Ben Brantley, a New York Times drama critic, wrote an article that appeared in the Arts & Leisure section (August 30, 2020) with the headline, "Enjoying Live Theater, Decades Old."
Since Broadway shows are shutdown until January due to COVID-19, Brantley has had to content himself with watching plays that were originally broadcast live in the 1950s during what has been called the Golden Age of Television, via YouTube.
He recalled when he was five years old walking into his family's living room in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and seeing what he later learned was the tail end of Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House," starring Julie Harris and Christopher Plummer. He remembered their characters arguing which left him "both upset and enthralled by what I had witnessed."
No doubt this televised performance planted the seed of theatregoing in his mind that later blossomed into a (so far) 27-year career as a drama critic.
His depiction of the racial landscape on television in those long ago days caught my attention: "...the faces on the screen are still overwhelmingly white, a reminder that the United States was still very much a culturally segregated nation."
I think it was the black writer John Oliver Killens who wrote that blacks on TV were so rare that whenever a black performer came on the screen, black people all over America would race to their TV sets to see them.
Accompanying the article were three black-and-white photos (one of them of writer Rod Serling) from the 1950s. The photo I found the most arresting was the one of the actors seated around a table during a rehearsal of "Twelve Angry Men" in 1954. The photo caption says the rehearsal was for CBS's Playhouse 90. Actually, it was for Studio One. According to The Complete Directory to Prime Network TV Shows, 1946-Present by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh (Ballantine Books, 1979), "Reginald Rose contributed teleplays for Studio One and it was Rose's 'The Twelve Angry Men' in 1954 that won Emmys for writing (Rose), direction (Frank Shaffner), and performance by an actor in a drama (Bob Cummings)."
Behind the actors are three cameras and crouching down behind one of the cameramen is a black man in short sleeves and wearing a headset. Although television back then was "overwhelmingly white," here was this black man (and possibly a second one in a far corner holding what looks like a still camera). But definitely the one behind the white cameraman is black.
Who was he? What was his job title? How did he get hired as a crew member on a major network show? What became of him? Did he encounter racial discrimination and racist comments while on the job? Does his name appear in the end credits? I have so many questions.
Just seeing him in the photo was a pleasant discovery. Who knew there was at least one black person among the crew members working on plays for the anthology series Studio One? He would have been, to reference a James Baldwin essay, a fly in buttermilk.
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