'The Blacks: A Clown Show' (Revisited as an American Tragedy)

By Clarice Feldman

In 1961 a play titled "The Blacks : A Clown Show" by the French petty criminal and homosexual prostitute Jean Genet, was the avant garde sensation of New York. At the St. Marks Playhouse it starred a cast of Black actors, then young but now well-known to us all -- people like James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett, Cecily Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, Maya Angelou, and Roscoe Lee Brown. As I recall --though the cast most certainly changed over time -- it remained one of the longest running off-Broadway plays of that decade. In its review of the play, the NYT's Taubman put his own spin on Genet's meaning and concluded with no evidence at all: "'Whatever is gentle and kind and good and tender will be black.' So M. Genet has a Negro declare as if in a vision, but surely he looks for the day when these things will be all colors and no color." Taubman to the contrary, Genet said "What we need is hatred. From it our ideas.... (Read Full Article)