SOURCE: "Crossing Lines," in The Saturday Review, New York, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2, January 9, 1965, p. 46.

In this review of "The Toilet, " Hewes finds that while the gratuitous violence and obscenities may scare off many viewers, the play is nonetheless "a vivid and indelible work of art."

LeRoi Jones's two new plays confirm the impression this thirty-year-old playwright made last season with his "Dutchman" and "The Baptism." Mr. Jones is less an astute dramatic craftsman than he is a Negro creatively expressing his portion of a total anger that his race has had to suppress in the centuries since the first slave-owner committed an injustice on the grounds that the Negro was sub-human. His plays are poetic and prophetic views of the total situation by one individual human being in search of a vital identity.

"The Toilet," written in 1961 (before "Dutchman"), is deliberately as unrelievedly obscene a play as Mr...