Dutchman by Amiri Baraka

First produced: 1964, at the Cherry Lane Theatre, New York City

First published: 1964

The Work

A powerful one-act drama, Dutchman brought immediate and lasting attention to poet Amiri Baraka. The play is a searing two-character confrontation that begins playfully but builds rapidly in suspense and symbolic resonance. Set on a New York subway train, Dutchman opens with a well-dressed, intellectual, young African American man named Clay absorbed in reading a magazine. He is interrupted by Lula—a flirtatious, beautiful white woman a bit older than he. As Lula suggestively slices and eats an apple, she and Clay tease each other with bantering talk that becomes more and more personal. She reveals little about herself, but Lula is clearly in control of the conversation and the situation as she perceptively and provokingly challenges Clay’s middle-class self image. Lula is, in fact, a bit cruel. “What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit and striped tie?” she asks. “Your grandfather was a slave, he didn’t go to Harvard.” Aware of his insecurities, Lula dares Clay to pretend “that you are free of your own history.”

Clay’s insecurities about his race, social status, and masculine prowess—slowly revealed as his answers shift from machismo to defensiveness—become the targets for Lula’s increasingly direct taunts. Eventually, Lula’s attempt to force Clay to see in himself the negative stereotypes of the black male—as either oversexed stud or cringing Uncle Tom—goad him into an eloquently bitter tirade. Black music and African American culture, he tells her, are actually repressions of a justified rage that has kept African American people sane in the face of centuries of oppression. Clay seems as desperate to prove this to himself as he is to convince Lula. He does not seem to know whether the rage or the repression has taken the greater toll on African American sanity. The scene escalates in dramatic force until Lula unexpectedly stabs Clay to death.

Baraka has said that Dutchman “is about how difficult it is to become a man in the United States.” Nevertheless, the ancient symbolism of apple and temptation, and the myth of the ghostly pirate ship, The Flying Dutchman, used in Richard Wagner’s opera and other literary works, are carefully suggested in Baraka’s play and amplify the dimensions of racial conflict.

Bibliography

Benston, Kimberly W. Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976. Argues that Clay’s is a tragedy of lost direction and lack of knowledge: In deciding not to kill Lula, he rejects the power and violence that would allow him to dominate the situation; he thus reaffirms his vulnerability and falls victim to Lula’s malevolence.

Bigsby, C. W. E. “Black Theater.” In Beyond Broadway. Vol. 3 in A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Analyzes the play in the context of the early 1960’s, as reflecting the self-awareness of a black playwright balancing a successful career as a writer and political necessities that seemed to require actions rather than words.

Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Although Clay is killed, Brown sees a kind of triumph in the assertion of humanity that makes his death inevitable.

Fabre, Geneviève. “LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka: An Iconoclastic Theatre.” In Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre. Translated by Melvin Dixon. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. For Fabre, a paradox of the play is that Lula reveals Clay to himself. His awakening comes too late, because he has already made too many compromises and too soon, because it is merely an individual, rather than communal, awakening, and therefore it is ineffectual.

Luter, Matthew. “Dutchman’s Signifyin(g) Subway: How Amiri Baraka Takes Ralph Ellison Underground.” In Reading Contemporary African American Drama: Fragments of History, Fragments of Self, edited by Trudier Harris and Jennifer Larson. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Argues that Baraka, despite his claims to the contrary, was strongly influenced by Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and that Dutchman is as much informed by Baraka’s worries about staking out an identity as an original African American writer as it is about his concerns with how to be an authentic African American man.

Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Popular Modernism.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Asserts that Dutchman combines a realistic look at American society with the absurdist and surrealist traditions of European theater. Lula, although a negative force in the play, expresses many of the playwright’s own ideas in his own language.

Walker, Victor Leo, II. “Archetype and Masking in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman.” In Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Looks at the antirealist aspects of Baraka’s play and their function in the representation of racial identity.

Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Frank reappraisal of Baraka, focusing on the contradictions between his public and private personas and balancing his brilliance with the more derivative aspects of his work. Based on rereadings of other people’s interviews, rather than new interviews conducted by the author himself.