[As I stated in the introduction to the memorial post for Ralph Lee on 9 June, when I read of his death, I wanted to put something on Rick On Theater in his memory, but I didn’t want just to republish his obituary. A few days later, the report of the passing of playwright James de Jongh appeared, and I decided to post an homage to the two theater artists together.
[I began assembling various articles and reports to accompany the two obituaries. As I developed the memorial post, it began to grow longer and longer, eventually outgrowing my maximum length for a stand-alone post. So, now the memorial to “Two Theater Personages of Note” has become two posts. I started with Ralph Lee and now I’m posting the homage to James de Jongh.]
“JAMES DE JONGH, 80, PLAYWRIGHT WHO TOLD
STORIES OF SLAVERY, DIES”
by Neil Genzlinger
[Neil
Genzlinger’s obituary of playwright and English professor James de Jongh was
published in the New York Times on 23 May 2023. I’m accompanying it on ROT with three
reviews of his best-known play, Do Lord Remember Me: first, from the New York Times of the 1978 Off-Off-Broadway
world première; second, of the 1982 Off-Broadway première from
the New York Amsterdam News; and third, from the Associated Press, also
of the Off-Broadway production.]
His play “Do Lord Remember Me,” constructed from interviews with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, was first staged in 1978 and has been revived multiple times since.
James de Jongh, a scholar and playwright best known for fashioning oral histories left by formerly enslaved people in the 1930s into “Do Lord Remember Me,” a 1978 stage work that painted an unflinching picture of the human cost of slavery, died on May 5 in the Bronx. He was 80.
Robert deJongh Jr. [sic], a nephew, said the cause was cardiac arrest.
Professor de Jongh was a longtime member of the English department faculty at City College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he specialized in African American literature and the literatures of the African diaspora. But briefly in his early career he had been an actor, and he continued to maintain an interest in the theater. In 1975, together with Carles Cleveland [sometimes identified as “Charles” and by one source as “Carlos”], he wrote his first play — “Hail Hail the Gangs!” — about a Black teenager who joins a Harlem gang.
“I wanted to go in a completely different direction for the second play,” he told the public-access cable channel Manhattan Neighborhood Network in a recent interview.
He was drawn to a book called “The Negro in Virginia” [Hastings House, 1940], a collection of interviews with formerly enslaved people started by the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Works Progress Administration under the New Deal, and completed in 1940 by the Virginia Writers’ Project. At first, he said, his idea was to construct a fictional story using that material as background, but as he delved further into archives of interviews at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, his thinking changed.
“Many of them were quite eloquent, were quite moving, were quite touching, and some of them were in, really, the voices of the people themselves,” he said. “In other words, the interviewers had actually recorded word for word, rather than simply summarizing the content of what they said. And those words were striking.”
He realized that he could create a play made primarily of the recollections of the men and women who had experienced slavery firsthand, augmented by the words of Nat Turner [b. 1800; hanged, 1831], the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion, and by some gospel and work songs. The result was “Do Lord Remember Me,” which premiered in 1978 at the New Federal Theater on East Third Street in Manhattan [at the Pilgrim Theater, 30 March-9 April 1978], with a cast that included Frances Foster [1924-97], a leading actress of the day.
“The play, strongly felt and single-minded, has an impact far greater than one would receive from reading historical documents,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review for The New York Times [5 April 1978; see below]. “The seven actors, portraying slave owners as well as slaves, transport us, showing us the auction block in our nation’s past — when people were a commodity for speculation — linking arms and embracing a collective consciousness.”
A revised version was staged in 1982 at the American Place Theater in Midtown [24 October 1982-26 February 1983], with a cast that included Ebony Jo-Ann [b. 1945] and Glynn Turman [b. 1947]. In a fresh review [“Stage: Slavery Recalled,” 26 October 1982], Mr. Gussow called it “a moving evocation of shared servitude.”
