SOURCE: "Racial Allegory," in The New York Times, 15 March 1971, p. 52.

Dream on Monkey Mountain received its New York debut on 14 March 1971 in a production by the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) at the St. Mark's Playhouse. In the following assessment of the premiere performance, Barnes calls the play a "richly flavored phantasmagoria" and stresses its poetic aspects.

Derek Walcott's The Dream on Monkey Mountain, which the Negro Ensemble Company presented last night at the St. Marks Playhouse, is a beautiful bewildering play by a poet. Mr. Walcott, a black Trinidadian, rightly sees the English language as one of his ethnic inheritances, and he fell in love with it in a way that few people can.

He writes with a mind clarified with the clouds of literature. Even in this play we can see hints of Don Quixote, Waiting for Godot, the Bible and a heritageful of Elizabethan and Jacobean...