from Moze Halprin's ArtForum review:
Indeed, Hansberry was a proponent of materialist theater, giving no quarter, in particular, to the midcentury avant-garde’s derealized visions of emptiness and “vogue of unmodified despair,” which she saw as antithetical to vital political engagement. She lambasted Jean Genet for his essentialism and fetishism of the oppressed, wrote Les Blancs (The Whites) in response to his The Blacks (as well as an unpublished parody of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot called The Arrival of Mr. Todog), and subtitled an earlier draft of Brustein’s Window “Up Yours, Ed Albee.” Perhaps it was that assuredness of her political convictions, in her organizing and polemicizing, that gave Hansberry room to make Brustein’s Window so fascinatingly murky and searching—even engaging in a brief dalliance with absurdism before a nascent call to action emerges from the void. |