The play, which has been restaged a number of times over the decades, has dashes of humor and a theme of triumphing over adversity. But it is also blunt in its language and its depiction of the cruelties of slavery, the kind of historical realism that is being erased from educational curriculums in some schools and libraries today. In one scene, a woman shares the back story of her facial disfigurement: As a child, she was punished for taking a peppermint stick by having her head placed beneath the rocker of a rocking chair and crushed.
In the interview with Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Professor de Jongh said that although he was not a particularly religious man, he saw creating the play as a sort of calling.
“Somehow, I felt I had a task,” he said, “and the task had found me.”
James Laurence de Jongh was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. His father, Percy, was the commissioner of finance for the government of the Virgin Islands, and his mother, Mavis E. (Bentlage) de Jongh, was an assistant director for the U.S. Customs Service and ran a poultry farm and plant store.
Professor de Jongh attended Saints Peter & Paul Catholic School on St. Thomas and then Williams College in Massachusetts, where he appeared in theatrical productions and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1964. He received a master’s degree from Yale in 1967 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1983.
Professor de Jongh continued to act for a time after his days at Williams College, but teaching was his vocation beginning in 1969, when he spent a year as an instructor at Rutgers University. The next year he joined the CUNY faculty; he remained there for decades and added the Graduate Center to his portfolio in 1990. He took emeritus status in 2011.
Professor de Jongh wrote numerous academic articles on Black theater, the art scene in Harlem and related subjects, and in 1990 he published a scholarly book, “Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination” [Cambridge University Press, 1990]. He also served on the board of the New Federal Theater, whose current artistic director, Elizabeth Van Dyke, called him “a quiet, gracious powerhouse.”
Professor de Jongh, who lived in the Bronx, leaves no immediate survivors.
The 1982 production of “Do Lord Remember Me” was also presented to inmates at Rikers Island [in the week of 7 November 1982; reported in “‘Do Lord Remember Me’ visits Riker’s” by Lionel Mitchell in the New York Amsterdam News on 20 November] — according to news accounts, it was the first complete professional production staged at the prison [Robin Herman and Laurie Johnston, “NEW YORK Day by Day: Chance for a Playwright And His Young Audience,” New York Times 12 November 1982]. Professor de Jongh attended and found the inmates more boisterous than traditional theatergoers.
“There was an element of risk in the entire situation,” he told The Times that year [see note above]. “The audience reacted with anger as well as humor. It was not just a play about remembering — their own freedom was circumscribed.
[Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries desk. Previously he was a television, film, and theater critic.]
* *
* *
“STAGE: FORMER
SLAVES REMEMBER ‘DO LORD’”
by Mel Gussow
[Woodie King (b. 1937), the founder and artistic director if the New Federal Theatre (which produced the world première of Do Lord, told Leo Seligsohn, theater reviewer for Long Island’s Newsday (“on theater: The PAF play-picker,” 31 March 1978), at the show’s opening that de Jongh had been inspired by some photographs of slaves that had been found in Boston in 1975 and published.
[“They aroused DeJongh’s [sic] interest and mine, too,” declared King. Searching further, de Jongh found the WPA interviews in a Harvard University archive, some in long-out-print books and others unpublished. As Earl Caldwell quoted the writer and teacher in the New York Daily News (“Some good words from a bad time,” 27 December 1982), he “decided to become in a sense a medium for the voices of these former slaves. They had in effect done their own playwriting.”
[De Jongh wrote no dialogue for Do Lord; he used the words of the interviewees verbatim, adding nothing, He used only people who’d been enslaved in Virginia, in their 80’s and 90’s when they were interviewed (making them young children when the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished nationwide). They were all residents of an “old folks home for the colored.”
[De Jongh relied heavily on Weevils in the Wheat (University Press of Virginia, 1976), a book of the unedited transcripts of 15 of the former Virginia slaves edited by Charles L. Perdue, Jr.; Thomas E. Barden; and Robert K. Phillips. The only words that weren’t from the WPA interviews were those of Nat Turner, the rebellious slave, added for balance from the confessions of Nat Turner.
