Les Blancs Read Free

play, which Margaret B. Wilkerson discusses in detail, the plot turns on an old hermit who emerges from a forest remote from civilization and discovers that the only survivors are wild children whom he, nearing the end of his life, has to teach all the wonders that humankind had produced.
    This “fable” was originally conceived for television, then reconceptualized for the stage. As of this writing, I have just witnessed the first staged reading of
What Use Are Flowers?
in which the directorial periods and commas were inserted by Harold Scott, who directed the award-winning twenty-fifth anniversary production of
A Raisin in the Sun
and the 1988 and ’89 productions of
Les Blancs
for Washington’s Arena Stage and Boston’s Huntington Theatre, respectively. Shortly (also in 1994), a full-fledged production of
What Use Are Flowers?
will be presented.
    Viewing it, as it begins to emerge on stage for the first time, one is struck again by Hansberry’s creative powers: the quality and force of her language and the playwright’s intuitive grasp of what makes for heightened dramatic action.
    One is also reminded of the timeliness of this artist’s vision. In the interaction between the hermit—who, in fact, is the world’s last teacher—and children to whom he must impart sensibilities of beauty and truth, there is a particular poignancy for our time, when the world’s children are not being served well by their elders and the world teeters precariously as a result. In this play, the artist as humanist was never more strikingly revealed.
    The Drinking Gourd
, originally commissioned for television to celebrate the centennial year of the American Civil War, has not yet been produced on film or stage. The reason, I think, is simple. The subject matter is American slavery; the nation has not yet come to terms with the terrible system of human bondage that has left us with so weighty a legacy still to be resolved.
    A journal entry from Hansberry on this subject is uncompromising:
    Some scholars have estimated that in the three centuries that the European slave trade flourished, the African continent lost one hundred million of its people. No one, to my knowledge, has ever paid reparations to the descendants of black men; indeed, they have not yet really acknowledged the fact of the crime against humanity which was the conquest of Africa.
    But then—history has not yet been concluded … has it?
    The record of whites in South Africa goes almost as far back as that of the presence of black and white peoples on American shores; hence the magnitude of the announcement of reconciliation from across the seas—and the promise.
    In this soon-to-be thirtieth anniversary of Hansberry’s death, history has moved from the independence of Ghana in 1957 and that of Kenya in 1963 (Jomo Kenyatta was on Hansberry’s mind in the writing of
Les Blancs
), to the rise of the new republic of South Africa as a phoenix from ashes in 1994, a testament not merely to human struggle but to the human will to triumph.
    Hansberry once said in an inteview that her goal as a dramatist was to “reach a little closer to people, to see if we can share some illumination about each other.”
    It will be interesting to keep
Les Blancs
within our purview for another thirty years, an ultimate milepost that will take us well into a new century and millennium to measure how far we and the world have come in sharing illuminations. Perhaps within this time frame, many more periods and commas will have been placed to shape the kind of world that Lorraine Hansberry in her brief life emphasized again and again was possible.
    —J EWELL H ANDY G RESHAM N EMIROFF
May 1994
    * Women who preceded Hansberry: 1941, Lillian Hellman,
Watch on the Rhine;
1950, Carson McCullers,
The Member of the Wedding;
1956, Francis Goodrich (with Albert Hackett),
The Diary of Anne Frank;
1958, Ketti Frings,
Look Homeward Angel
.
    * In 1994, David Levering-Lewis’s
W.E.B. Du Bois: