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Negro is at the very heart of the American confusion. Much of the American confusion, if not most of it, is a direct result of the American effort to avoid dealing with the Negro as a man. The theater cannot fail to reflect this confusion, with results which are unhealthy for the white actor, and disastrous for the Negro.
    The character a white actor is called on to play is usually a wishful fantasy: the person, not as he is, but as he would like to see himself. It need scarcely be said, therefore, that the situations the playwright invents for this person have as their principal intention the support of this fantasy.
    The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, A Majority of One, Tea and Sympathy
, and
Tall Story
are all utterly untruthful plays. The entire purpose of the prodigies of engineering skill expanded on them is to make the false seem true. And this cannot fail, finally, to have a terrible effect on the actor’s art, for the depths out of which true inspiration springs are precisely the depths he is forbidden to reach.
    I am convinced that this is one of the reasons for the nerve-wracking
busyness
of our stage—“Keep moving, maybe nobody will notice that nothing’s happening”—and the irritating, self-indulgent mannerisms of so many of our actors. In search of a truth which is not in the script, they are reduced to what seem to be psychotherapeutic exercises.
    Listening to actors talk about the means they employ to “justify” this line, or that action, is enough to break the heart and set the teeth on edge. Sometimes the actor finds that no amount of skill will “justify” or cover up the hollowness or falsity of what he is called on to do. This is where the director comes in: it would seem that much of his skill involves keeping everything moving at such a clip, and to have so many things happening at once, that the audience will remain, in effect, safely protected from the play.
    If this is true for the white actor, it is unimaginably worse for the Negro actor. The characters played by white actors, however untruthful they may essentially be, do depend on the accumulation of small, very carefully observed detail. Thus, Chester Morris, playing a thoroughly unreal father in
Blue Denim
, yet mimics the type so well that it is easy to be misled into believing that you once knew someone like him. But the characters played by Negro actors do not have even this advantage. White people do not know enough about Negro life to know which details to look for, or how to interpret such details as may have been forced on their attention.
    To take one of the many possible examples: the scene in Reginald Rose’s
Black Monday
, in which Juano Hernández is beaten to death. Hernández plays a janitor in the Deep South, you will remember, who isopposed to integration. He does not believe—so he informs a marvelously mocking and salty Hilda Simms—in pushing himself in “where he is not wanted.” He is also telling this to his twelve-year-old grandson, who is beginning (somewhat improbably) to wonder if he is as good as white people.
    Now, of course, we have all met such janitors and such Negroes. But their tone is very different and their tone betrays what they really feel. However servile they may appear to be, there is always a murderous rage, or a murderous fear, or both, not quite sleeping at the very bottom of their hearts and minds. The truth is that they do not have any real respect for white people: they despise them and they fear them. They certainly do not trust them. And when such a man confronts his nephew or his grandson, no matter what he says, there cannot fail to be brought alive in him envy and terror and love and hate. He has always hated his condition, even though he feared to change it, even though he may no longer be able to admit it.
    If the playwright does not know this—as, on the evidence, I gather Mr. Rose did not—he cannot draw the character truthfully, and the actor who plays him is seriously