Identity crisis PBRC’s powerful Dutchman BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Dutchman By LeRoi Jones. Directed by Julia Murphy. With Lamar Gregory and Lauren Lovett. At Providence Black Repertory Company through May 30.

In 1964, five years before LeRoi Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka, the country was as brimming with racial tensions as he was — notwithstanding Martin Luther King Jr. receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. The playwright spilled his outrage into the Obie-winning play Dutchman that year, while other blacks waited until the urban riots that followed the murder of the Rev. King in 1968.

Providence Black Repertory Company is staging a run of this seminal one-act play through May 30. It’s an excellent production that you don’t want to miss.

In a way, this can be seen as a period piece, a curiosity from a distant time in American history, when theatrical extremism in the defense of black identity was no vice. The play drives symbolism through the heart of dramatic realism — which never stops beating, in this clearly coherent staging by director Julia Murphy.

The literal events are straightforward. On a subway, a lusty white woman, Lula (Lauren Lovett), picks up a willing black man, Clay (Lamar Gregory). She verbally toys with him and he plays along. Eventually things turn ugly as each drops the mask of racial accommodation, and the relationship ends in violence.

But, of course, each of them also represents a legion standing behind them. In the civil rights movement of the ’60s, plenty of white women were going along for the rides, both political and sexual. Because of the New York City setting, in the first productions Lula was played as a Greenwich Village bohemian, a sexually liberated woman of the time. (She speaks of counting her gray hairs, so the playwright wanted a little desperation in her psychological mix.)

Here she’s not in leotards and black beret. The director and costume designer Marilyn Salvatore have Lula in a short chiffon dress. Not blatantly predatory, just a girl in springtime. Lovett takes it from there, making Lula knowing and intense, always in control — which, after all, is the whole point of racism. Yet the actor doesn’t let us dismiss the woman as just some crazy. Lula’s behavior — from manipulative to violent — can be read as quite canny, in fact, depending on how we choose to project our own views of racial relations of the time. Lovett doesn’t let this Lula display a flicker of vulnerability. Instead, she humanizes her through being constantly alert to Clay’s reactions. Fine work.

As Clay, Gregory is convincing at every stage of the journey that Lula puts him through. The playwright has him wearing a suit and striped tie, to establish one end of his personality continuum, and to allow Lula to accuse him of acquiescing to a complacent plantation mentality. (Jones/Baraka had a graduate degree in philosophy from Columbia, so he wore his share of suits before his dashiki days.) Although I suppose that a physically imposing African-American actor would convey the climactic rage scene most overwhelmingly, there’s certainly nothing underwhelming about the temper Gregory puts on display.

The playwright gives Clay the last monologue, though not the last word, in this recapitulation of American racial history. In this open letter shouted to society, the character makes a case for murder of white people as one satisfaction left to outraged blacks. (Unsaid is his frustration that Nat Turner, whose 1831 slave revolt killed dozens of whites, also managed to abruptly end the abolition movement in the South.) In his long outburst, Clay says to Lula: "You don’t know anything except what’s there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart."

To talk or to act, to find a black identity or to forge one, these are just two of the dilemmas treated here by the playwright. Jones also was a poet and music critic. In addition to philosophy, he studied German literature — could he have picked a whiter discipline?

Toward the end of the play, figures in gray, with gray masks, enter the subway car, to all appearances dead to life. Jones at all costs sought to not let his spirit be deadened by the pressures of being a black man in America. Perhaps most important to him was his fear of letting himself become what the title of the play refers to. The Flying Dutchman was a ship of 17th-century legend, fated to sail eternally near the Cape of Good Hope because of the captain’s sin of irreverent pride.

By the time Jones became Amiri Baraka, he had successfully wended his way between the rock of his birthplace and the hard place of being a black man there. His answer was to found a spiritual renewal movement in his home city of Newark, New Jersey.