E-Mail This Article to a Friend Power plays African-American shouts from the ’60s BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Say you want a revolution?

In 1969, when Ed Bullins’s one-act The Gentleman Caller premiered Off Broadway at the Chelsea Theatre, it packed a wallop by exploring the sadistic bonds between the white elite and the black working class. It was part of A Black Quartet, a bill that also featured one-acts by Amiri Baraka, Ben Caldwell, and Ronald Milner. Now Caller is being revived, and again it’s flanked by works by Caldwell and Baraka. This time the trio’s plays, along with one by Douglas Turner Ward, make up Black Power: Six Short Plays From the ’60s, which begins April 15 at the Boston Center for the Arts.

"Baraka and I had been talking about something like this for the longest time, but it never came to fruition," says Obie winner Bullins. "But now here it is in Boston. [My plays] are hardly ever done, so any time they’re ever done I’m grateful. I hope a bill like this will revive my production career."

The reunion of the playwrights’ works, all of which use absurdist humor, is the product of a new union in the Boston arts community. The city’s youngest black theater company, Up You Mighty Race Performing Arts Company, is joining creative forces with the oldest, New African Company.

The short plays that comprise Black Power were all written and first performed in the 1960s and deal with controversial issues that resonate today. The bill is part of a season that UYMR’s Artistic Director, Akiba Abaka, is calling "Sankofa," a Ghanaian word that means "go back and get it." As she explains, "To look into the past and reflect on it means to positively influence the future." Abaka selected works from three periods of the 20th century during which blacks made a historic impact. Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance, UYMR staged Langston Hughes’s Don’t You Want to be Free? Now, moving to the Civil Rights era before getting to August Wilson, the troupe is focusing on playwrights whose works mirror what was happening in the Black Power movement. Abaka passed some names to Vincent Ernest Siders, NAC Artistic Director, who chose the plays and directs them.

"Black theater is not exclusive from American theater; it’s part of it," says Abaka. "By choosing different plays, and looking at how a playwright was writing at a particular time and at the works coming out of that period, [you get] a sociological look at the times through playwriting."

But Abaka emphasizes, and Siders underscores, that these plays, historic though they may be, offer a clear lens through which to look at current events. Caldwell’s Mission Accomplished, which deals with colonialism in Africa, clearly has relevance today. "We go into a place and so-called try to civilize the natives," says Siders. "In the process, we overlook their culture and many things they have to contribute to the rest of the world. We go straight for the financial benefits."

When asked about his one-act’s contemporary bearing, Bullins, who’ll appear at an April 16 talk-back with the cast and director, explains that plays are like snapshots. "It captures a picture in a moment of time — the language, sometimes the lifestyle, the issues, the anti-dialectic of what’s going on that makes the antagonism and the tension of the picture. That reflects not only in its day but also later, subsequent things, so people can look back at that moment and live it through the action of the play, and hear the language and see the story made up in front of them. It’s a metaphor of history that’s not strictly writing history but capturing those lives. With the black theater, it reflects or mirrors concerns of an oppressed people who are shouting out, pushing their heads up. That’s historical and that’s immediate also."

Black Power: Six Short Plays From the ’60s is at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street, Boston, April 15 through May 8. Tickets are $20 to $25; call (617) 426-2787.