Otherwise Engaged

FROM WILLIAM FAULKNER to Harold Robbins, interracial sex has ignited the imaginations of American writers. The most popular of these works dealing with sex between Blacks and whites share a similar protagonist, usually a physically powerful but intellectually deprived Black man, who comes to a tragic end as the Victim of Society, headed for the electric chair or castration by a lynch mob for the alleged rape of a precious white girl.

Alice Childress' Wedding Band adds two twists to the usual plot of interracial sex stories. First, the male character is white; second, he and the female character are in love. But rather than use these unusual plot contrivances to probe new ideas from a different perspective, Childress presents a familiar cast of Southern caricatures--racists and saints--and often falls prey to didactic sermonizing that spoils this noble work about racial prejudice.

Wedding Band tells the story of Julia Augustine, a Black seamstress who lives in a secluded backyard where Herman, her white lover of ten years, can pay inconspicuous visits. In Childress' South Carolina of 1918, "mixed" affairs must be kept as clandestine as possible to prevent public humiliation, ridicule, or surprise late night visits from the local Ku Klux Klan. The two keep to themselves, celebrating their tenth anniversary alone in her shabby room with a small wedding cake. They profess undying love for each other and hope for the day when they can go North to marry. Yet guilt gnaws at their relationship.

Julia feels that she has betrayed her race. A romantic idealist, she struggles to convince herself that her love for Herman is a simple emotion, uncomplicated by their racial difference. But America's history of sexual relations between white men and Black women echoes of ugly racism: Southern gentlemen--even Jefferson--enjoyed frequent midnight strolls through their slave quarters, looking for Black women to sleep with; in most cases, these country squires took no responsibility for the slave children they fathered. Julia's female neighbors have not forgotten that sexual abuse and cannot help feeling that she allows Herman to use her body merely for his selfish pleasure, that his love is a lie. Nelson, her male neighbor, considers Julia an uppity nigger who gets involved with whites only because "a Black man got nothing to offer you."

Julia's neighbors fail to realize that Herman lives one step ahead of the bill collectors and the people who want to buy him out of his bakery shop. Alienated from the charmed world of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara by the South's rigid social hierarchy, Herman empathizes with Julia and her fellow Blacks. "I'm white," he says, "did it give me favors and friends?" The guilt that tortures him is more personal than Julia's; Herman feels he has betrayed his family, particularly his mother, with his love for a Black woman.

As Herman's sister and mother, Gretchen Klopfer and Laurie Patton surmount the formidable task of transforming characters written as villains into people whose prejudices, though painfully unjustified, can still be understood. Klopfer gives young Anabelle unexpected sensitivity. More than just a racist bitch, Patton's aging matriarch is a woman who, unable to accept her status as "poor white trash," clings to a delusion of superiority, the dying idea of white supremacy. In contrast to Herman's identification with Blacks, his mother hates them because she needs someone to despise in the same way that she suffers the condescension of the Southern aristocracy.

As Julia's neighbors, the more sympathetic Black counterparts of Herman's mother and sister, Connie Sullivan, Valerie Graves and Kevin Porter poignantly capture the desperation of a people struggling to retain their self-esteem in the face of daily abasement. Unfortunately, Wanda Whitmore, as landlady Fanny Johnson, mugs, contorts, and overacts her way through a performance that recalls the conniving but ignorant Black stereotypes in Hollywood's old plantation films.

WEDDING BAND'S fiery subject matter and Childress' unrestrained style force co-directors Nancy Krieger and Linda Thurston to walk a thin line between highly-charged, emotional drama and preachy social commentary. They get support for this precarious balancing act from Luiza Gonsalves, whose performance as Julia would, by itself, make this Black C.A.S.T.-Black Star Theatre production worth seeing. The subtle expressiveness of her Chaplinesque face and the easy grace of her gestures and movements lend her performance a naturalness that never fades though she remains on stage nearly every minute of the play. In Krieger and Thurston's most clumsily staged scene--a confrontation between Julia and Herman's mother that climaxes in a screaming match of racial slurs--Gonsalves delivers some of her most powerful lines upstage, her back to the audience; still she commands the scene. After her fight with Herman's mother, Gonsalves' face explodes in a mask of tearless rage that emphasizes the disgust she feels toward whites and toward herself.

While Gonsalves' forceful voice projects frustration and helplessness, her tone rarely changes, considerably weakening her scenes with Tom Saunders' Herman. Gonsalves' urgency, juxtaposed with Saunders' wooden-soldier gestures and flat line delivery, makes them appear more like uncomfortable acquaintances than intimate lovers.

Wedding Band is subtitled A Love/Hate Story in Black and White. Judging from the play's severe contrasts, one assumes that playwright Childress sees a world of rigid irreconcilable extremes. This production of Weeding Band succeeds best, however, when Krieger, Thurston and company avoid extremes, exploring life's gray region of confusion and ambivalence.