‘A Soldier’s Play’: Theater Review

, packs plenty of dramatic tension into smoldering issues of racial justice and injustice, military honor and dishonor, and the solemn struggle to balance their harrowing demands on characters who are only human. A superb all-male ensemble, under the powerhouse direction of Kenny Leon, attacks this knock-your-socks-off drama with intense emotional passion and intellectual courage.

“They still hate you! They still hate you!” he babbles — just as someone, sight unseen, pulls out a service pistol and shoots him down in cold blood.The character of the dead sergeant haunts the rest of the play, at times demanding justice, at other times denying the conditions that resulted in his murder.

The job falls to Captain Richard Davenport , who makes it a point of honor to follow the clues and pursue the suspects, come hell or worse. That kind of honor may be the stuff of heroic war yarns, but any attempt to exercise it in a segregated military unit based in white Louisiana in the 1940s is like putting your head on the block and stretching out your neck.

The beauty of this production is the way the well-oiled ensemble works in sync to balance the racist structure of the unseen outside world with the more subtle social and political breakdown of life on this all-black Army base. One world not only reflects the other; each one accounts for the existence of the other. Plays about sports teams dramatically soar on the same dynamic, but nothing beats the Army for sheer drama, and Fuller works it to the max.

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