Bridging the two forms of black theater in the 1960s and 1970s, the militant theater and the theater of experience, Richard Wesley has made significant contributions to both. His first major hit, Black Terror (produced in 1971), is a powerful political statement urging black revolutionaries to abandon the rhetoric and practice of revolutionary suicide and to pay more attention to the concrete realities of black life in the United States in shaping their tactics. It amply demonstrated Wesley's skill in dramatizing ideas, giving them an urgency, appeal, and impact that audiences cannot easily leave behind. Most of his other plays are sensitive, emphatic depictions of blacks who have either escaped from or remained fixed in various self-imprisoning and self-mutilating patterns of behavior arising from oppression. Another facet of his talent is revealed in his film scripts for Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and Let's Do It Again (1975), which provide laughs by...