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DUTCHMAN, by LeRoi Jones. In a New York subway car, a white girl who is a twitchy, neurotic bundle of well-informed cliches and sterile sexual aggressions, lures, taunts, degrades and destroys a Negro in a Brooks Brothers shirt, but not before he tells her, with profane and explicit brutality, how much Negroes hate whites.
THE BLOOD KNOT. Two half brothers, one light and one dark, act out in miniature the torment of being a racial outcast in present-day South Africa. Playwright Atholl Fugard writes with a tenderness, poignance and understanding that crosses all color lines.
THE TROJAN WOMEN, winner of a special citation from the New York Drama Critics' Circle, is a powerful, tormenting image of humans bearing the unbearable.
RECORDS
Opera
I PURITANI (3 LPs; London) is the last and loveliest of Bellini's operas, a story about the Roundheads and the Stuarts in the days of Cromwell incongruously drenched in Italian melody and sunlit harmony. Only singers skilled in bel canto, such as Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas, dare try it. In the new recording, Sutherland is the demented Elvira, and when she sings Vien, diletto in a deluge of perfectly matched and sparkling runs and trills, she embellishes even the embellishments. Maria Callas (on Angel's earlier version of I Puritani) has no such quicksilver in her voice, but in many poetic passages, exquisitely shaded and phrased, she is the better proof of Bellini's proposition: "The object of opera should be to weep in song."
GREAT SOPRANOS OF OUR TIME (Angel). Sutherland and Callas again, and out to draw blood. Callas plays Verdi's Lady Macbeth, chilling in the sleepwalking scene, and Sutherland is Donna Anna, crying vengeance on Don Giovanni at the top of her voice. The other reigning sopranos in this international exposition are Sweden's Birgit Nilsson singing Beethoven, France's Regine Crespin singing Wagner, Germany's Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing Mozart, and Spain's Victoria de los Angeles singing Verdi and Gounod.
JUSSI BJOERLING sings operatic duets with Robert Merrill and scenes (from II Trovatore, Rigoletto) with Zinka Milanov and others (RCA Victor). Like Caruso, whose popularity he nearly attained, the Swedish tenor died before 50, but unlike Caruso he was able to leave a treasury of well-engineered recordings of Italian opera. These excerpts date from 1950 to 1956, and show his voice getting slightly heavier and darker while retaining its refinement and radiance.
THE CRUCIBLE. (2 LPs; Composers Recordings Inc.). Based on Arthur Miller's play exposing some of the all too human motives behind the Puritan witch hunts, this 1962 Pulitzer prizewinner is the most successful to date of the operas subsidized by the Ford Foundation. Robert Ward's music is conservative by Schoenbergian standards, but dramatic, with syncopated, dissonant hymns and minor-keyed, folklike tunes suggesting the poisoned New England atmosphere. Most of the New York City Opera singers who premiered the work record it here with fine esprit de corps, led by Conductor Emerson Buckley.