Acclaimed playwright, Pulitzer Prize winner

NEW YORK — Charles Fuller, the Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright of the searing and acclaimed “A Soldier’s Play” who often explored and exposed how social institutions can perpetuate racism, died Monday. He was 83.

Mr. Fuller died of natural causes in Toronto, said his wife, Claire PrietoFuller.

Mr. Fuller’s plays were filled with complex characters and an undercutting of conventions. “The best way to dispel stereotypes and massive lies is telling something as close to the truth as you can,” Fuller told Newsday. In one review of his work, The New York Times said “clichés of form, plot and character shatter like skeets at a shooting range.”

Mr. Fuller’s most famous work, “A Soldier’s Play,” used a military setting in its tale of the search for the murderer of a Black sergeant on an Army base in Louisiana during World War II.

It dissected entrenched racism as well as internal divisions in the Black military community, wrapping it in a murder mystery.

The play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982 and two years later was made into the Oscar-nominated best picture “A Soldier’s Story,” for which Mr. Fuller wrote the screenplay and earned an Oscar nomination.

“I’d just like to be considered a playwright fortunate enough to have written a ‘hit,’ and who wants to keep on writing plays that break through the wall,″ he told The New York Times in 1982.

The work has attracted a who’s who of Black acting talent. The film version starred a young Denzel Washington, who had appeared in its first stage incarnation in New York alongside Samuel L. Jackson. A 2005 revival offBroadway lured Taye Diggs, Anthony Mackie and Steven Pasquale.

It made its Broadway debut in the pandemic shortened season of 202021 with David Alan Grier and Blair Underwood and earned seven Tony nominations, including best play revival.

“It has been my greatest honor to perform his words on both stage and screen, his genius will be missed,” Mr. Grier tweeted.

Mr. Fuller also is survived by a son, David, a daughter-in-law, four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.