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Black
Set in a middle class living room in New Jersey, the play investigates the possibly fatal triangular relationship between a white woman, her white ex-husband, and her African American lover. Jonathan Boyd is a photojournalist who after living abroad for months, calls on his ex-wife Debra and her new boyfriend Lew Claybrook, supposedly to fetch some boxes full of his old things. In reality Boyd has returned to his earlier home to entice his gorgeous former wife away from her black lover and reunite with her. Initially, the trio pretends that everything is ok but as the evening advances the feigning at politeness gives way to the expression of raw, unconcealed emotions.
Boyd's prejudice is disguised, if thinly, by his regular statements that he regards all Americans equal and that he is glad that Claybrook, a Yale graduate, has gained from positive action. However over and over again, he affronts his ex-wife's lover by innocently perpetuating racial stereotypes. Claybrook finally let's loose his pent-up anger when Boyd wrongly ‘charges' him of propagating pit bulls and he realizes that not even Debra understands him. Claybrook accuses Boyd of manipulating the poor people in developing countries by taking their photos and then selling them. The accusation and counter accusation reaches a point when Boyd takes out a revolver and starts intimidating his hosts. Finally he calms down and leaves with his boxes.
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Black is written by Joyce Carol Oates and was first published in Twelve Plays in1991. The popular full-length play was reissued in The Perfectionist and Other Plays in 1995. Along with I Stand Before You Naked, Tone Clusters, Ontological Proof of My Existence and Bad Girls, Black is one of Oates's most repeatedly performed plays. The prose edition of Black was released in Witness in 1989. A revised edition of the play with the name ‘Cry Me a River' was premiered in 1997.
