Its “kill whitey” ethos, its proclamation by black revolutionary leader Walker Vessels (Richard Bradford) that his children with white ex-wife Grace Easley (Lesley Berkowitz) are “freakish mulattoes,” and the frequency with which Vessels calls Grace’s current husband, Brad (Bob Weick), a white, liberal university professor, a “faggot.”
Amiri Baraka
The most surprising thing about Amiri Baraka’s race-war fantasy The Slave – produced for the Philly Urban Theatre Festival by Iron Age Theatre Company – is that it has aged better than Dutchman, his most celebrated work and the companion to this piece.
This, despite its “kill whitey” ethos, its proclamation by black revolutionary leader Walker Vessels (Richard Bradford) that his children with white ex-wife Grace Easley (Lesley Berkowitz) are “freakish mulattoes,” and the frequency with which Vessels calls Grace’s current husband, Brad (Bob Weick), a white, liberal university professor, a “faggot.”
No one ever accused Baraka, dethroned from his spot as New Jersey’s poet laureate after insinuating the 9/11 attacks were a secret Israeli plot, of being a nice guy.
Baraka (when the piece was written in 1964 he was known as LeRoi Jones) crafts a deeply conflicted character in Vessels, whose internal war matches the mayhem he has unleashed on the streets. Vessels, after breaking into the Easley home and drunkenly brandishing a gun at the couple, calls his foot soldiers “ignorant mother-s who have never read any book in their lives.”
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