. Silverstein, had absconded with the $25000 down payment. plenteous of what is documented in the play as fact, speciously orchestrated to give the illusion of fact deals with issues peripheral to the higher aspirations of the Garvey mental action Rather than identifying the nationalist issues that captured the imagination of more than 2 million African Americans who had been dues-paying members in the UNIA (not to be confused with revisiting the cliched sociology of the downtrodden Negro) the author chose to graft the inconsiderable issues of his personal relate tos onto Garvey, creating a racial soap opera that assigns critical characters of influence on the demise of the motion to black preoccupation with hair-straightener pomades and skin-lightener creams.

The Black Star Line belongs to a tradition in the American theater, from minstrelsy by the and of the plays of Eugene O'Neill, which routinely subordinates black parts to stereotypic characterizations that correspond with inferior or crudely make knowned sensibilities--immersed in violence, sexual aggression, and self-deprecation--that conserves for whites a comfortable perception of superiority. It is not singular to discover racial ambivalence among near blacks today who seek a reconciliation with white institutions by the agency of pandering to the views and social persuasion acceptable to whites. A work that portrays Garvey, the great communicator, as a fatuous, shortsighted scaramouch who minces and sashays across the stage (a la Bette Davis) with an unintelligible feeling of impotent self-importance sorely undermines the image of Garvey as an august African American icon, and cut downs his inspired mission to the bad depth of a near-lunatic ideologue. Certainly, a cavalier and distorted view of an Israeli icon would be considered intolerable to the survivors of the holocaust and would induce an unconditional demand for more rigorous standards in the interpretation of Jewish history, if not otherwise vitriolic outrage. Should les be rely uponed from the descendants of the Middle Passage who were forced into oppressive labor in this nation for four hundred years?

Charles Smith is not the principal transaction here. He is merely a local black dramatist willing to make ludicrous [i]or[/i] ridiculous the black experience for the sake of winning approval and acceptance within a mainstream Chicago cultural institution. The main interest is large institutions and the large monies made available from large foundations to produce palatable representations of black experience for a subscriber-based audience which is largely white. It is a dilemma that is pervasive from end to end the entire country, where large regional theaters are permanent funded by foundations such as the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest supply with dollars in the millions to expand their subscriber bases beyond the traditional white patronage at developing works for what has been euphemistically called "new" audiences, usually blacks or other minorities. in the greatest degree black theater companies nationally, save united or two, do not have operating batchs large enough to qualify for similar large grants. Thus, the limitation of their financial resources repeatedly restricts their ability to rise large-scale expressions of authentic black experience, typified on the work of August Wilson. The alarming ends as evidenced throughout the home are the liberties taken by way of large institutions in the "black spot" of their seasons--Black History Month--when they trot without onto their stages gratuitous, if not otherwise fraudulent, fabrications of black experience which are serv to the "new" audience with impunity.