It’s Savage, It’s Wild, It’s Ishmael Reed : The ‘ornery and skeptical’ playwright’s latest creation attacks the prosecution of Washington Mayor Marion Barry

Polemic playwright Ishmael Reed--who brandishes his pen like a knife--is jabbing the U.S. Justice Department for its prosecution of Washington Mayor Marion Barry on cocaine charges in his bizarre and wacky new play, “Savage Wilds Part II.”

Barry’s case is ready-made for the stage, says the 52-year-old Oakland writer, who uses his drama to pepper the government for what he sees as a racist assault on the mayor. The one-act production, premiering Friday night at the 49-seat Bullins Memorial Theatre located in a rough neighborhood blocks from Oakland in Emeryville, will provide audiences with an account of the fall of a charismatic mayor.

In the play, a fictional white U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Richard Head, entraps black mayor B.V. Dongson by using as bait a black woman offering cocaine. “One of the things that really got me indignant, got me sore and upset about this case and gave me the fuel to get into this play, were the tactics used against Marion Barry,” Reed says. “The government had gone too far with all kinds of Stalinistic entrapments and KGB tactics. We don’t have anybody bringing up these questions because there seems to be a certain amount of glee in the American opinion polls over a black man being busted like this.”

The real-life mayor’s leadership in the nation’s capital all but came to an end last winter when he was videotaped by FBI agents during a rendezvous with an old flame--former model Hazel (Rasheeda) Moore--working undercover for the police. Agents grabbed Barry after he allegedly smoked crack cocaine in front of a hidden camera. The government’s video evidence, however, failed to completely persuade a federal-court jury, which on Aug. 10 declared it was deadlocked on 12 drug and perjury charges. The panel, however, did convict the three-term mayor of one misdemeanor count of cocaine possession but acquitted him of another. Prosecutors will tell the court at a scheduled Sept. 17 hearing if they want to retry Barry.

Meanwhile, Barry has announced he will attempt to win an at-large seat on the Washington City Council in the Nov. 6 election.

“Barry will go about his life (and) go on to do something else,” Reed said. “The man can still contribute. After all, Chappaquiddick didn’t destroy Edward Kennedy. People have overcome their weaknesses.”

Reed insists that it is purely coincidental that his play’s opening night falls on the heels of Barry’s trial, thus maximizing exposure. Nevertheless, the attention generated by “Savage Wilds Part II” is greatly welcomed by the struggling Bullins Memorial Theatre, which is anticipating full houses. “It’s the best thing to happen to us,” says theater founder Ed Bullins, an Obie Award-winning playwright. “It might help pay the rent.’ (The theater is named after Bullins’ late son Edward A. Bullins Jr., who was killed in a car accident in the mid-’70s.)

“Savage Wilds Part II,” though performed in the little-known, nonprofit Emeryville theater (through Sept. 16), has attracted attention from afar. The British Broadcasting Company has inquired about filming a performance of the play. And the playwright is scheduled to read “Savage Wilds Part II” Tuesday night at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. (A spokesman for Barry said that the mayor would not attend.)

“I see this as a victory of the people over these covert operations this Administration is using,” Reed says. “There should be a probe of this sting. I think the country’s lost its way. I think Jimmy Carter saw it; he called it a ‘malaise,’ some kind of spiritual sickness. Why aren’t people more outraged with an event like this?”

The case, tinged with hints of drug deals at city hall, adultery and abuse of power, has all the trappings of a saucy soap opera. Reed, however, says that his play addresses issues beyond the tawdry drama. He maintains that some in government, and feminist groups, blame black men for most of society’s ills, and Barry is merely a scapegoat. And if the government turns to such tactics to nab the high-profile mayor, Reed cautions, then it eventually won’t hesitate to go after private citizens.

“We are going into very dangerous times. I agree with William Safire--and he’s a conservative--who said that never has our government stooped this low. Every American should think about how this affects them. Nobody’s safe. Our privacy is being invaded. Maybe that’s why some of the conservatives are alarmed about this. This is a perfect strategy: Do it to black people and nobody cares. But eventually, if they can do it to us, they can do it to other people.”

“Savage Wilds Part II” is a sequel to a play Reed wrote in 1988 depicting derisive treatment of black men at the hands of feminists. In the first piece, a combination wildlife program/game show called “Savage Wilds” features co-hosts Vanessa Bare and Sheena Queene, who hire comedian Uncle Sanford to be hunted down. He is killed when dummy bullets are replaced with the real thing. The play ends with the arrest of the co-hosts on murder charges. “Savage Wilds Part II” picks up in the jail cell of the women--one is white, one is black--who eventually escape prosecution and are promised a new TV show if they help trap Mayor Dongson.

“It’s an entertaining play,” Reed says. “You’re not likely to see anything like this on television or in any theater anywhere. ‘Savage Wilds’ had a very strong reception--people really hated it or liked it up front. All my work arouses different passions.”

The bearish Reed, with a gray-flecked beard and bushy hair, has a prophet’s fire-eyed gaze when denouncing the evils he sees. He’s always considered himself a voice in the wilderness. “I was born Feb. 22--George Washington’s birthday. So I’m bound to tell the truth!”

