Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 and searingly focuses on the corrosive effect of bigotry in the military and American society at large. After a hit off-Broadway run presented by the Negro Ensemble Company, the suspense drama was adapted into a film called “A Soldier’s Story,” and then revived off-Broadway in 2005. Fuller skillfully wraps his unflinching observations on racial animus and its poisonous influence into a taut murder mystery that still feels shockingly immediate.
In a 1944 training camp in the deep south, African-American officer Richard Davenport has been assigned to investigate the unsolved killing of career Army black sergeant Vernon Waters. At first, it appears white supremacists are the culprits since lynchings of African-American servicemen were not uncommon, but as Davenport delves deeper into the details of the case, he discovers a complex web of hate and resentment among the black soldiers fueled by institutional discrimination.
Kenny Leon delivers a taut, crackling staging, infused with the lava of rage bubbling just beneath the surface. The tension is expressed and balanced by musical moments, sometimes a riveting pastiche of tap routines, sometimes a roiling gospel choral number, rising and crashing on stage like a great wave.
The Roundabout’s crack squad of actors is mostly pitch perfect, infusing their roles with equal measures of dignity, rancor, and humor. However, Blair Underwood as the determined Davenport, pushes too hard and erupts too often and with forced fervor. David Alan Grier delivers a more convincing portrait of suppressed outrage as Waters. Racism has corroded Waters’ moral compass, turning him into a tyrant as he persecutes African-American soldiers he perceives as too subservient for “holding the race back.” Grier makes Waters’s twisted agenda believable and, if not sympathetic, at least understandable. There is also memorable work from Jerry O’Connell as a conflicted white officer, Nnamdi Asomugha as a private who rebels against Waters, and J. Alphonse Nicholson as Waters’s guitar-playing victim.
Derek McLane’s flexible barracks set and Allen Lee Hughes’ atmospheric lighting create the appropriate setting of confined military quarters with a menacing backwoods right outside.
