Entering from opposite sides of the stage, the two men shook hands and came out fighting–or at least sparring. The closest thing to a haymaker came when Brustein told Wilson, “You have the best mind of the 17th century.” Wilson had insisted that all African-Americans are directly descended from those people who had “made the journey in chains [in] the hold of a ship.” Fervently he said that “inside all blacks there is at least one heartbeat infused with the blood of Africa.” Brustein wondered “how you can claim to have African blood after 300 years.” His people, he added, came from Poland, but he didn’t consider himself Polish. Wilson might well have answered that Brustein’s heartbeats were not Polish but Jewish.
Given current tensions between blacks and Jews, this point might be incendiary. But the question of racial and cultural identity is at the heart of their dispute. The light-skinned Wilson said sardonically, “When you look at me, it’s obvious the white master visited the slave quarters.” In fact, Wilson’s father was white; when Brustein said that Wole Soyinka (the Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian writer) would not consider Wilson African, the playwright said: “I make my own self-definition.” Yet he rejected the self-definition of those blacks who choose to participate in “white” theater, even those who take roles in the classic plays of Shakespeare and Chekhov. He opposed a white director for the movie version of “Fences,” one of his two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays (the other was “The Piano Lesson”). For Wilson, only black artists can understand and express black culture. Brustein rejects this “tribal” separatism. “We are individuals first, Americans second and tribalists third,” he said.
The one point of agreement was that there should be more black theaters. Brustein described how theaters arise out of the passionate commitment of artists. Citing Wilson’s position as the most honored black playwright (and richest: Wilson attacked “elitist” white companies with high ticket prices, but “Seven Guitars,” his fifth Broadway production, had a $55 top ticket), he challenged Wilson to help start a theater. “I’m a playwright,” replied Wilson. “I’m not interested in starting a theater.” The audience reaction to this statement was perceptible shock–even, it seemed, among some of Wilson’s adherents. After all, if black theater artists had banded together and sought out Wilson’s help in starting a theater, would this have been his reply to them?
This was Wilson’s weakest moment. Brustein’s came when he said that artists were really two people, the citizen and the artist, and that the two had separate functions. This was surprising from the longtime liberal Brustein (whose brilliant book “The Theater of Revolt” treats the great modern dramatists as rebels against the social and esthetic status quo). When Brustein insisted that art changes nothing, Wilson got applause when he replied that “art changes individuals, and individuals change society.”
The drama of the Wilson-Brustein confrontation lies in their mutual intransigence. Wilson is right to insist on his self-determination. Brustein is right to worry about the divisive potential of cultural separatism. As America inexorably moves toward a multifarious conflation of racial, ethnic and cultural identities, the task of creating a new synthesis becomes more difficult, and more crucial. The embodiment of this potential was present on the Town Hall stage in the debate’s scrupulously fair, witty and incandescent moderator, the black writer and performer Anna Deavere Smith, who has played Americans of all colors and creeds in her powerful one-person dramatizations of flashpoints like the Rodney King case in Los Angeles and the Crown Heights clash between blacks and Jews in Brooklyn. This country had better learn to treat its dif- ferences as a source of fruition rather than hostility.
