Taking of Miss Janie

The New Federal Theatre and Joseph Papp got together to co-produce the outstanding black play of the season, Ed Bullins’s The Taking of Miss Janie , which won the New York Drama Critics Circle citation for best American play. The drama started at the end of the story, with the white California beach girl Janie (Hilary Jean Beane) in shock because her friend of many years, the black student Monty (Adeyemi Lythcott), has just raped her. She cannot understand it, telling him, “I thought of you as my special friend,” but he says she always knew their relationship would come to this. The scene switches back to the 1950s, and in a series of episodes we see how Miss Janie, who represents all patronizing white liberals and their attitudes to blacks, and Monty and his friends, who stand for the misguided hopes of his race, have been drawn to each other in a mission of failure. Both supporters and critics of Bullins’s work thought it his most accomplished play, filled with vivid characters and building in intensity rather than taking his usual scattershot approach. The good reviews encouraged Papp to keep the drama on the boards for five weeks. – American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama 1969–2000