THE GREAT WHITE HOPE
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A mighty peculiar result, when you consider that Sackler’s gimmicks are calculated to express rage rather than negate it. The Great White Hope isn’t the theatrical game The Man in the Glass Booth is. Sackler doesn’t tease us with mistaken identity gambits or Agatha Christie revelations. Just the opposite: he tries hard to break free of the usual middlebrow contrivances, using pseudo-Brechtian tactics–especially speeches addressed directly to the audience–as a way of confronting us with our own prejudice, our immersion in America’s racist culture.
Based loosely but unambiguously on the life of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion, The Great White Hope is shot through with angry testimony to white perfidy and black subjugation. Government agents meet to plot the champ’s assassination by litigation, hounding him halfway around the world, while fight promoters prop up one would-be white savior after another. A black nationalist prophet shows up to deliver an oration in which he asks black audience members, “How white you wanna be?” Other monologues explore the psyche of a white chauvinist, or the bitterness of a black woman whose blackness makes her undesirable. The Great White Hope is built on outbursts like these. It’s basically a succession of them, grouped in three acts and connected by the tale of the decline of Jack Jefferson, the Johnson surrogate.