[The playwright used slave spirituals and work songs to transition between scenes, but they were songs the elderly men and women spoke of in the recollections. The Civil War-era title spiritual, “Do, Lord, Remember Me,” is sung from off stage.
[Satisfied with the results of his work, de Jongh decided not to return to the original Civil War drama he’d planned when he began his research. After its world première, Do Lord was revived by theaters all across the U.S. and beyond. Perhaps counterintuitively, the play had tremendous appeal to children—perhaps because, though the characters are old folks, what they are remembering is their own childhoods.
[I’m presenting three critical notices of two productions of Do Lord from different publications.
[The only review I could find of the world première of Do Lord, Off-Off-Broadway at the New Federal Theater was in the New York Times. Mel Gussow, who would rereview the play when it reopened Off-Broadway at the American Place Theater in 1982, published his notice on 5 April 1978 in “The Living Section” (sec. C).
[The two-hour, intermissionless play’s début ran at the Pilgrim Theater, home to NFT productions at this time, on Thursdays through Sundays, 30 March-9 April; admission was free.
[Directed by Regge Life (sometimes identified as Reggie), with a cast of seven actors (reduced to five when it débuted Off-Broadway), each playing multiple roles, the setting was by C. Richard Mills, the lighting by Sandra Ross, the costumes by Benny Parks.
[NFT revived the show several times, often in different venues, before, during, and after the American Place mounting. Well into the 2000s, Do Lord was presented by regional theaters, community groups, and schools—high schools and colleges (one of which even increased the cast to 13). It easily became de Jongh’s best-known and most-produced play. It’s also been the subject of scores, if not hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, including reviews, and even a few dissertations and theses.]
There is a transcendent moment at the end of “Do Lord Remember Me” when Frances Foster, as a woman of 86; casts her mind back to the days when she was 8 and was treated as human chattel. The recollection is clear-eyed, unmarred by myopia or the withering of time. For almost 80 years the woman’s past has been her daily reminder of a nation’s inhumanity.
The significance of the scene can be partly attributed to the authenticity of the story. As dramatist, James de Jongh has compiled and structured this anthology from interviews with former slaves conducted in the 1930’s under the Federal Writers Project. It is also a tribute to the authenticity of Miss Foster’s performance.
In previous roles, this admirable actress has played everything from foxy grandmothers (“The River Niger” [Negro Ensemble Company (Off-Broadway, 1972-73); Broadway (1973)] and “First Breeze of Summer” [NEC; Broadway (1975)]) to the stoical young Lena in Athol Fugard’s “Boesman and Lena” [NEC (1975)] In a single scene in “Do Lord Remember Me,” she straddles a century. Through octogenarian eyes, she communicates the stain of childhood memory and the horror of slavery.
Dramatically, the moment reminds us of Gloria Foster’s [no relation to Frances Foster] Soliloquy at the end of “In White America” [Sheridan Square Playhouse (Off-Broadway, 1963-65)]—a mature actress transformed into a 15-year-old black girl trying to go to school against impossible opposition.
“Do Lord Remember Me,” a Henry Street Settlement production, is not the searing experience of “In White America.” Despite the conviction of these first‐hand impressions, there is a repetitiveness about some of Mr. de Jongh’s selections and there is a slowness in Regge Life’s staging that makes the evening less than completely enthralling. The anthology is interspersed with occasional songs, in which we see the antidote to injustice—the determination and the will for survival. More music would help.
Nevertheless, the play, strongly felt and single‐minded, has an impact—far greater than one would receive from reading historical documents. The seven actors, portraying slave owners as well as slaves, transport us, showing us the auction block in our nation’s past—when people were a commodity for speculation—linking arms and embracing a collective consciousness. Whether in the kitchen or in the fields, pampered or brutalized, “it was slavery no matter where you are.”
The actors are all inseparable from their material, but special mention should be made of Louise Stubbs, Brel Barbara Clarke, Miss Foster and Joe Attles. Tall, slim and angular, the ageless Mr. Attles, a 50‐year veteran of the American Theater, is himself an icon of indomitability.
