Jazz and theater scenes overlapped within two blocks of each other.

Evidence

Given the piece’s subject matter and theatricality, it was unsurprising that Roach and Lincoln would have been involved with the first American production of Jean Genet’s symbolic drama The Blacks, a play within a play in which a group of black actors (some in white face) reenact a trial for the murder of a white woman before the Queen and her court. The play was in rehearsal in the spring of 1961 under Gene Frankel’s direction at the St. Mark’s Playhouse, not two blocks from the Jazz Gallery. Roach wrote a score; Lincoln was cast as the outspoken Augusta Snow. The ensemble included Roscoe Lee Browne, Godfrey Cambridge, James Earl Jones, Lou Gossett Jr., Raymond St. Jacques, Cicely Tyson, and Maya Angelou (as the White Queen). Angelou recalled the play as “delicious to our taste”: On that small New York stage, we reflected the real-life confrontations that were occurring daily in America’s streets. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 322

Categorization

• XREF: Physical proximity of the St. Mark’s Playhouse and the Jazz Gallery is a concrete illustration of the reader’s ‘cheap rent and physical proximity’ conditions for scene density.
• QUESTION: A star-studded cast (Jones, Gossett, Tyson, Angelou) at a two-block radius — worth mapping the East Village geography of this moment.