Three's Company.

In 1969, Larry Neal, a black writer, published an essay titled "Any Day Now: Black Art and Black Liberation." In it, Neal tried to clarify the goals of the Black Arts Movement, an ideological aesthetic that was first laid out by the poet and activist Amiri Baraka, after Malcolm X's assassination, four years earlier. The Black Arts Movement, Neal wrote, sought "to link, in a highly conscious manner, art and politics in order to assist in the liberation of black people." The propaganda-filled plays of this movement--by Baraka, Charles Fuller, and Ed Bullins, among others--are, for the most part, forgettable. Caught somewhere between art and activism, they call for revolutions, not ovations. (Bullins, the movement's most talented son, did not produce his masterwork, 1970's "The Fabulous Miss Marie," until he began to see his plays less as a way to get Whitey and more as an expression of his own sensibility.)

Luckily, the Black Arts Movement wasn't the only game in town. In 1967, as an alternative to Black Arts' unabashed militancy, the director and playwright Douglas Turner Ward co-founded the Negro Ensemble Company, a troupe that performed at the St. Marks Playhouse, in the East Village, and specialized in mawkish narratives whose sweetness was intended to soften, if not disguise, the ideology at the company's core. Although the New Federal Theatre, founded by Woodie King, Jr., at the Henry Street Settlement, farther downtown, presented a more diverse selection of plays, from 1970 on--treating writers ranging from Tennessee Williams to Ntozake Shange with equal respect--it is the Negro Ensemble Company that theatregoers recognize as New York's ur-black dramatic voice.

And it's a measure of the N.E.C.'s continued historical significance that the Signature Theatre Company is devoting its entire new season to works that were first produced there, beginning with a revival of Leslie Lee's 1975 melodrama "The First Breeze of Summer" (at the Peter Norton Space, under the direction of Ruben Santiago-Hudson). After a few months downtown, the original staging moved to Broadway, where it was nominated for a Tony for best play. In a recent interview, Lee recalled that Walter Kerr, then the drama critic for the Times, said "that 'First Breeze' was the first African-American play that invited him in to share in it." Lee added, "I loved that comment. This play isn't good because it is a black play. I work very hard to create characters that can speak for all of society." One can't help wondering if Lee isn't being disingenuous, given that his overdependence on the tropes of American blackness is, in the end, what undermines this too long, predictable, and sad play.

In the era of Afro puffs and leisure suits, Milton and Hattie Edwards (Keith Randolph Smith and Marva Hicks) are God-fearing, hardworking Negroes who run a construction business somewhere in the Northeast. They have two sons: the competitive, woman-loving, twenty-something Nate (Brandon Dirden), and his bookish, closeted teen-age brother, Lou (Jason Dirden), who aspires to a college education and a career as a doctor. Two women are visiting the Edwards home on this hot, suffocating summer day: Milton's mother and the family matriarch, Gremmar (Leslie Uggams), and her daughter, Edna (the brilliant, irrepressible Brenda Pressley). (Gremmar had another son, Sam, who died.)

Near the start of the play, Gremmar is alone onstage, slowly picking out a hymn on the family piano. The moment is quiet, mournful, made even more beautiful by the way it gives Uggams a chance not to shine--at least, not outwardly. (Ever since she made a name for herself, in the sixties, with the television band leader Mitch Miller, Uggams has twinkled a trifle too brightly; she often seems to be hiding something behind her discordant cuteness.) Lights up, stage right, and we're in Gremmar's bedroom, her memory cave, from which she recalls the three love affairs that punctuate the present-day action ...