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Winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama can be a mixed blessing when it comes to commercial success in theater. Even though the past 10 plays to be so honored all received New York productions, five have yet to reach Broadway. Sometimes decades go by before producers are prepared to bet on a prize-winning play. Take Charles Fuller’s “A Soldier’s Play,” the harrowing story of the 1944 murder of a black Army sergeant. It opened in 1981, winning the Pulitzer after a 468-performance off-Broadway run. Norman Jewison turned it into a modestly successful film in 1984, and “A Soldier’s Play” has since received two short-lived off-Broadway revivals, in 1996 and 2005. Only now, though, has the Roundabout Theatre Company deigned to give Mr. Fuller’s play a biggish-budget Broadway production starring David Alan Grier and Blair Underwood and staged by Kenny Leon, Broadway’s top black director.
Fortunately, this tautly mounted, strongly cast version was more than worth the wait. It is, in fact, one of the very finest revivals, whether on or off Broadway, that the Roundabout has given us…
No small part of the excellence of “A Soldier’s Play” arises from the fact that it’s well-wrought without being predictable. It’s a whodunit set on Fort Neal, a segregated Army base in Louisiana, deep in the heart of Ku Klux Klan country. When Sgt. Vernon Waters (Mr. Grier) is found shot to death in the woods surrounding the base, the “tan yanks” of Company C, the 221st Chemical Smoke Generating Company—or, as they bitterly refer to themselves, the Great Colored Clean-Up Company—understandably conclude that he has been lynched. So does his white commanding officer, who promptly contrives to have the case investigated by Capt. Richard Davenport (Mr. Underwood), a black Army lawyer who is all too clearly meant to be the fall guy.
But Capt. Davenport, who takes his duties with crisp seriousness, discovers no less promptly that Sgt. Waters, as we see in flashbacks, was a spit-and-polish martinet who looked upon his well-meaning but ill-educated troops with undisguised contempt…
Just as “A Soldier’s Play” keeps you guessing all the way to the final curtain, so do the members of Mr. Leon’s cast shun stock characterizations. Mr. Grier, for example, is best known as a stand-up comedian whose performing energy is essentially genial. That’s what makes his performance all the more excitingly unpredictable, for he is playing a decent man who is cleaved by passionate rage at the system of which he has chosen to be a part…
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Read the whole thing here.A video featurette about A Soldier’s Play: