666 The American Century: Literature since 1945begins her act all over again. The claustrophobic physical setting, the sense of
irresistible force and motion, and, not least, the constant references to Adam and
Eve, fairy tales, and the Flying Dutchman, all suggest the synthesis of styles and
approaches at work in this powerful tale of racial tension and sexual repression.
Clearly affected by this and other plays by Baraka, Bullins has created his own special
mix of streetwise dialogue and sophisticated dramatology, the vernacular and the
mythic, in the more than fifty plays he has written, starting with Clara’s Old Man
(1965) and Goin’ a Buffalo (1968).
Goin’ a Buffalo, for instance, is about a group of characters living on the edge in
Los Angeles, prostitutes and pimps. “This play is about some black people,” Bullins
tells us in the initial stage directions. For these people, money, drugs, and sex
circumscribe their lives. They are caught, it seems, in enclosed spaces that reflect
their captive, constrained status in society; and they are bewildered by the gap, or
rather chasm, that opens out between the promise of America and the realities, the
sheer violence of their everyday existence. For them, Buffalo, on the other side of
the American continent, beckons as an escape, a chance to realize the unrealizable
dream of freedom and a fresh start. The dream, however, dissolves in conflict,
manipulation, and deception. Bullins later chose to include Goin’ a Buffalo in his
Twentieth-Century Cycle, a proposed series of twenty plays on the African-
American experience, that deals not so much with race relations as with the everyday
lives of African-Americans. Other, subsequent plays in the series include In the
Wine Time (1968), Home Boy (1976), and Boy x Man (1995). All the plays in the
series so far, together with those outside it, carry his familiar trademarks. “Each
individual in the crowd,” Bullins has written, “should have his sense of reality
confronted, his consciousness assaulted.” So, his plays consistently startle in their
immediacy, their raw power of language and action, their concentration on the
psychosocial anger of African-American culture. The “natural” style Bullins says he
follows is a product of craft, calculation. Music, particularly rhythm and blues and
jazz, is used to frame the actions and focus feeling. Symbolism, such as the symbols
of boxes, enclosures that run through Goin’ a Buffalo, establishes meaning.
Language, a stripped, rhythmic vernacular, discloses only what the characters want
to disclose: there is no obvious attempt made to impose a meaning, impart a
message. This is an art that resists overt ideology – Bullins left the Black House
Theatre when he felt that there was too much pressure on him to produce simply
agitprop plays – but that nevertheless explores the many avenues by which drama
can issue out of and return to black life, carrying with it in the process a series of
potentially revolutionary ideas. As such, it represents, perhaps, the finest realization
of the black aesthetic on the stage.
While Bullins has been central to the story of alternative theater, success on the
mainstream stage has tended to elude him. By contrast, August Wilson enjoyed
considerable mainstream success. His Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982), Fences
(1983), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984), The Piano Lesson (1986), Two Trains
Running (1992), and Seven Guitars (1995) were all produced on Broadway, for theGGray_c05.indd 666ray_c 05 .indd 666 8 8/1/2011 7:31:38 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 38 PM