A white-authored drama about Blackness established a lasting Black theater institution

Evidence

The Blacks, however, was a sensation that—despite opening in the East Village at the St. Mark’s Playhouse—would run for 1,408 performances. In addition to a favorable review, the Voice published Norman Mailer’s bombastic, if confused, endorsement (“Take your family, take the kids, take the hoodlums on the corner. Take your gun … The Blacks is a Mother F. Kerr”). Lorraine Hansberry’s counter-review (“a conversation between white men about themselves”) was less a critique of Genet than Mailer, who would be defended in the Voice letters column by Ted Joans and Jonas Mekas. Although the audience was overwhelmingly white, The Blacks served as a base for its cast—actors would take roles in other plays and return. (Clebert Ford, who appeared in the play, published an appreciation in Liberator magazine asserting that “no play that ever had been presented on an American stage has given the Negro an opportunity to so completely express himself in both artistic and ‘social’ terms.” The Blacks also established an identity for the St. Mark’s Playhouse, which subsequently opened two plays by LeRoi Jones, The Slave and The Toilet, and later became the home of the Negro Ensemble Company. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1877

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how an individual work’s runaway success (1,408 performances) functioned as economic infrastructure seeding an entire theater identity.
• SEED: The paradox of a white writer’s play about Blackness spawning the Negro Ensemble Company is a sharp angle for an essay on appropriation-as-infrastructure.