In 1964, when his one-act Dutchman premiered off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Amiri Baraka was still LeRoi Jones—a 30-year-old black poet with a BA in English, a dishonorable discharge from the U.S. Air Force (for possessing Soviet propaganda), and a complicated interracial love life. You might also say he was full of rage, but that would be an awfully polite way of putting it. At least as he expressed himself in the play, he was an antiwhite, misogynist bigot. If James Baldwin was America’s literary Martin Luther King, Jones was its Nation-of-Islam-period Malcolm X.
TRANSit is Dutchman redux: a similar circumstance and dynamic brought into the present, with a different kind of gender fireworks added. The train riders this time include Ronald, a female-identifying black man who calls himself Veronica (a formidable, fragile Manny Buckley) and Veronica’s gay white clubbing friend Luke; the seducer role is filled by Lalo, a black-Latino kid who dances on the train for kicks and tips. The great and interesting difference between Canady’s piece and its inspiration is the lack of a clear enemy, despite plenty of sexual and racial tension. Without Jones’s unmitigated Evil One, all that’s left is the rage. v
Through 9/25: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM Greenhouse Theater Center 2257 N. Lincoln 773-404-7336 americanbluestheater.com $19-$49