“Do Lord Remember Me” will play tomorrow [Thursday, 6 April 1978] through Sunday [9 April] at the Pilgrim Theater, 240 East Third Street [far East Village, between Avenues B and C in Alphabet City].
[There were no other reviews of the first production of de Jongh’s play that I could locate using the Internet. (I didn’t make a trip up to the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to look through the review scrapbooks and the clipping folder; I may do so at some point, and I’ll make corrections if I find this isn’t accurate.) The Amsterdam News ran an announcement of the upcoming production on 1 April 1978 (“Ex-slaves speak in new play”), but didn’t review the play until the American Place production opened in 1982 (see below).]
* *
* *
“JAMES DEJONGH’S
‘DO LORD REMEMBER ME’”
by Lionel Mitchell
[The
review by Lionel Mitchell, the New York Amsterdam News’ longtime theater
reviewer, of the Off-Broadway première of Do Lord was published on 30
October 1982. (The Amsterdam News
is one of the oldest newspapers in the United States aimed at an African-American
readership.) The show ran at the
American Place Theater, 111 W. 46th Street in the Theatre District, from 24
October 1982 to 26 February 1983.]
James DeJongh [sic] was looking through some slave narratives and came across the materials that form his newest work at American Place Theatre, “Do Lord Remember Me.” It’s all authentic stuff with nothing added or taken away. I found it difficult to keep a dry eye — that’s how moving it was.
Perhaps W.E.B. Du Bois [1868-1963], in his own words, conveys the mood of this period in his “Black Reconstruction in America” [1935; latest edition: Black Reconstruction (Library of America, 2021)]. He has a chapter called “The Coming Of The Lord,” the eve of Emancipation, the great Union advance into the South (1864-65): “There was a joy in the South. It rose like perfume — like a prayer. Men stood quivering. Slim dark girls, wild and beautiful with wrinkled hair, wept silently; young women, Black, tawney, white and golden, lifte[d] shivering hands, and old and broken mothers, black and gray, raised great voices and shouted to God across fields, and up to the rocks and the mountains.”
That is the mood which the play conjures once again. Something about that material is absolutely irresistible. It makes one feel pure, justified, confirmed, affirmed, as in the old spiritual: ‘Done Got Ova AT [sic] Last!”
Blending past and present
The long millennium of the African Diaspora opens up. The past and present re-link. One dances on the streets of the Rebel capital as Grant and Sheridan ride up through the Shenandoah and with Black troops at their head, break into Richmond [3 April 1865].
One is there as Lincoln, a few days later, steams down to the broken Confederate capital to walk through the streets unguarded by anyone except the joyous ex-slaves [4 April 1865].
But more than that, more than seeing history through the eyes of the slaves, that cast, consisting of dynamos Frances Foster, Ebony Jo-Ann Pinckney, Glynn Turman, Lou Myers, and the indomitable Charles H. Patterson, paints the agony with wonder and exuberance. One experiences the personal tragedies, triumphs, the human victories over slavery. I kept recalling my German-Jewish professor of history, himself a survivor of the Lotz Ghetto [sic; Łódź (or Lodz) Ghetto in Poland, second-largest Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe] where he had weathered the Final Solution, exclaiming before a predominantly red-neck history class: “In one century, the Negroes have outstripped your slave system and they are sitting beside you in this classroom. Who knows what will happen, what relation they will bear to you in another century?”
I never failed to score in the upper 90’s in that class! This play is like that — every Black man and woman ought to make it a holy obligation to see it. In addition, all people in this country ought to see it. “Do Lord Remember Me”, [sic] as I pointed out in the discussion last Sunday at the American Place Theatre [opening night, 24 October 1982], rediscovers perhaps the best lost literature of the Civil War period. It is material that even the great Edmund Wilson [writer, literary critic, journalist, and dramatist; 1895-1972] overlooked in his study of Civil War literature, “Patriotic Gore” [1962].
