Chuck Connors, who usually plays a “good guy” role in the film world, portrays Tom Moore, a slave master who rapes one of his slaves and later blackmails their son. Cicely Tyson is magnificent in her role as one of the first generation of slaves brought from Africa. Cultural scene Vancouver’s York Theatre, one of North America’s oldest sur- viving community theatres, is planning renovations to become a low-rent facility for community, cultural .and theatre groups. To help finance the renovations, the Vancouver Folk Song Society is holding a benefit concert at the theatre on Sat., March 19 at 8 p.m. Tickets are$2 and can be bought at the door. Address is 639 Com- mercial Dr. * * * An evening of contemporary song by Ishmael Katz and Shawn Robins is featured at the York Theatre this Friday, March 11 at 8:30 p.m. The two songwriters describetheir music as topical folk rock which pokes fun at some of the social and political situations in Vancouver. * * * Tamahnous Theatre, one of the many theatre groups which have sprung up in Vancouver, an- nounced this week they had received a grant from the federal government to make capital im- provements at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre premises which will become home for the theatre group. * * * Heritage Musical Theatre presents Godspell at the James Cowan Theatre, 6450 Gilpin, Burnaby, March 23 to April 2. There are evening and matinee performances. For information phone 298-3900. Rarely has a television series hit such a response, both in Canada and the United States as has the adaptation of Arthur Haley’s book - ‘‘Roots.”” First shown on a U.S. network and received in parts of Canada, the series has also been rerun by Ontario’s Global network. Reaction and commentary in the U.S., as typified by a series of articles and reviews in the U.S. Communist paper Daily World, indicates such response.- We reprint here a review by the Daily World’s Washington correspondent Tim Wheeler. Canadians who missed the series may want to urge theCBC tocarry it for the message is certainly not limited to U.S. audiences. There is plenty of sweetness to savor in the triumph of Alex Haley’s book “Roots’’ and _ its televised adaptation. Take for example, the fact that the TV viewing audience, 130,000,000, smashed the record set last fall by NBC’s airing of Gone With the Wind. Gone With the Wind for 30 years has been one of Hollywood’s most effective carriers of U.S. history’s biggest lie — the benevolent slave- master who cares for his slaves, portrayed as grateful children, fairly bursting with gratitude for the master’s kindness. Gone With the Wind depicts the Union army as a rampaging horde of vandals that invades the South to destroy this idyllic, paternalist setup. But the televised Roots mer- cilessly demolished this hoax. It was a stroke of casting genius to put Lorne Green, Mr. Good Guy, the hero of Bonanza, in the role of Kunte Kinte’s first master. The mask of benevolence is soon ripped away. As Kunte Kinte’s friend, Fiddler, pleads with the master, the overseer directs the brutal flogging of Kunte Kinte for daring to run away and for refusing to give up his African name. Fiddler pleads for mercy but the master keeps right on reading his Bible with a magnifying glass. ‘He broke the rules,’ the master calmly states as the cracking whip resounds through the open window. Then there is lean-jawed, hand- some Chuck Connors, another “‘sood guy’’ who plays Tom Moore, master of Kunte Kinte’s daughter Kizzy. He rapes Kizzy and she gives birth to a son, Chicken George, who grows up to be the skilled trainer of Moore’s prize fighting cdcks. As Moore’s ex- ploitation of his slaves becomes more brutal, Chicken George fights back and, in the process, finds out for the first time that his “owner is also his father. In a rage, he threatens, in effect, to go on strike by refusing to train the fight- ing cocks. Moore, as cool as you please, tells his slave-son that if he refuses, he will sell his mother and brothers and sisters into the murderous cotton belt. Chicken George is forced to submit. It is indeed a ‘‘peculiar in- stitution” that would so demoralize a man, so completely strip him of his humanity, that he would black- mail his own son. The point so_ effectively dramatized here is that the in- stitution of slavery dictated the consciousness and behavior of the slavemaster regardless of any glimmer of\humanity that might otherwise have survived in his character. Individuals that might otherwise have been perfectly decent human beings were trans- formed by virtue of the fact that they ‘““owned”’ other human beings. Their parasitism required them to . destroy human impulses, beat, rape and kill, just as nazism required that otherwise decent humans engage in mass murder. There is, in other words, nothing innate about the evil and the solution, abolition, therefore spring forward in the viewers mind. On the other hand, the TV dramatization was unique in portraying the slaves themselves as absolutely unreconciled to their . fate. Take Fiddler, for example, whom Kunte Kinte first perceives as an accommodationist because of his insistence that Kunte accept his slave identity in order to sur- vive. Kunte learns over the years that Fiddler, born into slavery, is resourceful, and battlewise in the tactics of carrying on the struggle. Reams have’been written about the significance of the book and TV series. William Greider, Washington Post columnist, in a highly perceptive column, points out that tens of millions of white people watched the TV series. Why? Greider says that while it is true that the films were laced with violence and brutal sex, standard television fare, a deeper impulse explains the overwhelming suc- cess, since the other networks wheeled out their most decadent of films to compete with Roots. He says that the TV series brought to life the ‘“‘shared heritage”’ of black and white Americans. He has touched a profound point. It is true that white people have never experienced slavery in the U.S. They have not experienced racist oppression. Those who at- tempt to cover up this unique fact of black history are actually seeking to minimize the centrality of the struggle against racism. But the -kernel of truth in Greider’s observation is that black _and white working people do in- deed face a common enemy today. The Big Lie of the paternal slave- master is not very different from the modern day Big Lie of the paternal corporation or bank executive. In fact, this is the real | of both black and white Americans SR reason for of Gone With the Wind. After all, the slaveowners are Gone With the) Wind. But Nelson Rockefeller and his famous grin are not. | Roots, by demolishing the myth of the kindly master and the happy slave, also indirectly undercuts the myth of the kindly boss and thé contented worker, be he black Latino or white. White worke® who watched the exposure of tht slavemaster’s brutality had plenty to recognize in their own treatme?” at the hands of profiteering em ployers. : Kunte Kinte, dragged in chaif® from the stinking hold of the slavé ship, screams in pain as a redhe, iron’ with the initials LL for L® Linganeer sears into the flesh hisssback.e.1 whispering under my breath tf d ‘prophetic words of Karl Mar: “Labor in the white skin can nevé be freeso long as labor in the bla¢ skin is branded.” Don't Miss Medderick “A new concert from Bargain with new songs about today’s struggles... B.C.’s labor movement, Tom Hawken and Surrey’s outstanding talent, Medderick.” Bargain at half the price March 25 — 8:30 p.m. YORK THEATRE 639 Commercial Dr. Vancouver with the minstrel of ‘A NEW WIND BLOWING’ RESERVATIONS: 255-0141 ALL TICKETS $3.50 QOronwto found mysell J Tom Hawken PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MARCH 11, 1977—Page 10 a: weee ft ae — ws p>etNns