During the pandemic, NT Live at Home is providing a means of diversion with archival recorded performances from the National Theater. The latest production, a reworked version of Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs from 2016, is especially relevant as the Black Lives Matter movement dominates the news. Hansberry achieved fame in 1959 with her brilliant A Raisin in the Sun, the first play by an African-American woman on Broadway. She had only one other work produced on the Main Stem in her tragically short lifetime—The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, a comedy-drama about Greenwich Village intellectuals. Les Blancs was unfinished at the time of Hansberry’s death at 34 from pancreatic cancer. Her ex-husband Robert Nemeroff adapted and completed the script, bringing it to a short-lived and ill-received Broadway run in 1970 starring James Earl Jones. The NT version was assembled by director Yael Farber along with Joi Gersham, Nemeroff’s daughter and director of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust, and dramaturge Drew Lichtenberg.
The play remains flawed with a talk-heavy script, underdeveloped characters and a melodramatic plot, but Farber’s production is an electrifying spectacle, drawing on African music and customs and brutally confronting Hansberry’s thesis of European colonialism fostering misery and terrorism. A chorus of women provide starkly beautiful tribal music and the spectrally beautiful Sheila Atim as a ghostly embodiment of the beleaguered continent haunts the play like a vengeful wraith.
Set in an unnamed African country occupied by British settlers, the play is a response to Jean Genet’s The Blacks. Hansberry wanted to write a more realistic work than the French author’s impressionist piece which saw its symbolic African characters through an exotic lens.
Hansberry’s protagonist is the charismatic Tshembe Matoseh (a powerhouse Danny Sapani) who has returned to his native land for his father’s funeral. The main setting is an impoverished hospital and mission (an evocative skeletal set by Soutra Gilmore) run by liberal whites whose well-meaning humanitarianism ultimately leads to further oppression of the people they seek to help. Tshembe’s attempts to reconcile his European-influenced education with his African roots as well as the futile attempts of the many players to resolve the powder-keg situation form the plot.
Hansberry’s dialogue is eloquent and stimulating and just as relevant today as when it was written, but the many characters are more like talking perspectives than real individuals. Tshembe is the anguished African intellectual, not unlike Joseph Asagai in Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. His two brothers (a priest and a confused young man) represent different aspects of the African population’s attitude to colonization while the white settlers, doctors, and missionaries symbolize European and American stances. There is a tantalizing view of Tshembe’s younger biracial brother Eric, who may or may not be gay, but this part of his character is never developed (Hansberry herself was lesbian, and Sidney Brustein had a gay male character). In addition to the intense Sapani, there is magnificent work from Siân Philips as the compassionate but powerless missionary, Sidney Cole as a seemingly servile servant disguising his revolutionary ardor, and Clive Francis as the authoritarian military commander.
One harrowing parallel with our present moment comes when the authoritarian British major frankly states that one White life in worth more several Black ones, and the other White characters more or less concur. That horrifying moment and many others in this visceral and gut-wrenching production illuminate the tragedy of Hansberry’s short life. Her keen and compassionate intellect would have been the perfect voice to dissect our current clash of race, culture, and sexuality.
