SOURCE: "Once upon a Full Moon," in The New Yorker, Vol. XLVII, No. 6, 27 March 1971, pp. 83-5.

Oliver declares Dream on Monkey Mountain a "masterpiece " and praises its "beauty, imagination, humor, and vigor."

The Dream on Monkey Mountain, at the St. Marks, is an enthralling play by the West Indian poet and dramatist Derek Walcott, and the performance of the Negro Ensemble Company, under Michael A. Schultz's clear, inspired direction, matches it in beauty, imagination, humor, and vigor. The Dreamer is an old black charcoal peddler, who thinks himself so ugly that he has not been able to look into a mirror for thirty years. At the beginning of the play, after he has gone into a frenzy and caused considerable damage in a local bar, declaring that God is black, not white, he is thrown into the jail of some West Indian island by a mulatto corporal. He...