Theater: Rolling Thunder

(4 of 4)

At high school graduation, six scholarships awaited him, and he chose all-black Tennessee State University in Nashville, where he majored in speech and drama. During one summer he helped organize a student troupe called Footlights Across Tennessee, and the group toured the black colleges of the South and Midwest playing the classics, modern plays and little-known comedies by black playwrights written in Negro dialect. Gunn was halfway through his master's thesis on "The Negro in the Theater, 1840-1960" and teaching at Louisiana's Grambling College when the itch to further his acting career won out. He went to New York and signed on as an understudy in The Blacks at $15 per week. He has been part of the off-Broadway ferment ever since.

From Visibility to Variety. On another performing front, Gunn will be seen in three films to be released this year. In The Great White Hope, he plays a prophetic black nationalist named Scipio. In a Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward film, Hall of Mirrors, Gunn will play a venal funeral director with powerful connections at city hall. He becomes one of Napoleon's generals (Gourgaud) in Eagle in a Cage, a film with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.

In the theater, it may be said that during the '60s the black actor and the black playwright achieved visibility. In the '70s, they may well achieve variety, both in probing the scope of black experience and in playing the entire canon of dramatic literature. If that happens, then by virtue of his gifts and his diligence, industry and fortitude. Moses Gunn will be a name widely known and fully honored.