Tight Right White

1993 19mMovie

Staged in a loft on Lafayette Street, across from the Public Theatre, the piece used the film adaptation of Kyle Onstott’s 1957 novel, “Mandingo,” as its primary script. Sitting on cushions on the floor, audience members had to crane their necks to see the proceedings. Enter Moishe Pipik (the amazing Tony Torn), a long-nosed Jewish character in a huckster’s checked suit. When he pisses in a pot of earth, a money tree springs up. Moishe has a friend, Blaster, a black teen-age junkie and drug dealer. They’re refugees, in a sense—racist and anti-Semitic parodies of Jewish liberal identification with blackness. Sometimes they hang out as if they were on a talk show, their chatter intercut with all that “Mandingo” mess, Mandingo’s black phallus looming in the minds of the white people who constructed their dream of an antebellum South on black backs.