STAGE REVIEW : BLACK MEN ASKING FOR 2ND CHANCE

“The Diary of Black Men,” a touring show out of Houston that just wound up a popular run at the Beverly Theater, is quite a surprise: a theatrical polemic in the best sense of the word.

That word is that black men have been losing their black women and they want them back, that chauvinism is not manhood, that black women need love, too.

These may not be earth-shaking themes, and the production from Maceba Affairs is awfully thin on plot and structure, but the importance here is sociological. This is a hit show for blacks and it obviously says something they want to hear. It fills cavernous houses around the country (there wasn’t an empty seat at the 1,328-seat Beverly’s concluding Sunday night performance and in two weekends the 10 performances reportedly drew 12,500 people for a show that had played the Beverly just last June).

More black women were in attendance than black men, and they filled the theater with noisy delight as six male actors on a bare stage took uproarious turns making their cool manhood pitches to black women in a number called “I Am All Man.” In this case, they were a player (street talk for pimp), a Muslim/preacher, a blue collar worker, a militant, a white-furred street slick and a pipe-smoking intellectual hawking “education, intelligence and a solid bank account.” (The women whooped at that.)

Yet, this is only the diversionary, strutting peacock part of the show. The kill comes later. The playwright is a Houston writer/folk singer named Muntu Thomas Meloncon, who, it develops, has very important things on his mind. The survival of the black family, not a matriarchal one, is the heart of the play’s concern. How do you love a black woman? The answer comes back: Get rid of the attitude that she is “my woman”; use her womanhood to help make your manhood. It’s good advice regardless of race.

Against the sweet backdrop of a three-piece jazz trio, the half dozen, deftly etched characterizations (especially Franklin Anderson’s upwardly mobile intellectual and Melton Martin’s good-time jive) co-mingle with a symbolic, silent female figure skillfully enacted and danced by Lorenette Hayes.

Acoustically, the Beverly is not the best venue for dramatic theater. From down front, the diction is muddied and in the balcony, you have to work at tuning in. But director Clarence Whitmore, who plays the character of the militant and hails from L.A.’s Inner City Cultural Center, overcomes the material’s inherent limitations with a vigorous and clean line.

You are reminded of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Curiously, “The Diary of Black Men” is saying much the same thing, but with self-parody and much more dialectic. Indirectly it even suggests a certain justification for black male bluster. Implicit is the unspoken fact that the black feminist movement (and the subsequent desirability of black women in the job market) has left black men confused and angry.

But this is not an angry production. If anything, it’s black men asking for another chance.

The show starts a Bay Area run Friday at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos.