The Theater: Requiem for the '60s

THE TAKING OF MISS JANIE by ED BULLINS

This play begins with a black man raping a white woman. Strangely enough, it is less a brutal physical act than the saddest of requiems. The play ends with the figures of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X on a rear stage scrim being spattered with gobs of blood. Thus the rape is, to some degree, an image of the anarchic violence of the '60s.

It is also a double requiem for the defeated hopes of the '60s. As a black girl who...

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