Theater: Tardy Rainbow

The Amen Corner, by James Baldwin, has one negative virtue as compared with his Blues for Mr. Charlie, offered last season: it is not a strident, vulgar, melodramatic polemic on the race question. Those who love to see the tumbrels of social protest roll portentously across the stage will be sorely disappointed. The play also has one positive virtue: Baldwin’s autobiographical acquaintance with the Negro evangelical scene. But Amen Corner, a 14-year-old first play, scuttles edgewise through this milieu like a crab, evading dramatic life more successfully than it confronts its characters. Baldwin has yet to learn that drama is really a verb masquerading as a noun.

The heroine (Bea Richards) is a Harlem storefront preacher, and she preaches and preaches and worries and cries. The husband she left years ago, an alcoholic trombonist, has come home to die, and that turns out to be a play-length process. The son she has cowed into seemingly submissive piety sneaks out to bars, and surreptitiously plays his father’s jazz recordings. A kind of Greek chorus of Harlem harpies gibber, clown, and rummage about as if they were witnessing the fall of a discount house of Atreus.

The prevailing sound of the evening is whiny, rhetorical self-pity, though ten minutes before the final curtain Bea Richards pierces the cloudy monotony with a stormburst of tears and sun shafts of helpless laughter. But by then it is too late for the playgoer to be greatly cheered by a solitary rainbow of real passion.