Ted Shine continues a tradition established in American black theater by Langston Hughes--the use of humor as an incisive weapon and as a defense against weeping. While Shine began writing plays prior to the black revolution, the new black consciousness which swept across the nation in the 1960s is clearly felt in all of his writing. He represents the school best characterized by Owen Dodson's phrase: "jokers with a blackmail style." Shine possesses microscopic insight and a finely tuned ear for dialogue and dialect, particularly that spoken by the rural Southerner, and very few, if any, of his peers can match his skills in this aspect of playwriting. His dramas work on stage and screen; his audiences, black or white, cannot escape from a sense of verity and from the messages Shine drives home to them. As Dodson says, Ted Shine, with Ossie Davis and Douglas Turner Ward...