Some actors occupy the stage; a few rule it. Some actors hold an audience; a few possess it. Some actors light up a scene; a few ignite the play. These combustible few blaze with the x factors of acting—intensity, intelligence, and authority. Theirs is a royalty apart from role, and when an Olivier, Gielgud, Nicol Williamson or Irene Papas treads the stage, their fellow actors are as rapt as the audience. Though the marquees of Broadway do not bear his name, Moses Gunn is of this regal breed.
Gunn is black and Broadway is still, racially speaking, the great white way. Nonetheless, Gunn's employment record is enviable. Since he arrived in New York from Louisiana in 1962, he has appeared in 18 productions, counting off-Broadway and Shakespeare-in-the-Park. Rarely, if ever, during that time has he received less than glowing notices in plays ranging from Genet's The Blacks to the gore-glutted Titus Andronicus in which Gunn played what he calls "the black Iago," Aaron the Moor. He will play the classic Moor, Othello, this summer at Stratford, Conn.
Assured Masculinity. Physically, Gunn is a lean six-footer who bends slightly forward from the waist as if he were bracing himself against a brisk wind. His long tapered fingers shape the air with the aristocratic command of a symphony conductor, and his voice has a resonant precision that quells any incipient coughers in the audience. Psychically, his stage personality is one of intensely contained, almost glacial calm. He understates like distant rolling thunder. Even now, many blacks are playing the professional Negro on stage, parody Uncle Toms or militant minstrels, and thus catering to the applause and approval of guilt-intoxicated whites. Gunn never does this. At 40, he has an assured masculinity that lies in his bones and not his skin.
Of all the tests that an actor has to face, range is crucial. Gunn impressively demonstrated his range in two vastly different off-Broadway performances. In Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, he played a middle-aging bull of a canecutter foreman who loses his job and his virile stud appeal at about the same time. Gunn made the man a blinded, shorn, bewildered Samson who wrenches at the pillars of his doom in one last mighty agony. In Daddy Goodness, a play about a religious con artist, Gunn fashioned a composite portrait of a store-front Father Divine, a Harlem dandy and an irresistible lecher, boozer and rogue.