When A Soldier’s Play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, The New York Times ran a reaction piece on its newly honored author. It opened straightforwardly: “Charles Fuller, the black playwright who yesterday won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, said he was ‘stunned’ and ‘delighted’ by the news.”
Not “the playwright,” but “the black playwright.” This was in 1982.
That, in its way, gets to the heart of Fuller’s work, which debuted in 1981 in an off-Broadway production staged by the Negro Ensemble Company and opened in its Broadway premiere tonight, in a lovely and loving revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company at the American Airlines Theatre that ably masks the script’s flaws. Even when black people succeed in America, Fuller says, they’re still first and foremost seen by this country as black.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★ review here.]
A Soldier’s Play is a murder mystery on its most basic level, set at a Southern Army base during World War II. It opens with the murder: A drunken African-American sergeant, Waters, is laughing and shouting. “They’ll still hate you,” he says, repeatedly. Then he’s shot. Soon enough, Davenport, the rare African-American officer, an MP—“I’m a lawyer the segregated Armed Services couldn’t find a place for,” he says by way of introduction—arrives to investigate. The story is told in a series of flashbacks as Davenport works to uncover the truth. Everyone thinks it was the local Klan; everyone worries it may have been some racist white solders; and, as Davenport learns, it turns out all of the black men in Waters’ unit hated him. You can’t have a murder mystery without plenty of plausible murderers.
On that basic murder-mystery level, A Soldier’s Play is, well, pretty basic, a by-the-book procedural. There’s a lot of “send in the next one” and “are you sure that’s really what happened.” Davenport’s main antagonist is a white captain on the base, Taylor, who thinks of himself as a decent person but also can’t quite take to the idea of a black man holding his same rank. For no particularly good reason except that it moves the story along, in one scene Taylor shifts from undermining and attacking Davenport to sharing the base’s secrets with him. It’s all a little bit underwhelming.
But it’s on the less basic levels that the play works. It’s really a portrait of what living under racism, and what hating oneself for it, can do to a person. Waters was a man who did everything right—joined up, worked hard, got ahead. And still, he realized, they hated him. He took out that diminishment on his men, especially the Southern black men he hated most, the ones he saw as living up to stereotypes, the ones who reminded him why, he believed, whites hated him. (Shondes for di goyim, you might say.) It’s this socio-psychological element that raises Fuller’s OK play to something more.
It’s also this particular staging. David Alan Grier gives a remarkable performance as Waters, both blustery and wounded. (It didn’t hurt that the night before I saw A Soldier’s Play, I’d been at the Met for Porgy and Bess, which mostly served to remind me of Grier’s sensational Sporting Life at the Richard Rodgers several seasons back.) Blair Underwood is controlled and fierce as Davenport. The actors playing the men of Waters’ company ably sketch a collection of real individuals, and even Jerry O’Connell shines in the somewhat motivationless role of Taylor, the white caption who switches from bad guy to good. Kenny Leon directs with a sort of quiet military precision, and Derek McLane’s post-and-beam set, moodily lighted by Allen Lee Hughes, impressionistically suggests a barracks, a drill hall, and perhaps a gallows.
Still, A Soldier’s Play remains as stubbornly earnest and straightforward as its title. At its end, the black soldiers—relegated mostly to playing baseball for the base, never getting to fight Hitler—receive word that they’re finally shipping out. And O’Connell’s Taylor realizes the error of his early ways. “I was wrong, Davenport—about the bars—the uniform—about Negroes being in charge,” he says. “I guess I’ll have to get used to it.” It’s a play set in the 1940s, written in the 1980s, optimistically looking toward a better time in American race relations. In 2020, that can’t help but feel quaint.
A Soldier’s Play opened January 21, 2020, at the American Airlines Theatre and runs through March 15. Tickets and information: roundabouttheatre.org
