THE HOUSE OF THE NEGRO INSANE
by Terence Anthony
Directed by Daniel Carlton
59E59 (show page)
Reviewed by David Spencer
1935. A work shack. Attius (Benjamin C. Rowe), a black man is building coffins for the Central State Hospital; Henry (Rob Penty), white guy who’s some kind of supervisor for the “negro insane” compound is asleep on the cot. Attius thinks about doing Henry in his sleep with a hammer. Henry wakes up, Attius’s fantasy is over; Henry is of course a bully who hides behind a veneer of benevolence; you know the trope. Attius has to say “yassuh” a lot.
(How much can you see coming?)
Little later on, Effie (Wadiah Waliah), a semi-nutty escapee, finds her way to the shack. Attius says “You can’t be here!” But she’s one of those endearingly eccentric crazies. She hides successfully under the bed when Henry comes to check up on Attius. Henry waves a little work knife around for emphasis, puts it under his cot mattress. Unclear whether he always keeps it there—but it’s there now!
(How much can you see coming?)
A scene it two later on, Madeleine (Sidney Hatcher), a haunted 10-year-old black girl with a vivid imagination, an eye patch and the shakes is added to the mix. She makes her entrance while everybody is away, but she “stumbles upon” the small work knife under the mattress and pockets it. Attius returns. “You can’t be here.” But she’s a friend of eccentric Effie, who said she’d be safe there. Attius relectantly relents
(How much can you see coming?)
This is all within the first half hour, maybe a bit more; play is about 80 minutes long. Many of them interminable.
There’s an enormous difference between setting up your tonal and thematic permissions, so the audience is keyed into the ride they’re about to take, and telegraphing your destination, and in The House of the Negro Insane, playwright Terence Anthony provides everything but the operator to type out the dots and dashes.
The paradigm is familiar: a central character accepts abuse directed at him not to make waves, but rises up when it’s directed at others who cannot defend themselves or have been destroyed. And there are many variations. The one that rushes to mind is obscure, but also vastly underrated, having been produced—the harsh light of a half-century later seems to indicate—before its time, and that’s Ronald Ribman’s The Poison Tree, a prison drama set in the deep south. Its story trajectory isn’t precisely a parallel to that of The House of the Negro Insane, but the white guards/black prisoners dynamic is key and the psychological journeys are similar. And that’s what makes it the ideal contrast, because while Ribman plants seeds that will germinate just as inevitably, you don’t catch him at it. To break my usual rule about spoilers just this once, the abusive guard who will meet his end at play’s end and at the hands of the prisoner who has finally had enough, has just as complex an emotional life, just as much capacity for compassion (however selective) as any of the other characters. You may have a sense of something catastrophic coming, because The Poison Tree is also what I call a “pressure cooker play,” that requires catharsis, but you either can’t predict it or find yourself in anticipatory suspense as to how it’ll play out, because you care too much about the characters not to be invested.
Unfortunately, The House of the Negro Insane thwarts suspense with long talking-heads scenes, not much in the way of plot…and some truly graceless direction (Daniel Carlton) in which the blocking is clumsy and the lack of pacing leaves the poor performers gesturing futilely and indicating emotions in dumbshow to cover for pauses that a savvier director would have found ways to close up toward at least giving an illusion of momentum.
All this said: I attended the opening; it’s a production of the Negro Ensemble Company, so between friends, fans, associated personnel, colleagues, you can imagine the audience demographic. The reaction was, of course, respectful and the mood one of encouragement—and also, of course, that made it impossible to gauge what the audience, in general, was really thinking: the border between polite tolerance and actual enjoyment can be a thin one, and the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. Especially on an opening night. But I was also mindful that The House of the Negro Insane may have resonances for some members of an African-American audience beyond even the obvious ones, who would forgive or overlook its clumsiness because it touches upon life experience, family history or some other sociological aspect about which I can neither make assumptions or presume. So I can’t say it doesn’t/won’t have its audience.
But I wish it treated its audience better.