Defiant '60s a good fit for Little Green Pig

DURHAM -- It seems fitting that Little Green Pig's unearthing of Ed Bullins' "Goin' A Buffalo" falls under the aegis of Manbites Dog Theater's "Other Voices" series.

Since the mid-1960s Bullins has written more than 100 plays, helped spark a radical black theater movement in the 1960s, served as the Black Panthers' minister of culture and received some of the most prestigious honors and fellowships in the arts. Yet his voice in the American theater remains an outsider's.

"Goin' A Buffalo" is driven by neither plot nor character and, despite its roots in the radical black theater of the 1960s, not overtly concerned with politics or aesthetics. The play aims instead to capture a mood and an environment.

Its voice is authentic, particular and uncompromising, and as such also insular, strange, even obdurate. Bullins attended the Wednesday performance at Manbites Dog, and when he came onstage during the curtain call, he gazed out at the audience calmly but with unmistakable defiance.

Even when showered with applause, he cast himself as an Other. Perhaps he is less an outsider than a national treasure who chooses to stay buried.

The set by Erik Benson, John Galt and Emily Hower offers a visual analog to Bullins' writing. The playing area is as wide and flat as the Manbites Dog venue allows, forcing the action downstage until it's virtually in the audience's lap.

Hower's huge clenched Black Panther fists, a vivid homage to the great comic book artist Jack Kirby, are painted on an otherwise brazenly white wall that runs all the way across the stage. Yet the farther "Goin' A Buffalo" is thrust at us, the harder it becomes to penetrate.

The narrative plays as one instrument in a crowded jam session of theatrical elements. It follows a handful of struggling urbanites, mostly but not all black, who get themselves into a murk of complications while planning a crime in the title city.

There are afros and addicts, whores and hi-fis, near-rapes and barroom brawls. There's no one to root for, and no one gets ahead.

Unlike many of his more celebrated contemporaries, such as Amiri Baraka (who wrote "The Dutchman," the cardinal play of its era), Bullins doesn't bother to dream about a better world before effacing it. The play's pessimism feels lived-in, and true to its riotous, impoverished times.

Little Green Pig's typically antic production, directed by Jay O'Berski, decks "Goin' A Buffalo" in garish '70s effects that at times seem to intensify the play, at others to parody it, especially through the literal and constant comment of voices buzzing improvisationally in the background. Bullins' work was called obscene in its time -- and "Goin' A Buffalo" is still suitable only for mature audiences -- but its profaneness gets laughs now, and Little Green Pig encourages them.

This is not to say that the play is humorless (it's often quite funny), but to wonder whether LGP, one of our most spirited theater companies, is manifesting the play's spirit or its own. In fundamental ways "Buffalo" closely resembles its all-black "Cherry Orchard" and its voodoo "Streetcar Named Desire" -- not the theater used to examine blackness but the other way around.