Vivid?

Indelible?

-It's Only Ugly

TH

By Peter Bellamy

HE PLAY most likely to make its audiences gag, retch and sick to their stomachs is an off-Broadway offering, "The Toilet," at St. Marks Playhouse.

This completely loathsome orgy of obscenity, profanity, scatology, and brutality is a disgraceful new low in the American theater. Its continued existence is not made more pleasant by several New York drama critics who profess to see something fine in it.

The play takes place in the lavatory of a boys' high school. The room is equipped with seven urinals, one of which a Negro boy uses as the play opens.

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The action starts after a Negro boy receives what can only be interpreted as a homosexual love letter from a white boy. The Negroes then proceed to kick, punch and stomp the white boy to death, savoring every moment of sadism and leaving his bloodied head in one of the urinals.

Implication of Playwright Leroi James is that many Negroes would like to see all white heads bloodied and left in urinals.

For comedy relief, the play shows the Negroes playing mock games with rolls of toilet paper. One of the Negro boys has been described by a teacher as a credit to his race.

Howard Taubman of the New York Times in his review of "The Toilet" and its companion piece, "The Slave," a story about all-out war between blacks and whites, called James "one of our most gifted playwrights." Time Magazine referred to the play's "nightmarish brilliance." The Saturday Review said, "a vivid and indelible work."

The same could be said of the pornographic "Memoirs of the Marquis de La Sade" and I'm sure if it were produced in New York, some learned critic would say "it is a pungent morality tale played by an agile cast which plays the roles with infectious relish."

I don't know how close the New York critics are to Negroes in New York or if they have ever served on settlement boards which offer services to Negroes.

However, as one who served on the Glenville Community Centers Board for a number of years, I think that such fine Cleveland men as the Rev. Isaiah Pogue and George Moore, associate director of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, would be utterly sickened by "The Toilet."

Nobody could find it part of the "golden dream" of Negroes for a better, decent life.

The play reduces Negroes to the level of savage animals, and its coupling racial hatred and homosexuality only pours gasoline on the social fire. In a world heartbreakingly in need of tolerance, it preaches the most venomous race hatred and vengeful cruelty.

Playwright James, a Negro, is pitifully mixed up. He preaches hymns of race hate as dreadful as any by Southern white racists, but his wife is white.

The theater has many missions, but I submit that one is not to degrade human beings to the level of cretins as "The Toilet" does. Nor should the theater treat of depravity and beastliness for their sake as does this and many other plays written in recent years by angry young men and women and phony homosexual intellectuals.

The Negroes in "The Toilet" remind me of a group of white boys from Southern mill towns into whose company I was thrown in the Navy during World War II. To them all eight parts of speech were obscenities and profanities. Their meanness of disposition was only exceeded by their ignorance and prejudice.

I thanked God daily for the chastening presence of rugged bosun's mates who would countenance no such running amok as offered by The Toilet."

One of the reasons that "The Toilet" and several other mediocre plays have had runs in New York is because several of its most powerful critics lean over backward in their efforts to show how liberal in thought they are.

If a play is about civil rights or a "cause," they are likely to do wild nip ups about the play's excellence. whether it has any merit or not. A case in point was the play. "Blues for Mr. Charlie." whose demise was greeted by several drama writers as akin to a national disaster, which it certainly wasn't.

Certainly Dr. Martin Luther King, who has preached nonviolence in the civil rights issue, could not possibly see any valadity or merit in The Toilet." in which Negroes are made to spew the vilest of words and appear lower than snakes.

Until there is more critical balance to discourage the production of such cesspools as "The Toilet," the theater will be more of a garbage can and less of a "dwelling place of wonder."