Dutchman is performed in an actual subway car from 1955 at the Trolley Museum of New York in Kingston. The audience sits in the car, too. It was an LL car, but the conductor at the beginning of the show, imagines it an A train. ("All aboard, for the A train, making express stops only!" he shouts to the audience, indicating that the show is starting.) Bruce Grund, the director, was in the car with us. At one point Clay (Lerone Simon) pulls the New York Times out of his hands and throws it to the floor.
Dutchman is one of those combustible works of art, like the Battle of Algiers (the movie) or Huckleberry Finn — works that have been banned repeatedly, by Christians, fascists and even liberals. It is offensive, unsettling, cartoonish, violent, unsavory, hard-hearted, wily, taboo-crushing. The plot is quite simple. A good-looking blonde woman walks up to a black man on a subway and begins talking. She smiles at him, she reads his mind, she seduces him. The man, who is named Clay, is flattered, confused. All of us, on the subway, watch helplessly. Lula (Terri Mateer) calls Clay a "n_____." He flinches.
Amiri Baraka understands an audience. He knows what we want: the satisfaction of bullying. A woman against a black man — it’s an even contest, strangely. She is white, but a woman; he is black, but masculine. Both are victims of history, and neither quite know it. Whom do we root for? The man, certainly. The woman is unacceptable, terrifying, though she grows more beautiful as she sings erotically.
Amiri must have been angry, furiously angry, but at whom? At himself, certainly — but also at bohemians and African-American businessmen. In the claustrophobic subway car of 1964 that he constructs, there are no heroes; only gradations of fools. But Dutchman is not an angry play, just as a steam engine is not made of steam. Baraka points to a distant destination, which we may not reach, and even our children may not know. A train must move forward, even a subway train. We, the passengers, must progress — even if we’re simply coming home. The year after this play, Curtis Mayfield wrote:
People, get ready, there’s a train a’coming,
Picking up passengers from coast to coast…
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