Review: Stunning, Well-Made HOUSE OF THE NEGRO INSANE at Contemporary American Theater Festival

The Taft State Hospital for the Negro Insane, the setting for Terence Anthony's stunning play, The House of the Negro Insane, was a real place, in business between 1934 and 1970. It was the only mental hospital available to Black patients in Oklahoma during that period. How much of the story is realistic, I can't say, though I did note that in the play the staff of the hospital is clearly all-White, while one source I looked at says it was actually all-Black. If the source is correct, this would be a departure of some significance, because Anthony's critique of the hospital world rests squarely upon the oppressiveness of that White dominance.

It may matter less than one would think, though. The medical outlook which reportedly guided the development of the seven or so hospitals created along this model was definitely White, and shockingly racist. There is an interesting post from two years ago by the then-current president of the American Psychiatric Association which reconstructs the guiding doctrine at the time these hospitals were founded, according to which there had been little insanity among Blacks during slavery, and a great deal thereafter, because Blacks theoretically could not adjust to the challenges of freedom. The post quotes the superintendent of a facility in North Carolina similar to the Oklahoma one, speaking in 1896, who said that Blacks could live comfortably "under less favorable circumstances than the white man, having a nervous organization less sensitive to his environments, yet it is true that he has less mental equipoise, and may suffer mental alienation from influences and agencies which would not affect a race mentally stronger." And this superintendent felt that the supervision should be White, because "The negro laughs louder, sings louder, prays and preaches louder, than the Caucasian; and is more vulgar in speech and less cleanly in his person. He carries these characteristics into his insane condition and is therefore more noisy, more vulgar and beastly in his habits." And consequently, there are "few colored attendants [who] have the necessary influence over the colored insane that is so desirable in their care and treatment."

The play darkly hints that the Hospital harbored malign treatments ethically akin to the Tuskegee Study, in which Black patients were deliberately infected with syphilis. One of the patients depicted here, Effie (CG), upon a medical determination that she has not been responsive to treatment (apparently meaning that she has been fiercely independent and unafraid of the doctors), has her skull drilled through at the temple, apparently to drain brain fluid but also to permit manual probing of her brain. Effie characterizes the standard treatment regimen in this way: "They don't have us in chains no more, so they throw us in places like this - where they can take us apart piece by piece."

Effie is one of three patients we get to know. The play centers around Attius (Jefferson A. Russell), a man who was literally taken apart, castrated, by what amounted to a lynching by prison guards even before reaching the hospital. Finally subdued sufficiently to be employed, he is sent to the hospital's casket shop (patients regularly die, unsurprisingly), in an outbuilding beyond the locked patient wards. The third is Madeleine (Lenique Vincent), who suffers from epilepsy and apparently some disease that had cost her her right eye, who so far has not been subjected to the taking apart process, but who cannot hope to escape it if she stays in this place very long.

The other character we get to know is Henry (Christopher Halladay), a dangerous White racist with a violent past who runs the casket shop, and to whom Attius reports. Speaking in formal and cultivated-sounding pleasantries alternating with vicious attacks, he pressures Attius to enter into some kind of intimacy with him, but Attius always resists. Henry is the play's most concrete representation of White power and malignancy. Attius attempts to avoid either alliance with Henry or conflict with him, but neutrality will eventually prove impossible, the result of visitations by Effie and Madeleine during Henry's absences. Attius finds himself cajoled and partly tricked into providing them some kind of shelter, and inevitably, against his better judgment, becomes protective of them. Soon he is even telling himself that perhaps there might be a way he could carve out an arrangement in which he would take over the shop and employ the two of them as his assistants. But that vainly assumes that Attius' diligence and skill amount to viable bargaining chips in his confrontation with the White hospital regime and with Henry.

The real and inevitable outcome of Attius' struggle against the powers that be will be more traumatic and more violent than that, and will prove to have been cunningly foreshadowed in the music Henry returns to in his mind to fortify his spirit against oppression, and in stories Madeleine tells herself.

Indeed, foreshadowing is the least of it. This is such a well-made play that all themes and all plot turns work together right from the start. Even Chekhov's admonition that a pistol shown in Act One must be discharged by the end of Act Two is observed, after a fashion. And in fact nothing in this tale is wasted.

The cast is simply superb, and the direction, by Cheryl Lynn Bruce, keeps the tension ratcheted up at nearly every moment. A visitor to Shepherdstown this July with limited time to sample the Contemporary American Theater Festival should definitely make sure not to miss this one. However, if missed, it will also be on stage at the National Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem next month.

House of the Negro Insane, by Terence Anthony, directed by Cheryl Lynn Bruce, presented through July 31 by the Contemporary American Theater Festival at Studio 112, 92 West Campus Drive, Shepherdstown, WV 25443. Tickets $38-$68 at https://catf.org/buy-tickets/ or 681-240-2283 ext. 1. Adult language, adult situations, lethal violence. All audience members will be required to show proof of vaccination status and photo ID, and to wear a mask while in the theater.

Production photo credit: Seth Freeman.

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