Tiger Tiger Burning Bright, by Peter S. Feibleman, is a little like a Negro Glass Menagerie. The widowed mother (Claudia McNeil) is a ferocious matriarch with a personality as forbidding as a medieval fortress. She has ringed her brood with a moat of make-believe, fearfully shielding them from the outside world. Her daughter (Ellen Holly) is retreating into a tormenting mental twilight of blinding headaches.
The tiger of the title (Alvin Ailey) is an inarticulate rebel, snarling and moping about the house. Mama pins her faith to a framed telegram, a next-of-kin death notice for another son killed in World War II, that hangs on the bleak wall of her shanty on the outskirts of New Orleans. It is proof that the boy, who she feared would end in jail, died a hero's death instead.
Gradually, this faith is destroyed. The gifts—money, a stove, earrings—that the tiger has lavished on his mother in the guise of promotion benefits from his job with the telegraph company are revealed to be thefts from the homes of whites. Moreover, he is a male prostitute catering to the jaded tastes of some of the richer white women in town. He hasn't delivered a telegram for years; the last one is on the wall, a fake he made up as a teenager to give his mother the comforting lie that she craved.
Tiger is a play of fumbled possibilities. It is a mordant reflection on a Negro mother to say that her highest hope for a son is a good death rather than a good life, and an acid play might have come of it. Playwright Feibleman opaquely implies that the Negro in the U.S. lives in a state of siege and self-corroding stratagems. But he has carried understatement to the point of no comment. He is so leery of the false premise that color affects everything that, as a matter of stage fact, he is trapped into arguing the equally false premise that color affects nothing.
In default of dramatic momentum, Director Joshua Logan soups up the melodramatic attitudinizing—soulful head clutchings, venomous spittings-in-the-face, and caged-animal stage stalking. Only in the last act does one scene come alive with fury and clarity. Diana Sands, a cool, sexy hustler who has worn the body-and-soul-for-sale sign longer than the tiger, proposes marriage to him. Too sterile for love, too cynical for hope, she suggests only that they huddle together for animal warmth in their loneliness. In the psychic fatigue of her voice, there is a fox at bay, and one hears, imaginatively, the sound so muted the rest of the evening, the distant, electrifying yelps of the white world's hound pack.