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The two plays were produced by the Negro Ensemble Company, founded two years ago by Actor-Playwright Douglas Turner Ward, Actor Robert Hooks and Producer Gerald Krone. The company is the apex of a genuine black breakthrough that occurred off-Broadway during the 1960s. The small theaters, mostly below 14th Street in Manhattan, were the training or proving grounds not only for Moses Gunn but for James Earl Jones (The Great White Hope) and Diana Sands (The Owl and the Pussycat"), as well as for Gloria Foster, Clarence Williams III, Cicely Tyson, Barbara Ann Teer, Rosalind Cash, Lou Gossett, Vinie Burrows, Yaphet Kotto, Hattie Winston, Nathan George, Roscoe Lee Browne and many more. Simultaneously, a band of black playwrights got their first chance to render and explore black experience to increasingly black audiences. In a sense, it has been a drama of exorcism, a casting out of white devils from black minds. LeRoi Jones' Dutchman is a prime example. A sexy, sassy white girl in a subway car flaunts herself before a softspoken, conservatively dressed black boy, goads him into venting his pent-up fury at whites, and then knifes him to death. Jones achieved his own symbolic revenge soon after in his play The Toilet where a group of black boys pummel a white boy to death and leave him with his head dangling in a high school lavatory.
Other plays have shown the depth of Negro travail. Lonnie Elder Ill's Ceremonies in Dark Old Men focuses on a pitiably poor father who tries to rear his sons in honesty only to find that the survival value of honesty in his situation is very low. In Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody, a savvy young man who idolizes an ex-con man tries to form his own black Mafia and dies in the attempt.
As Moses Gunn sees it, all of this is a great deal more than a spontaneous eruption of black playwriting talent. He feels it was always there: "What we have done is simply put a poker iron up people's behinds and have said, 'We write too.' It is said of blacks that they don't have enough training to be playwrights. But the theater is not an area that has much to do with education. It has to do with craft. Blacks have had the craft, but if a man with a potential has enough barriers put in front of him, naturally he won't develop that potential."
Why have the barriers remained so high? Says Gunn: "Power and influence on Broadway are in the hands of whites. They feel threatened at letting others get involved. Discrimination is not diabolical in intent. It is extremely difficult to adjust to the new situation, to get over ingrained prejudices and to realize that black people, whom they have labeled 'inferior,' can do the same thing that they do or do It better."