Les Blancs

At the National Theater

Or: The Line Unbroken

Why did no one tell me about this play? Why, in all my years of inching through dusty aisles over Doll’s Houses, Crucibles, and Raisins in the Sun, did I never find, did no one produce, did nobody tell me about Les Blancs by Lorraine Hansburry? A stunning, beautifully crafted script, full of speeches with tongues of silver and hearts of bronze, holding fast and tracing the poison of colonialism and white supremacy through the bones of the world; an evil that was powerful when Hansburry put ink to paper, is particularly prevalent today, and will continue far into the future. How could this not enshrined as an American masterpiece?

Charlie Morris (Elliot Cowan) a white American reporter in an unnamed British colony arrives at the Neilsen Mission, a hospital and church catering to the local villages. In hopes of interviewing the famed Reverend Neilson, who’s off ministering in the bush, Morris pals around with local tippler Dr. Willy Dekoven (James Fleet), attempts to romance the winsome Dr. Marta Gotterling (Anna Madly), and pays court to Madame Neilsen (Sian Philips), the blind matriarch of the mission. Morris’s arrival coincides with rising unrest in the country (after three hundred years of occupation) that bursts into a spate of settler killings, met by ever more vicious reprisals by the Colonial authorities, embodied in the deceptively fussy and murderously cunning Major Rice (Clive Francis).

As Morris grapples with his notions of peaceful partnership and brotherhood across race and culture, waiting for the white savior that never comes, we also meet Tshembe Matoseh (Danny Sapani). A local man who has for wondered Europe and America, he has returned to bury his father and find a home for his younger, aneurotypical half-brother, Eric (Tunji Kasim), contending with his uncle Ntali (Sidney Cole) and elder brother Abioseh (Gary Beadle) who both have very different paths in mind for the boy.

From the first moment when we see the mission, Soutra Gilmour’s narrow skeletal house, looking sickly and impermanent and smothered in fine grey dust, we feel an unease tickling our throats. The set (placed on a turntable) is controlled, barely, by The Woman (Shelia Atim), who walks with the stiffness of a lifetime of brutalization, shoves the turntable into motion and painstakingly drags together the set, scored by a chorus of matriarchs (Mahlen (Madosini) Latozi, Joyce Moholoagae, Nofenishala Mvotyo, and Nogcinile Yekani Nomaqobiso) and the occasionally bone deep moan of the Neilson’s cello. An invisible presence (and wickedly hard part) Atim stands as a recording, sometimes avenging, angel through each scene, an incorporeal projection of the ensemble of Blacks who creep like mice across the mission scenes, fearful of capturing any attention from the whites.

But while director Yael Farber has painted nuance on the stage, senses of power and pain that settle as finally as the dust, Hansberry (who’s posthumous script was completed by Robert Nemiroff) is not interested in a gentle touch. Les Blancs is a play that tackles, striking the audience squarely with the corner of its shoulder and ploughing on. It is a play of speeches; white hot and eloquent, that burn the tongues of actors coming across to them. There is the acidic chill of Fleet’s direction as he shows that the light the European world sees coming from the mission and Reverend Neilsen is irradiated not saintly. Or the leaping, captivating speech of rebel leader Ngago (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva) rallying his people to war. Spanai in particular grounds the live wire of Tshembe’s mixture of rage and frustration; his voice a river of pain and pride in his own struggles and that of his nation. Badgered again and again by Morris’s insistence that they are not so different, the desire “to talk,” he lambasts the reporter for his thought that five hundred years of suffering can “Dissolve in cigarette smoke.” one of the many delicious lines that catches sweet on our ears and burns down our throats. His confrontation with Abioseh, pits his tectonic strength, quivering with self doubt, against Beadles tearful earnestness, delivers us to that greatest of playwriting pleasures, the threshold of revelation, where you figure out some awful truth right before a character confirms it, and your stomach drops through your seat like you were gripped with love or terror. The best playwrights can summon this feeling, unique to the theater, for a single gut punch but here Hansburry sends it hovering at all times, in all corners, a ghostly shiver at your shoulder, ready for the next chance to trip you into horror.

What Hansberry does so well, what makes the piece so classic and so necessary for the theater of the present moment, is paint white supremacy with unflinching, unveiled, unforgiving artistry. In other plays racism is portrayed as linked to wicked hearts or as ignorance that can be cut away with a few enlightened actions; but Hansberry shows us white supremacy comes in many strains and shades. There is Morris’s belligerent ignorance, his insistence that poking at deep wounds shouldn’t hurt, compared with Dekoven’s recognition of systemic racism but a lack of hope, or interest, in solving it. Dr. Gotterling, the sweet and chipper minister of the villagers ills, is, as she is described, “A brilliant surgeon and a saint, but she questions nothing.” Her kindness and hope stem directly from her condescension and superiority, and the sight of her in the second act attending to her patients with a gun at her hip, “just in case,” froze my blood.

And of course there’s Major Rice. If Tshembe is a brilliantly conflicted protagonist, whose actions and motivations tangle and tighten as he confronts his brothers and his friends, we could not ask for a more straightforward (and yet so irreducible) villain. Les Blancs is one of those plays that an actor has to get up very early in the morning to ruin; its language and plot are so elegant, so fine, that it rises through the performer regardless fo their talents. Nevertheless Clive Francis plays Major Rice to the hilt, using his characters mixture of vulgar slurs, thoughtless cruelties, sadistic cunning, and complete self justification to a beautifully terrible effect. “It might surprise you, but I don’t consider myself a violent person.” he remarks to Morris, standing over the body of a man he’s shot in the head. His fiddling with a pair of ray ban sunglasses, an esthetic mark of police forces the world over, is a particularly fine touch. The Major loves his country, loves his way of life, “These are our hills, “He remarks wistfully. And he cannot see how he can raise his family, enjoy, “A glass of wine, a bit of music” without the complete subjugation, erasure, and relentless murder of human beings.

I know why nobody told me about Les Blancs. Why it is not as enshrined in the American cannon as A Raisin in the Sun. Raisin is a story of hope, of upward motion, of moving towards a world that Charlie Morris dreams of and is convinced is just around the corner. It’s not a bad story to tell, but it is not as strong a one. Les Blancs is cruel, devastating, and utterly uncompromising in its call for justice; sovereignty for Africans and protection of Black Lives by whatever means necessary. As Madame Neilson remarks to Tshembe, “A line will go on forever, unless something bisects it.” So to will colonialism and all the harm it carries go on forever, an unstoppable force, until it meets an immovable object. Tshembe often describes the peaceful protests and petitions of his countrymen, seeking small dignities and protections, endless marches to the capitol “And when we were not shot we were ignored.” Small wonder then that the rule, the justifications, even the dreams, of the whites are poised to go up in flames.