Baldwin's 'Blues' remain powerful, 37 years later

There is only a bare set: a stark wooden cross adorned with a crimson shroud; a small, white, undistinguished portable pulpit; a long narrow bench; a greenish-brown easy chair situated next to a small radio. It is within the spaces created by these potent symbols that the action of Blues for Mr. Charlie, by James Baldwin, plays out in the African-American House this weekend. In the drama, Ran Aubrey Frazier, SM '03, portrays Richard Henry, a young black man from small-town Mississippi who has returned home in the '50s as a recovering dope addict, a result of spending eight years of dissipation as a musician in New York. Baldwin uses a stereotypical division of Whitetown—the apparently benign world under which lies a propensity for indignation, hate, and rage—and Blacktown—the undeniably uneasy world where ministers desperately entreat God to end their suffering at the hands of Whitetown—to dramatize Henry's eventual death.

Blues For Mister Charlie: By James Baldwin, Directed by Rachel Watson REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH

Convinced that "white folks" were responsible for the death of his mother when he was a boy, Henry comes back to Mississippi intoxicated by a loathing of all such "white folks," and the swagger in his step, along with his coarse language, leads him into trouble with Lyle Britten (Gregory L. Yolen, SY '04), a poor, insecure white grocery store owner hovering just above the level of white-trash bigot. Jo Britten (Bethany Moreton, GRD '05), Lyle's wife, serves up the Delta twang and anxious hospitality an audience might stereotypically expect of a recently married woman of '50s Mississippi settling down with her husband in a town polarized by racial division.

Baldwin structures the play so that it begins in medias res, after Henry has been killed and his family has begun to pursue the legal redress of his death, therefore enabling the audience to see just how it was that the people of Whitetown and Blacktown contributed to Henry's death. There are strong hints that Britten is the murderer—he was the last person to be seen with the victim, and his edgy, restless character after the crime suggests that he's definitely got something to hide—but the audience doesn't actually see how Henry was killed until one of the play's last moments.

The play's greatest strength, as written and now performed, lies in its attempt to crystallize the social interactions that characterize the distinct worlds of Whitetown and Blacktown. These two parallel, indirectly linked worlds, along with the often corrosive human relationships that they each contain, only merge directly into a singular entity during Lyle Britten's trial at the end of the play. Yet, even the stops and starts of the trial itself are punctuated by a series of monologues. Baldwin resorts to stereotypes, even caricatures, to convey what he calls the "plague" of race, and critics such as Walter Meserve, in The Black American Writer: Poetry and Drama, Vol. II, have attacked Baldwin for trying to "use theatre as a pulpit for his ideas. Mainly his plays are thesis plays—talky, over-written and clichéd dialogue and some stereotypes, preachy and argumentative. Essentially, Baldwin is not particularly dramatic..."

However, as Meserve suggests, masterful actors—and there are several in this production—can articulate Baldwin's ideas while bringing to life his raw drama . With his equally raucous, equally virulent demeanor and his strongly expressive face, Frazier, as Richard Henry, can throw out his firecracker characterization of white women as "dried-ass cracker bitches" as easily as he can vow with frightening sternness that "I'll make myself well with hatred. I'm gonna learn how to drink it every morning..." With a manner that's just as chilling as Henry's, Yolen nails the fast-moving Mississippi twang, the "good ol' boy" slaps on the back, and the unavoidable nervous twitching of a violent young white man who will ultimately kill a black man if he refuses to call him "sir."

Moreton, who largely spends her time alone around the house, captures the audience near the end of the play when she comes to see that she can be doing something more than just hosting social gatherings where miscegenation is tabooed. Jo doesn't ever appear to transcend the racism that's so endemic in Whitetown, but she does have the courage to question the direction of her own life: "Am I goin' to spend the rest of my life serving coffee to strangers in church basements?" Also, Jackie Sibblies, DC '03, turns in a solid performance as Juanita Harmon, Henry's childhood playmate and, after he's returned to Mississippi, his girlfriend, characterizing the spirit of apprehension in Blacktown when she remarks that life in the Delta is so rough "you can't help being scared."

As for criticisms of the often disturbring stereotypes and racist language in Blues for Mr. Charlie, Baldwin claimed, "I'm not concerned with the success or failure of the play. I want to shock people; I want to trick them into an experience which I think is important." Baldwin's characters in this play can be fascinating to watch, but the audience must remember Baldwin's message. Reeling from the shock of the murders of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and black youth Emmett Till in Mississippi, Baldwin offers Blues for Mr. Charlie as a battle cry for blacks, as a sorrowful song of blues for the whites that Mr. Charlie represents, and, ultimately, as an antidote to the terrible darkness of his own time.

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