Joseph A. Walker's Ododo (truth) is an unstructured, loosely hung kind of review, if anything. It is self-contradicting in both form and content. The first four of fourteen scenes are highly stylized symbolic conceptions of an African birth-of-man fable, and of the initial entrapment of Africans by predatory human animals…. Walker has trouble with his assessment of the Black man. To begin with, he uses symbolism which he seems unable to control. In one of the early stages of African life, the ...

If any single criticism were to be leveled against Joseph Walker's The River Niger … it might be that it contains too much. But that is a good fault—one that in this case is both an aspect of the play's exuberance and integral to its purpose. The River Niger depicts the morass of Harlem; it heaps together vitality, corruption, agony, aspiration, violence and a will to transcendence. No salient trait predominates, except ferment, a ferment of existence struggling confusedly and va...

Joseph Walker's The Harangues … is another example of impassioned black theatre which is interesting only because it is impassioned…. The first of the evening's harangues (there are two, which are emblematically pictorial and hymnal) is a short melodrama in which a young Negro plots the murder of his prospective white (Texan) millionaire father-in-law and is himself mowed down by the man (actually a Harlem Italian) and several of his black henchmen. In the second harangue, Asura,...

["The River Niger"] is so generous—so rich in character, detail, incident, emotion, and humor—that it more than fulfills the promise of Mr. Walker's not so successful "The Harangues" of a few years ago. "The River Niger" is about a family in Harlem and the crises that beset it during the single week of the action…. The title makes an apt image for the whole drama—the black river flowing through Africa, the black wave of humanity fl...

At the end of [The Harangues], we are left with the marvelously bitter image of Asura cursing the world with fierce profanity. Within the short span of the taut action, none of the characters have much opportunity to reveal themselves more than nominally, but maybe that is why Mr. Walker calls his creation a harangue. Whatever its faults, it does succeed in expressing the playwright's passionate distaste for the hypocrisy and corruption that infect both blacks and whites. Henry Hewes, &#...