#3: A Soldier's Play, by Charles Fuller

[whereweather.livejournal.com]

A Soldier's Play, Charles Fuller
1982

This play won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  It's set in an Army training camp in the deep South (Louisiana) in 1944, during the Second World War, and it is, at least in one sense, a murder mystery.  Vernon Waters, a black sergeant who was responsible for a group of black enlisted men, has been found shot to death outside the base's nightclub.  Who did it?  One of the white Southern officers, resentful of "uppity negroes" in the forces?  Klansmen from the nearby town?  One of Waters' own men? 

The Army sends an investigator to look into the death: Captain Davenport, an Army lawyer and the first black officer most of the men on the base have ever seen.  Davenport sets about interviewing all of Waters' men, one by one, trying to learn about the complex dynamics that existed within this group of men from many different backgrounds and parts of the country, and between them and the white officers who rank above them all.  All this, and he also has to contend with Captain Taylor: the men's well-intentioned commanding officer, who is furious that Headquarters sent a Negro to investigate -- because, he says, he wants justice for Waters, and the people around here will never let a white man be brought to justice on a black man's word...

If the play were a paint-by-numbers piece "about race," or "about racism," of course it wouldn't be very good (though I suppose it might be educational).  But the characters come alive, the tension runs high, and so what you see is humans in history navigating through a minefield of restrictions, assumptions, fears and aspirations that for a contemporary reader (at least, for me) are in many ways as foreign as another culture or country.  I added a tag "institutionalized racism" to this one, because it's hard for me to explain how strange and shocking it is to read about this essentially pre-integrated Army -- when as long as I've been alive the Army has seemed like one of the most relatively egalitarian, and indeed integrated, of our national institutions.  But it wasn't always that way, not even sixty years ago...

Anyway, I recommend this play to people interested in, well, in any of the elements I've mentioned.  I think I give it three and a half out of five stars.

Also, a tangential note: The copy of the play that I read listed in its front matter the cast of the 1982 opening production in New York, which featured not only Denzel Washington but also Samuel L. Jackson.  That seems like a pretty amazing coincidence to me.  But then I wondered if perhaps the available roles for black actors were so few that it was not too surprising that the cream of the nation's acting talent would be concentrated in a single mostly-black New York production.  Then I wondered to what extent that has changed between then and today.

Comments

[egretplume.livejournal.com]

Denzel Washington was also in the 1984 film adaptation A Soldier's Story (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088146/), which is well worth seeing.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

The copy of the play that I read listed in its front matter the cast of the 1982 opening production in New York, which featured not only Denzel Washington but also Samuel L. Jackson. That seems like a pretty amazing coincidence to me.

I don't see why--most US actors live and work in either LA or New York. Samuel L. Jackson was a longtime stage and independent-film actor in New York before he became a Hollywood star (he was Mr. Senor Love Daddy, the deejay in Do The Right Thing, for instance).

If you go to Broadway and off-Broadway theater a lot, you are seeing a lot of the people who are eventually going to become movie stars. Washington's big break came more than a decade before Jackson's, but it does seem like Jackson is catching up.