Theater: Uncle Tom Exhumed

Purlie Victorious (by Ossie Davis) peoples a Broadway stage with Negro characters that the N.A.A.C.P. has long claimed do not exist. Here is a cottonpicking Uncle Tom (Godfrey M. Cambridge) who hymns the supposedly subservient spirituals and cringes, hat in hand, before the white man (“You dah boss, Boss”). Here is the bighearted, yuk-yuk-yukking Southern mammy (Helen Martin). Here is the corn-pone simpleton (Ruby Dee) who says things like “Indo. I deed.” Here is the unlicensed preacher hero, Purlie Victorious Judson (Ossie Davis)—a liar, a braggart, a trickster, and the self-appointed messiah of his race (“Who else is they got?”). And here, too, is the neo-Confederate villain, Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee (Sorrell Booke), a Simon Legree plantation owner equipped (in A.D. 1961) with a bull whip and not-quite-so-unbelievable quips (“You tryin’ to get non-violent with me, boy?”).

The curse is almost taken off these caricatures by Director Howard Da Silva, who treats the entire play as an animated cartoon strip. Actor-Playwright Davis stirs up intermittent fun with a flamboyantly well-paced performance and some sharp wisecracks, e.g., “You are a disgrace to the Negro profession.” The plot hinges (and the hinge often creaks) on an attempt to trick Cap’n Cotchipee out of $500 so that Purlie can buy back Big Bethel Church and “preach freedom in the cotton patch.”

Seesawing between tongue-in-cheek and cheek-in-tongue, Purlie Victorious says remarkably little about its theme, integration. Unacceptable as real Negroes, the play’s characters live a fantasy life that Playwright Davis presents as gorged with self-pity and filled with a lust for revenge over past wrongs. Under the surface laughter lies chauvinism: “I find, in being black, a thing of beauty … a native land in every Negro face!” Substitute the word white, and any playwright who wrote it would be howled down as a racist.

Purlie Judson somewhat resembles the frustrated, overambitious hero of A Raisin in the Sun, but Raisin’s hero grew to recognize that in race relations, as in life, there are no short cuts, and he courageously set his face toward selfdiscipline, hard work and fair play. Purlie gains no such self-victory, and he slips into his pulpit at play’s end to deliver a glib sermonette on brotherhood, which comes, like Purlie Victorious itself, from the depths of his tonsils.