Reggie Life gets authenticity
Reggie [sic] Life has the cast doing some very authentic foot-stomping slave spirituals and Ebony Jo-Ann takes the lead in these. Madame Frances Foster is far the most powerful dramatic Black actress on the scene in years.
Glynn Turman both acts and dances to a fare-thee-well and I suspect he choreographed some of the movements he does as well.
That is a chromo [a color lithograph] for directing, for visual statement. Charles Patterson deserves applause for his narration — through a street man’s eyes. Absolutely superb!
[The cast, still under the direction of Regge Life, was largely the same (minus two actors) at the American Place as at the Pilgrim Theater 4½ years before. The Off-Broadway set was designed by Julie Taymor (soon to be well known in her own right as a director), the lighting by Sandra L. Ross (who lit the Off-Off-Broadway début), and the costumes by Judy Dearing.
[Lionel
H. (for Hampton—his father was a jazz musician in New Orleans) Mitchell was a
journalist, poet, novelist, memoirist, and playwright, who wrote for the East Village Other in
the 1960s, where some of his poetry was also published occasionally, and
reviewed theater for the New York Amsterdam News. He was
born in 1942 in a small town in Louisiana before coming to New York City and
settling in the East Village, where he was a fixture until his death in 1984
from an AIDS-related illness. His one known published book was an
autobiographical novel, Traveling Light (Seaview Books, 1980).]
* *
* *
“NEW PLAY OFFERS AN EVENING OF ORAL
HISTORY OF THE SLAVERY ERA”
By Mary Campbell, Associated Press
[Neither Mel Gussow’s notice for the Off-Off-Broadway world première, nor Lionel Mitchell’s of the Off-Broadway début (both above) were particularly detailed about the production, but I wanted to get them on record. I’ve selected one more review, the Associated Press notice of the American Place mounting published in the Bridgewater, New Jersey, Courier-News of 30 October 1982, for its description of the play and performance.]
new york – James de Jongh, who wrote “Do Lord Remember Me,” playing off-Broadway at the American Place Theater, has taken oral American history – of slavery – and made an engrossing evening of theater out of it.
The oral history was recorded in the 1930s. Among the New Deal jobs created to give people something to get paid for doing was the job of asking former slaves what slavery had been like. Most still alive in the 1930s were infants or children during slavery.
But they had memories and memories of stories told to them. De Jongh, who teaches at the City College of New York, has given this theatrical form. A fine cast of five – four of them acting like old people – string the anecdotes together and act them out.
The tone of it all is interest in America’s past, not an incitement to racial hatred or guilt.
Many of the anecdotes are brief. Few detail atrocities. Those that do are vivid enough to be memorable.
One striking thing is how often one hears of a lively individual spirit that slavery did not quench or sour. Sukey, whose master tries to undress her while she’s boiling lye soap, pushes his backside into a pot of the stuff. When he sells her and hands pry open her mouth to look at her teeth, she still has something saucy to say. Uncle Jackson, left on guard in slave quarters while the men hold a meeting in the woods, leads the suspicious master a chase, outsmarting him.
“Do Lord Remember Me” tells of things from slavery that one may know, like children being sold and the parents never seeing them again and marriage by jumping over a broomstick. And it tells of things that one may not know, like slave church services only allowed when a white preacher is present and slaves who escape from the fields into the woods, not forever, and are allowed back.
De Jongh found the interviews stored in Smithsonian Institution archives. He used them verbatim and he used only those with slaves who’d lived in Virginia.
There is one section in which Glynn Turman speaks as Nat Turner. This gives variety – he thought he was a prophet. But the play probably would be better without it. It’s a very jarring note to have a man hanged in the 1800s among those reminiscing in the 1930s.
[A number of other review-writers expressed this same sense of displacement.
[Nat Turner (1800-31) was an enslaved African-American preacher who organized and led a rebellion of enslaved and free black people in Southampton County, Virginia (21-23 August 1831). The rebellion was quickly suppressed, but Turner went into hiding and wasn’t captured until 31 October and imprisoned.
