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FREEDOMWAYS THIRD QUARTER 1972 that she left projects unfinished at the time of her death. But now we possess Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry, a book that fills some of the gap for us of those years of her work between Raisin and her death in 1965. It is a wonderful book, which contains not only three of her plays-Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers?-but a good deal of criticism, biography and theater history as well. Julius Lester has written a superb introduction, which reviews all of the dramatist's published work, gives many penetrating insights into the individual plays, and examines her overall concerns as a politically sophisticated black woman, a playwright and a humanist. In addition, Robert Nemiroff, the editor of the book, has provided a critical background for each play, and these essays are truly indispensable for anyone interested in Lorraine Hansberry's work; more than just giving valuable critical opinions, they tell how she came to write cach play and what happened in the production, or attempted production, of each. Thus, this book of marvelous plays is also a significant and revealing document of American theater history. Of the three plays, What Use Are Flowers? is the least successful dramatically but the most basic in terms of its issues. It concerns a hermit who comes out of his seclusion after a war has devastated mankind, meets a group of half-savage children who somehow have survived, and tries to teach them about civilization. He is, in effect, an "everyman" confronting the ultimate question of life: namely, in the face of all that there is to cause one to despair, and in the face of all that is painful, difficult and dehumanizing in our existence -why exist? It is a question with which Lorraine Hansberry was constantly doing battle in her writing, and this work is her dramatic formulation of the issue. The play itself is weak, because it is too flatly an attempt to answer the barrenness and nihilism of the "theater of the absurd" on the latter's own terms of isolation from society. Still, What Use Are Flowers? expresses the tough, realistic vision that is the basis for the rest of Lorraine Hansberry's writing and gives it such force. The Drinking Gourd, which NBCTV commissioned her to write and then refused to produce, is a play about slavery and the Civil War that probes directly to the heart of the questions of why slavery existed, of who and what were responsible, of what it meant for the black man and of what it meant for the white man who either owned slaves or worked within the slave system. It is a swift, intense drama because of its pointed dialogue and vivid characterization. 246 ------ BOOK REVIEW NESS It begins with a picture of life among the slaves on a plantation before the war, and of the life of young Hannibal, who is "the only kind of slave I could stand to be-a bad one!" Hannibal plans to educate himself and run away. But the plantation masters see him as a distinct threat: their diminishing profits are forcing them to work the slaves harder and treat them more harshly. The conflict between masters and slaves draws the play inexorably toward a horrifying climax. By the end of the play, we have truly learned what the slave system meant for those who lived within it. All of Lorraine Hansberry's work concerns itself, in one way or another, with a "search for the roots of war, the exploitation of man, of poverty and of despair itself," but of all her plays none so comprehensively treats these issues as Les Blancs, which is perhaps her very best. (It was not completely finished at her death, incidentally, and Robert Nemiroff did the final work.) It concerns an African named Tshembe Matoseh, who has married and settled in Europe, and is returning to his native land only for his father's funeral. But his country is embroiled in a civil war: after many years of suffering, the natives are rebelling, with terrorism, against the white colonial settlers who rule the land. Tshembe's friends from his own village demand that he join their ranks, instead of returning to Europe; but he does not want to be involved or to kill, only to be "free" to go "home." The central issue of the play is what Tshembe will do about this decision which history has forced upon him. Characteristically, Lorraine Hansberry placed the most challenging and complicated aspect of this historical subject at the very center of her play. Thus, the setting is not an impoverished native home, or a plantation where the natives are bitterly oppressed and exploited (though these are clearly in the conceptual background), but a mission hospital which was founded by a European doctor like (or perhaps representing) Albert Schweitzer. The whites in the play, with one exception, are not racists: they are a visiting American journalist and a group of doctors who have lived among the natives for many years, helping them. And yet this is the eye of the storm of native terror and imperial repression; this setting is where Tshembe, who was educated by the mission founder's wife, a wonderful old woman whom he loves and deeply respects, must make his decision whether or not to join the ranks of the resistance to the white colonialists. Les Blancs is a highly ambitious work; very few other American playwrights have even attempted to dramatize such broad issues 247
