Volume 10, Number 2 · February 1, 1968
The Whole Hog
By Elizabeth Hardwick
The Great White Hope
by Howard Sackler, Directed by Edwin Sherin. produced by Arena Stage (Washington, D.C.)
'I just went the whole hog, man.' This is the key to the fate of the great Negro boxer, Jack Johnson, whose history is the subject of an extraordinary new play, The Great White Hope, by Howard Sackler. This work is completely open, within the reach of the largest or the smallest audience; it is dramatically and artistically powerful and moving. From the moment James Earl Jones, as Johnson, is first seen at the punching bag—young, confident, with an exuberant, explosive consciousness of his own possibility—to the pitiful and terrifying end when he staggers on, having thrown the world championship, his eyeballs bleeding, his cheeks maimed, swollen, accusing, his mouth a gap of blood, followed by the victor, 'the white hope,' beaten to a pulp, ruined, barely alive, carried on the shoulders of some screaming maniacs: from the beginning to the end has taken four hours and twenty-five scenes. This obstinate exhaustiveness has, out of the most literal and indeed the most hackneyed material, created something of genuine symbolic force. A truly American drama, one of them at least, had been hidden all along in that exploited, drained fight world, a world whose authenticity is itself no longer capable of being uncovered, since true history and stage and film history are one. It was Howard Sackler's inspiration to have acknowledged this, to have consciously—and that is the art of it—been content to leave it all there, corrupted, sentimentalized, full of the shabbiest folklore.
Review, 1376 words
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