Charlie Fever

FROM THE MOOD-SETTING sinuousness of the prefatory dancer to the audience's final cathartic gasp, No Place to be Somebody captivates. H-R Black C.A.S.T. has established in its short existence a tradition of loose and engaging productions which feed on audience interaction and force spectators into a vital consideration of the black person's experience in America.

No Place is a nightmare of black survival in the white-dominated world, never quite salvaging their own pride from degradation and suffering. A would-be playwright meanders drunkenly across the stage singing the old revival hymn "Wash Me Whiter Than Snow," and condemning the not-so-antiseptic world his family found when they tried to leave their "dirty, filthy nigger hovels across the tracks" and imitate "clean, white people."

An emaciated, terminally-ill racketeer returns from a ten-year prison term to tell his protege, a pimp and bar owner, that he is just another victim of "Charlie fever"--"we couldn't only pick up the good things about white men, we couldn't just be men, no, we had to take on the bad parts, the hustling, the rackets, the big cars and fine clothes." This emphasis pervades even the moments of comic relief provided by a lanky, effiminate short-order chef who wants to be a classical dancer--he takes lessons from a white Jew.

There is resolution only in more suffering, suicide, and murder. Transcendent, however, is the hope for "a new life"--and this hope is just as gripping as the sordidness that went before it. No Place to be Somebody is something to see.