The Gentleman Caller opened at the Chelsea Theatre Center of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, New York with three other plays as A Black Quartet on April 25, 1969.
The most elaborately designed of the four plays, The Gentleman Caller presents a symbolic and expressionistic look at race relations as seen in the interaction of a mistress and servant.
The play opens in a satirically lavish drawing room decorated in white, red and black walls adorned with American flags. Prominent is a gun rack containing rifles and shotguns surrounded by mountings on spikes of the stuffed heads of a black man, a Native American, a Vietnamese and a Chinese--trophies of rich white America.
This "satirical fantasy" served the purposes of the Revolutionary Black Theatre and supports Bullins' view that we don't want to be another form of white art in blackface.
Critic Clayton Riley says : "A young black man calls on a decadent rich white lady, sits while she babbles endlessly about her traditions, her family, her 'ecclesiastical rank.' He never speaks. No one else does except the maid, a big black woman dressed in American flags and such. The lady's husband is painted gold (she is painted silver, both roles being played by black performers). The husband is dead. The lady is going to die, and this seems clear from the beginning, because she represents the broker, the 'whitey' from whom the reparations are going to be received. And... down she goes in a fusillade of lead from the maid-turned-militant who subsequently 'ices' the young man after he discovers that Mr. Mann (read the man, or Mr. Charlie) wears a false beard instead of the real one the young man coveted. So, the true and dedicated militant sees that what he thinks the Establishment has isn't worth having, certainly isn't what he wants. So, Mama has to get rid of him in true 'sustainer' fashion."
First produced in Brooklyn in 1969.
It has one male and one female character.
Hope this helps.
2006-08-08 01:26:00
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answer #1
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answered by Jigga 3
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