Reinterpreting the Sins of the Past
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

When works of fiction explore racial tensions within the African-American community, they tend to emphasize prejudice toward those perceived as not black enough – the light-skinned or privileged blacks who are accused of “passing,” of “Tomming.” In his provocative if occasionally schematic 1981 work “A Soldier’s Play,” currently receiving a electrifying revival by director Jo Bonney and a first-rate cast, Charles Fuller looks in the opposite direction, toward those whose presumed sin is being too black.
The first thing we see is a soldier on his knees, in a drunken stupor, being shot in cold blood. It’s 1944, and the man on his knees is Vernon C. Waters (James McDaniel), a sergeant in the U.S. Army. But the setting isn’t Anzio or the Ardennes; it’s Fort Neal, La. Was it the Klan that killed him? Or the bigoted enlisted whites who resented the blacks in uniform? Or his own men?
The character of Waters is Mr. Fuller’s crowning achievement – a veteran of two world wars whose blend of pride, ambition, and self-hatred has curdled into venomous contempt toward the unassimilated Southern blacks under his command. “The black race can’t afford you no more,” he says to one such man. Like any proper corpse in a whodunit – and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Soldier’s Play,” for better and for worse, is a whodunit – Waters did not lack enemies.
A black military lawyer, Captain Richard Davenport (Taye Diggs), has been sent to Fort Neal to sort things out. Doing so requires interacting with white men unaccustomed to calling blacks anything beyond “boy,” let alone “sir.” Charles Taylor (a strong Steven Pasquale), the troop’s white commanding officer, wants Davenport removed from the case because the cocksure lawyer will never attain justice. Or does he have his own reasons?
Through Davenport’s interrogations, we meet the 221st Chemical Smoke Generating Company, a typical cross-section of soldiers humble and brash, amorous and somber, hailing from Detroit and Jutlerville, Miss. All they have in common is an itching desire to fight the Nazis and a second-class status within the Army. They’re all seen as blacks first and soldiers a distant second, a demoralizing and infuriating condition that may have a lot to do with Waters’s death.
Mr. Fuller at times seems to have been torn between providing the nuts and-bolts facts of any whodunit (who can verify whose whereabouts at what time, etc.) and excavating the strata of resentments that Waters felt and instigated. The latter impulse is clearly the reason he wrote “A Soldier’s Play,” but the required logistical table-setting often threatens to overwhelm his insight into the racial dynamics that swirl in Waters’s wake. These complicated (perhaps overcomplicated) logistics, which even include a flashback within a flashback in the middle of an interrogation, make the director’s traffic cop skills even more crucial. This is where Ms. Bonney excels: Aided by David Weiner’s crisp lighting design, she whips the action from the baseball field to the barracks to a tiny jail cell with split-second precision, giving the play’s cinematic transitions their full due and hustling the audience through the obligatory red herrings.
Ms. Bonney also elicits uniformly excellent performances from her platoon, particularly from Anthony Mackie and Mike Colter as its strongest and weakest members. Mr. Mackie’s coiled indignation plays beautifully off the compelling Mr. Colter, whose genial, bluesplaying C.J. Memphis brings out the worst in Waters. Mr. McDaniel paints a powerful portrait of a shrewd, ambitious, rage-choked man whose contradictory impulses prove ruinous. The only mild disappointment is Mr. Diggs, who is constrained by the role of Davenport, a terse man fueled largely by indignation. These scenes are well within his abilities, and he pulls them off with no trouble, but they muffle much of the charisma that makes Mr. Diggs such an engaging actor.
The whodunit trappings of “A Soldier’s Play” may have helped pull audiences into its expertly crafted snares of racial prejudice and self-loathing back in 1981, before artists like Spike Lee and Edward P. Jones tugged these issues into the mainstream. But they feel extraneous now, a series of needlessly twisty means to a satisfying and thought-provoking end. Luckily, Ms. Bonney has burrowed through these layers and located the sinew and gristle underneath. “Any man ain’t sure where he belongs, must be in a whole lotta pain,” C.J. says of his doomed commander. Ms. Bonney and her accomplished cast have situated Waters and the rest of Mr. Fuller’s angry young men with the confidence and precision needed to turn their pain into the audience’s hard-earned pleasure.
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The opening of “A Soldier’s Play” comes the day before the official renaming of Broadway’s August Wilson Theatre (formerly the Virginia); along with Mr. Fuller and Suzan-Lori Parks, Wilson is the only other black playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize in 35 years. Some of his longtime producers have announced plans to bring “Radio Golf,” the 10th and final play in Wilson’s 20th-century cycle, to Broadway next season. Seeing as his works have been tough sells on Broadway of late – “King Hedley III,” “Gem of the Ocean,” and a “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” revival all lost money in the last few years – this commitment is a gamble but an honorable one.
But if you’re going to gamble, why not gamble big? Second Stage, the current home to “A Soldier’s Play,” produced Wilson’s riveting “Jitney” in 2000; it and “Radio Golf” are the only plays in the cycle never to have reached Broadway. If the viability of the newer play is in question, why not perform both in repertory and offer Wilson a 10-for-10 batting average?
Before long, some enterprising theater – the Kennedy Center? the Guthrie? Atlanta’s Alliance? – will have the guts to run all 10 plays in sequential order. It will be able to draw from a ludicrously deep pool of acting talent: Wilson launched and/or solidified the careers of at least two dozen major black actors over the years, and their gratitude is not likely to go untapped. Until then, though, a “Jitney” and “Radio Golf” double bill (all five characters in “Radio Golf” could be recast easily among the larger “Jitney” ensemble) would give Broadway audiences an invaluable opportunity to judge American theater’s most ambitious epic in its entirety.
“A Soldier’s Play” until November 13 (307 W. 43rd Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, 212-246-4422).