So much has happened in Africa since 1961 [when Lorraine Hansberry began the writing of "Les Blancs"] that the play, laid in a Schweitzer-like medical mission in some vast equatorial country plagued by white colonial rule and black terrorism, has an air of being far less current than it claims to be …, and this datedness is reflected in its doggedly didactic tone; we are being lectured to and made to see things in the light that Teacher wishes us to see them in and not otherwise. When, fairly late in the play, the plot erupts into melodrama … our sympathies are not engaged, for the characters involved have long since come to seem symbols of sets of beliefs and not individuals capable of holding contradictory opinions and of being murdered in cold blood.

Brendan Gill, "The Theatre: 'Les blancs'," in The New Yorker (© 1970 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol...