Black Militant Drama

In a period of fundamental and emotional social change, it it not surprising that literature produced at such a time would be considered “important” and threatening to an audience chiefly made up of the dominant society. Among such works are American plays dealing with the “Black Power Revolt.” But audience reaction to “socially-relevant” literature is not simply a conscious and socially-oriented response; at any given moment in the viewer's experience of a play, there may be a complex of reaction components.

One of these components is the personal one, which depends upon one's previous life-history; this response is partly conscious, partly preconscious, and can usually be articulated upon reflection. The social component, closely linked to it, may initially take the form of defensive rejection of statements in the play dealing with the nature of the “good society” or the validity of a given ethical system or desirable norms of behavior or analysis of present societal ills, but there exists in the response a foundation of consciously-held beliefs. The esthetic component may be chiefly personal, the result of innate sensitivity and intelligence, or social, the result of a certain kind of training (that is, a conditioned response to literary elements, such as rhetorical language and manipulation of symbols), or a fusion of personal and learned responses; generally, in current American literary training, the esthetic response includes a large negative conditioning to “revolutionary” or “shocking” themes and language. The psychological component is primarily unconscious; it is a response to aspects of the play which analogically recapitulate the mental growth of the viewer or imitate his mental structure. It is the “psycho-esthetic” component which is the subject of my essay.

Let me clarify my thesis. I will not describe the psychological state of the author of the play or of any character within