tailed set of descriptions that emphatically situate
the reader and audience in the scene. The play is
set in a studio apartment that reflects the social
upheaval and moral confusion in the lives of the
two characters.
After a precise orientation of the untidy space,
Bonner reveals the occupants and comments dis-
paragingly on the ambiguous relationship between
them. The female protagonist is Dot, a woman
who is “thin... almost as pale as the sheets” and
suffering from uneasy sleep. On the floor next to
her is Buddy, a man whose “high poised features,”
according to the narrator, mark him as a “keen
black man.”
Over the course of the play, Dot prepares for
an evening out with a man named Exit Mann. The
puns on his name are not lost on Buddy, who sus-
pects that the light-skinned Dot is passing and dat-
ing a white man. In a murderous rage, Buddy
threatens to kill the woman, whom he cannot
admit to loving, and her suitor. In the final scene,
Dot’s beau appears but shadows about him conceal
his identity. Buddy, frustrated by racial inequity
and his conflicted emotions, shoots in the direc-
tion of the couple. The beau finally turns and re-
veals a dead Dot in his arms. At this moment, Exit
Mann is revealed. The figure in a dark coat and
hat now appears to have the “hollow eyes and
fleshless cheeks” of Death. Bonner’s final scene re-
peats the first; the couple is sleeping fitfully in the
same positions in which they appeared first. Dot
dies in her bed as Buddy, shocked by her passing,
professes his love for her.
“Exit, an Illusion” is a stark and pointed medi-
tation on racial anxiety and the effects of social
and racial inequality. Bonner’s terse portrayal of
strained social relations between men and women
underscores the life-threatening impact of poverty
and hints at the nightmarish domestic upheaval
that accompanies racial passing.
Bibliography
Allen, Carol. Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Na-
tion, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline
Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Marita Bonner.New York:
Garland, 1998.
Bonner, Marita. “Exit, an Illusion.” Crisis (October
1929): 335–336, 352.
Flynn, Joyce, and Joyce Occomy Striklin. Frye Street and
Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.
“Marita Odette Bonner.” Lorraine Elena Roses and
Ruth Elizabeth Randolph. Harlem Renaissance and
Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women
Writers, 1900–1945.Boston: G. K. Hall & Co.,
1990.
Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Elizabeth Randolph. “Marita
Bonner: In Search of Other Mothers’ Gardens.”
Black American Literature Forum 21, nos. 1–2
(Spring–Summer 1987): 165–183.Eyes of the Old, TheDoris D. Price(1932)
One of four known plays by DORISD. PRICE,
published in 1932 with Price’s THE BRIGHT
MEDALLIONin a collection entitled University of
Michigan Plays. The volume, edited by George
Wahr, included selections of University of Michi-
gan student work produced in classes with En-
glish professor Kenneth Thorpe Rowe. Little is
known about Price, but records confirm that sis-
ters in the Detroit chapter of DELTA SIGMA
THETAproduced The Eyes of the Oldand The
Bright Medallion.
The Eyes of the Oldfocuses on three genera-
tions of women in the South: Grandma Matthews,
her daughter Lillian, and her granddaughter Carrie
Jackson. Grandma Matthews, whose blindness
does not prevent her from seeing the error of her
granddaughter’s ways, attempts to prevent Carrie
from abandoning school and eloping. The strong
and visionary matriarch in Price’s drama argues for
education and against the evils of single mother-
hood. The play’s title is taken from Grandma
Matthews’s prescient observation that “young folks
born wid der eyes of der ole” are the only individu-
als who are able to overcome the follies of youth
and to succeed.Bibliography
French, W. P., M. J. Singh, and G. E. Fabre. Afro-American
Poetry and Drama, 1760–1975: A Guide to Informa-
tion Sources.Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1979.
Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph.
Harlem’s Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900–1950.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.Eyes of the Old, The 147