Off Broadway: Play v. Players

The Negro Ensemble Company seems to be forging a dubious tradition of brilliantly staging mediocre material. Last season, the company managed to make interesting evenings out of two rather lumbering efforts from Africa — Song of the Lusitanian Bogey and Kongi's Harvest. The play the Negro Ensemble offered last week lumbers out of dark est Georgia. God Is a (Guess What?) was written by Atlanta Schoolteacher Ray Mclver, whose intention was clearly to make a cutting satire of black-white relations in the U.S.

Mclver's intentions unfortunately outrun his wit; the jokes are just not bright enough to shine up the cliches about Whitey's hypocrisies—ecclesiastical and lay. But the players of the Negro Ensemble, under the direction of Michael A. Schultz, endow this "minstrel-morality play" with a lively inventiveness and bounce it was never born with. Arthur French and David Downing are notable as a comic couple of end men in whiteface out to stage a "traditional American lynching" on a long-suffering black man (Julius Harris). There is some show-stopping (if irrelevant) footwork by a trio of pretty chicklets billed as Extraordinary Spooks. And Frances Foster has a delicious bit as a highfalutin Whitey lover who is afraid that a lynching will ruin her daughter's debut, which is slated to be "written up in the paper near the society page." But many prefer him dead—the church for ritual, the whites for souvenirs, an African tribeswoman for dinner.

God himself finally intervenes, though he admits that "taking command is not my cup of Tetley," and Graham Brown plays him with elegance and panache in a sharp set of threads that is appropriately grey. But God and Author Mclver have a soporific tendency to repeat themselves until the play fights the players to a draw.