Ed Bullins is an enigma. A one-time Black Panther Party Minister of Culture inspired to playwriting by the Black Nationalist Movement, he broke with the movement when it was at its peak in 1967. Proclaimed by critic Samuel Hay in Negro History Bulletin as the leading celebrant of everyday black life, his plays are seldom totally realistic. The winner of two Obie awards and a Drama Critics Circle Award, Bullins is, according to one producer in a 1977 New York Times interview, "America's greatest living playwright," and at the same time he is "unbankable." No work of his has ever appeared on Broadway. Promising in the introduction of his 1969 anthology, New Plays From The Black Theatre, a future art "completely different from white anglosaxon Western art," he included in that anthology under the pseudonym Kingsley B. Bass, Jr., a play he had adapted from Albert Camus. Predicting confidently in Newsweek...