Reed is a literary free spirit, testing his talents in poetry, literature, plays and songs. He has twice been nominated for the National Book Award and has written eight novels, including “The Terrible Twos,” which compares modern America to a 2-year-old child incapable of being satisfied, and “Reckless Eyeballing,” the 1986 novel that drew criticism from some feminists who accused him of creating a caricature of Alice Walker. Four books of poetry and three tomes of critical essays carry Reed’s byline, including “Writin’ Is Fightin: Thirty-seven Years of Boxing on Paper.’ He has also been a lecturer at UC Berkeley for 20 years.

His writing, he says, is part of the “trickster tradition” common to Afro-American culture. The trickster, Reed explains, exposes pomposity and hypocrisy. “He prods sacred cows, shows the absurdity of positions and theories people cherish. ‘The emperor has no clothes’ is a typical trickster observation. I’m naturally ornery and skeptical. Maybe that is what has kept me in the writing business for almost 40 years. I’m saying things in a way that other people don’t. I can be a conservative one minute and on the left wing the next minute. A trickster’s hard to define.”

Reed’s stance in “Savage Wilds Part II,” however, is not difficult to discern. The play is raw and, in some parts, as raunchy as a dirty joke. The prescription-pill popping U.S. attorney has a strange erotic fascination with the womanizing mayor. In Reed’s fictionalized capital, members of the National Security Council and Secret Service snort cocaine; generals and senators attend “freak parties,” and the President, also called “Skippy,” is caught with a “young girl who freaked out on acid.” U.S. attorney Head’s 10-year obsession to “bag” the mayor and “stop his swagger” leads to the lawyer’s incurable condition of insomnia.

Mayor Dongson, arrested after FBI agents catch him puffing on a crack cocaine pipe, doesn’t go down quietly. “I can get rid of my stains, but how is your government going to get rid of its?” the mayor angrily asks Head. “One of the most powerful governments in the world reduced to pandering. Reminds me of the old African proverb: No matter how high the vulture flies, it can’t get rid of its stink. . . . Maybe I have been a bad husband. A substance abuser. A liar. But who expects any more from a politician? There are politicians all over town who’ve done worse than I have. Besides. All I did was smoke from a crack pipe. At least I’m not flying it in or bringing it in by ship, like your people are. I get set up while they go to college campuses on speaking tours.”

A white politician would not have been pursued by the FBI as Barry was, Reed insists. “Blacks, especially black men, have always been singled out and attacked like this. Most of the lynching victims in the South were black males. They were lynched for all things--looking good and being proud of themselves. There has always been the chastising or scolding of black men who thought they could do what white men did. The mayor forgot his place. There’s always a glee on the part of the white population upon seeing some uppity or impudent black male get his comeuppance.

“I think this guy’s been singled out for prosecution. There’s a lot of hostility toward black people in this country. We have these mammoth social problems in the United States; they cut across class and race and everything. But the tendency in the media is to comfort middle-class subscribers and viewers by saying it’s all a black problem. The politicians want to comfort their constituency. Curing all these problems will take a lot of money. If you can put out the image that blacks are the only ones engaged in these problems, like illegitimacy and all that, it’s their fault. It’s their behavior that causes it--not racism, not government policies to cut down on school lunch programs and all those populist things that have been happening since the ‘60s.”

Reed says he does not condone the actions of his fictional mayor. “The character has these basic desires and will go to any length to fulfill them. He’s very arrogant and foolish. The mayor in the play is a pathetic fool. But in the end, he has more dignity than does the government that entrapped him.”

Reed lives in a stately Queen Anne Victorian house with his wife, children’s choreographer Carla Blank, and teen-age daughter Tennessee, who is also a published poet. Their home is located in a tough West Oakland neighborhood Reed calls “the front lines.” Stacks of newspapers--ammunition for his writing--and shelves crammed with books line the walls. He keeps 10 years worth of voluminous files of newspaper clippings upstairs.

During a recent Sunday morning interview, he was warm and affable and full of hearty laughs that boomed through the house. But his ideas that feminists and the government have conspired against black males carry the force of a strong left hook. His punches have provoked accusations that he is a misogynist, paranoid and mean as a junkyard dog.

“Writing is a weapon for us,” Reed explains. “It may be a finger exercise for the Establishment, but for us it’s a matter of survival. Our literature is about combat and plotting. Brer Rabbit says, ‘Please don’t throw me into that briar-patch.’ ”

The writer, who accuses most West Coast theaters of breeding limp drama, expects his new play to push some buttons. “I hope this is the return of political theater. Nobody around here would have produced this play but Ed Bullins. Most of the theaters are out not to offend. In order to truly get the middle-class audience you can’t make them feel uncomfortable. The same people would have jumped on Shakespeare in his time; they wouldn’t have given him a grant. He’s now safely removed by 400, 500 years. Even though some of his issues are contemporary, they don’t have the bite they had when they were first presented. I’m waiting for Jesse Helms to read ‘Titus Andronicus.’ He’d probably ban Shakespeare!”