A subway car encounter between a button-down Black man, Clay, and a provocative white woman, Lula, ends in violence: The enigmatically named “Dutchman,” a half-hour play-cum-exorcism by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) was the Off Broadway sensation of 1964. Two years later, it was filmed by a neophyte director, Anthony Harvey. The response was mixed in the United States, and the film disappeared.
Now newly restored, “Dutchman” is showing through Feb. 19 at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
A one-act two-hander modeled on Edward Albee’s menacing “Zoo Story,” “Dutchman” shared a bill with plays by two reigning “absurdists,” Samuel Beckett and Fernando Arrabal Terán; it reaped all the attention, received an Obie and was retained for a second run, billed with Albee’s “American Dream.” Generally faithful to the play, Harvey’s film expanded it to just under an hour with contextualizing shots of deserted subway platforms and trains barreling through dark tunnels. Lula (Shirley Knight) has ample time to slink around an otherwise empty car and, munching on an apple, writhe into the seat next to the uptight Clay (Al Freeman Jr.). Toward the end of the film, Harvey adds a half-dozen passengers, silent witnesses to their mortal combat.
The dialogue is often terrific (Baraka was, after all, a poet) and until the climax “Dutchman” is essentially a verbal sparring match. Knight and Freeman, both members of the Actors Studio, were matched in the play’s Los Angeles production and, both electrifying in their own ways, returned to the fray with relish.
In addition to evoking racial and sexual anxiety, “Dutchman” channels the urban nightmare of subway harassment or entrapment. Recalling “No Exit,” it might have been named after a 1930s race film, “Hellbound Train.” Harvey incorporates a current ad poster in which Bert Lahr’s devil proffers a bag of Lay’s potato chips, but nothing may be more allegorical than snaky Lula’s endless supply of apples. There are autobiographical aspects as well. Lula’s taunting lines are sprinkled with coded digs at Baraka’s white patrons (Allen Ginsberg and Albee), his Jewish wife at the time (Hettie Jones) and the author himself, calling Clay by Baraka’s original first name, “Everett.”
Shock value notwithstanding, the play was respectfully received in the United States. Not so the film. The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called it “a drawn-out, rancorous gabfest” lacking “consistency or conviction.” The movie fared better in Europe. It opened the Venice Film Festival (where Knight won an acting award) and received enthusiastic notices in Britain, earning Harvey a gig directing Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole as the jousting royal couple in “The Lion in Winter.”
MoMA is showing “Dutchman” with another restoration, Billy Jackson’s 1971 documentary short “We Are Universal.” A celebration of the Black Arts movement, it features brief interviews with a host of writers, artists and musicians, as well as the young Jesse Jackson quoting Sly Stone. Baraka, a major and majorly controversial figure, is mentioned only once in passing, as “LeRoi Jones.”
The film is a period piece — dated not so much for its sartorial styles as for its by-your-bootstraps analysis of Black culture, which has long since been revised in the light of critical race theory. Not so “Dutchman,” which, recently remade by the filmmaker Andre Gaines, still packs a wallop.
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