PLAY SOLDIERS ON
African-American military drama as powerful as ever
Few playwrights have served in the United States military. But Charles Fuller, the author of “A Soldier’s Play,” was stationed in Japan and Korea between 1959 and 1962.
When his drama, now on Broadway through the Roundabout Theatre Company, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 after a production by the Negro Ensemble Company, a stunned Fuller told journalists that “he didn’t talk about the Army at all.”
Demonstrably, he wrote about the Army instead. Its hard-baked racism — pervasive enough to overwhelm a psychotic African-American sergeant in Fort Neal, La., in 1944 — and its capacity for nation-leading change.
Watching “A Soldier’s Play” now really is to marvel at how many of the themes explored by young African-American playwrights in the 21st century were so vividly expressed in this 38-year-old work, probably best known as the basis for “A Soldier’s Story,” the 1984 Norman Jewison movie starring Howard E. Rollins Jr., spick-and-span in his officer’s uniform and sporting reflective sunglasses.
Kenny Leon’s lively, broadly staged Roundabout revival, which stars a savvy Blair Underwood and a boldfaced David Alan Grier, plays a kind of sly homage to the erotic legacy of that Oscarnominated film, the stage being filled with a plethora of stunningly buff and goodlooking guys — there are no women in the play, but there were plenty around me in the audience at the American Airlines Theatre on 42nd St. Appreciation for a military-style body even becomes vocal, reportedly night after night, at the moment when Underwood, playing the Rollins role of investigator Capt. Richard Davenport, appears briefly without his shirt — so much so that he is forced to acknowledge the whoops.
It’s an incongruous moment, perhaps, given that Davenport, one of the Army’s very few black officers, is deep into the investigation of the murder, by an unseen shooter, of Sgt. Vernon Waters (Grier), a man who has so ingested the racism of his time and place as to become physically and emotionally dangerous to the young African-American men of whom he has charge. But the excellent Underwood, who is playing a storyteller moving in and out of his own narrative, makes it work.
For sure, Fuller, who now is 80 years old, was exploring how systemic racism often has been the root cause of African-Americans destroying one another with violence. But he was also writing a thriller and a murder-mystery. Today’s progressive Twitterati would probably see that choice back in the 1980s as a necessary concession to snag an audience, and a Pulitzer, especially since the play includes a relatively decent and enlightened white character, exuberantly played by Jerry O’Connell.
But to his credit, Leon manages to direct a show that doesn’t compromise those difficult themes while also embracing the commercial and highly entertaining nature of the writing. “A Soldier’s Play” remains a strikingly taut drama that you don’t want to end. I’d argue that only enhances its political impact.
And any veterans walking through the door would immediately grasp that Fuller served.
“A Soldier’s Play,” which now features a wise and revealing design from Derek McLane, is structured as a whodunit and, on a subtler level that Leon enhances with the overt theatricality of this production, it is also a celebration of the camaraderie, charisma and character of black enlisted men. The ensemble in this productions bursts with so much life force that you feel on a profound level how much talent the armed forces either wasted or underused for so long.
We’re watching the era just before African-Americans finally were allowed to fight alongside their white brethren, an imminent change in status that the members of this company embrace with colossal enthusiasm, even if it puts them in grave danger. Patriotism and optimism among African-Americans are key themes of the play, and everyone combines here to make the point that their ability to survive in the face of such human cruelty was no less than a military miracle.