I'm real glad you asked that. The biggest problem that I've had with the Board of Education and the parents of the kids is that they become immediately fearful that I'm presenting such a romantic picture of the theatre-you know, with the bright lights and the grease-paint and all that-that I'm "making actors." I'm no more trying to do that than a math teacher is trying to make mathematicians or a physics teacher is trying to make a scientist. I simply feel that if the performing arts were investigated at a public school level, we wouldn't have such trivia written today, because the audience level of intelligence and demands would not permit it. So I'm really trying to teach the aesthetic of the art through practice. In other words, by working on a play and relating to another human being with an audience, you can communicate a great deal more than you can sometimes with a game of stick-ball in the street, because it's focussed.

So you're really dealing with future audiences at least as much as with future actors?

More so. I wouldn't want anyone that I taught to go into the theatre. It's a hideous life. I think if I had ever anticipated some of the things that I would have to contend with, I wouldn't gone into it. But when you find yourself ten or twelve years at something, you look around and say "Jesus God, what else can I do?"

"Mother always wanted me to be a doctor."

Exactly. What else can I do, or what else can I do as well as I do what I've done this long? It's frightening really, how much I focussed on it, even here, I think the CRIMSON published a statistic at some time that I'd written, directed, produced, or acted in over thirty plays in the four years that I was here. So that in my senior year, I just flopped right out at Lamont with mono. I had focussed that much attention on learning what I wanted to do, on learning how to act and direct and produce well.

Not a screaming recommendation to aspiring actors.

Not one.

Being black in a predominantly white society is going to effect your acceptability in some dramatic circles, and perhaps impede your freedom as an actor, teacher, and director. What are the problems, first of all, of being a black actor in New York?

Working. Finding jobs. And, you know it's interesting. I'm as much for the use of the word "black" as opposed to "Negro," I suppose, as anybody, though I sometimes wonder if we're not over-emphasizing the difference.

Well, when you were in college, it was "colored." Are you talking about the current vogue?

In terms of vouge, yes. You always latch onto the word that is most dramatic, since Madison Avenue has trained us for that, in order to make an image sear the brain. To some degree, "black" has done that. Unfortunately, I think that white society has taken the use of the word "black" so literally that hundreds of actors who, like me, don't happen to be darkcomplexioned, and who in a T.V. commercial or on a stage, don't necessarily read "black," because there's nothing "racial" or "Negroid" (and I mean those words in the derogatory sense) in my voice unless I choose it to be there. It makes it even more difficult for me to function than Godfrey Cambridge, because if you use him for a commercial, no one can question that you're using a black man for your product. But if you use me, you run the risk of someone thinking, maybe he's Puerto Rican, or maybe he's black, or just what is he? And I think until we get past that whole thing of making a point of saying "Sec? I'm using a black man, I've got my quota," nothing can be done. Because as long as that's a problem, people are going to go out to find the blackest, most obvious person. And we come in all sizes, shapes, and shades.

You have it coming from both sides.

Right. It's hideous. Evelyn Holly really knocked the hell out of the thing when she wrote an article for the New York Times called "How Black Do You Have to Be?" In other words, if you've had the black experience in this country, I don't care whether you're yellow or checked, you've had it. That's the only qualification you need to declare yourself a black actor or human being, a black man.

So this reverse discrimination can really cut down on the number of roles that are open to you.

Black roles, it limits. On the other hand, you see, I have spent most of my life doing a great deal of classical work as well. You throw a wig and a costume on me and no one would necessarily know the difference. I've done Lear here, and Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. The Othello required more make-up for me than the Lear, simply because I had to be made visually black, and have my hair dyed black and teased, which was more work than the Lear, because then I was under so much wig and beard that there was very little skin left to see.