YOUR FAVORITE LOGO TV SHOWS ARE ON PARAMOUNT+

Review: “A Soldier’s Play” Is a Gritty Mystery About Racism—But Is It Still Shocking?

Blair Underwood heads up the Broadway revival of the 1982 Pulitzer-winning production.

Spoilers! Set during the waning years of World Word II at the fictional Fort Neal, a segregated military base in Louisiana, Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play won a Pulitzer in 1982 (and became an award-winning 1984 film) for its pressure-cooker portrayal of the futility of internalized racism.

The first Broadway production, directed by Kenny Leon, is efficient, with all sorts of ritualized marching, drills, singing, and chanting punctuating the high-power dramatics (though the movement was better utilized in last season’s all-male Choir Boy, which was similarly a pressure-cooker plot). At the outset, Sgt. Vernon C. Waters (David Alan Grier, who played Corporal Cobb in the movie) is shot to death, and it’s up to Captain Davenport (Blair Underwood) to investigate whodunit.

Through interviews and flashbacks, we learn that—though initial suspicion falls upon the Klan or other racist whites—there’s a lot more to the story. Waters turns out to have been a highly disliked assimilationist who wanted to score points in white society and, as a result, he looked down on black people that he felt were stereotypical Uncle Toms. His disdain for such types even led one private to kill himself, and his cohorts are none too forgiving about that.

I won’t reveal the murderer, but I will say that the play exposes the damaging effects of internalized bigotry, especially as the role of the black man was drastically being redefined in the armed forces and elsewhere. All this happens as Captain Davenport receives a mixed reception for being a black man assigned to this daunting investigation.

Derek McLane’s set is a batch of wooden barracks and a flag, and Leon’s direction keeps things emphatic, with Underwood exuding world-weary decency and determination that even a skeptical white captain (a good Jerry O’Connell) eventually bows down to.

Joan Marcus

From left: Jerry O-Connell and Blair Underwood.

Act 2 kicks off with Underwood buttoning his shirt, revealing a flash of his torso; at the press preview, the audience—anxious for a light moment of release—squealed with laughter as he covered up. To his credit, Underwood didn’t break character.

Loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, the play—and movie—once galvanized audiences in the '80s, whereas now it comes off like a pretty basic mystery. Not revolutionary, just solid.

Latest News