[He was tried for rebellion and insurrection on 5 November, found guilty, and hanged at 31 on 11 November. The rebellious African Americans killed 55-65 white Virginians, and after the revolt was suppressed, the local militia and frightened mobs killed up to 120 blacks, most uninvolved with the rebellion.
[In 1967, William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner, a popular novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1968.]
Lou Meyers, bald, Charles H. Patterson, gray, Ebony Jo-Ann and Frances Foster are the four old folks, going stiffly up and down porch steps and telling almost all the stories. They break the two hours without intermission into sections with occasional hymns. Reggie [sic] Life directed. The show opened last Sunday.
[Turman, the fifth cast member, plays various manifestations of The Slave, who, de Jongh said, “gets called into being” by the recollections of the four older characters. In Turman’s words in an interview with Marie Moore in the Amsterdam News (“Glynn Turman returns in ‘Do Lord Remember,’” 23 October 1982), the role is “sort of like the thread that is used to weave through the piece.” He’s “the spirit that either starts these people to talk or [is] conjured up as a result of their conversation.”]
In case one feels “Do Lord Remember Me” is too soft or has too much humor, it ends with Foster, 86 years later, telling of being a girl house slave, almost starved. She stole a piece of candy and the mistress held her face down under her rockingchair’s [sic] rocker so she could beat her. Facial bones were crushed on one side, her eye was permanently reddened and she was never again able to chew.
[Back in 1985, when I was a grad student at NYU, I took a production dramaturgy class that focused on stage adaptation of non-dramatic material, a dramaturg’s frequent assignment. The instructor was Cynthia (C. Lee) Jenner, who’d been literary manager at the American Place Theater before taking the Performance Studies teaching gig. She had served as a dramaturg on APT’s 1982 presentation of Do Lord Remember Me.
[Needless to say, Do Lord was one of Cynthia’s prime examples of a successful adaptation. In February, James de Jongh was Cynthia’s guest in the class. The discussion was principally focused on de Jongh’s work on the script (which was where a dramaturg’s efforts would have been directed). Here’s a transcription of my notes (lightly edited for readability) from that sessions:
De Jongh: A playwright’s work is invisible. S/he doesn’t write just dialogue – writes behavior, creates scenes. Plays that read well don’t necessarily play well.
With Do Lord, de Jongh wrote no dialogue – all language was from the interviews. He created the structure of the play. The arrangement of the scenes shapes the pay. He found his ending early – knew where he was going. Had to decide how to get there. Assembled material into “categories” – but was it a scene? Did it have an action?
Had to create a through-line – created an outside character (“The Slave”). Looked for pieces that “felt like present action.” Occasionally had to “distort” pieces to make it feel like present action. (Idea derived from a distorted memory of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.)
De Jongh had 3 structures operating in Do Lord – string of beads (categories of slave memories), through-line (from The Slave), and action peaks (builds and climaxes of action).
[That last comment, about the unifying and cohesive structures evident in Do Lord, was a later remark by Cynthia, made after the guest session with de Jongh. (I said Do Lord was a frequent touchstone in the class for a successful adaptation.) I don’t know if the playwright created those structures intentionally, with forethought, or if they came organically from his intuition.
[I suspect that, whether these structure were intuitive or purposeful, they were something that Cynthia picked up on independently—that is, de Jongh didn’t point them out to her—either while helping the writer develop the script or from a post-mortem analysis to determine why Do Lord worked on stage.
[If I apply the analytical method I learned from Michael Kirby in his Theatrical Structure class (see my two-part post on 15 and 18 February 2011), I can identify several more structural devices at work. Two come to mind immediately: the unit setting, the same all through the performances (Continuity Structure), functions as a unifying device; the small cast with the same five (usually) actors throughout the show is a variation on Character Structure as a small ensemble of actors forms a constant, unifying presence.]
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