The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan, Apr. 7, 1941

Native Son (produced by Orson Welles & John Houseman). Playwright Paul Green has helped Negro Novelist Richard Wright turn his best-selling Native Son into by all odds the strongest drama of the season. Broadway drama critics generally agreed that the book's pain-by-pain account of the Negro hero's tortured mind was more powerful than the play. But in ten scenes, framed within forbidding brick walls, played without intermission, the play says plenty.

The story is of Bigger Thomas (Canada Lee), a brooding, violent Negro whose father was killed in a Southern race riot, who lives...

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