Forty years on, Charles Fuller’s ‘A Soldier’s Play’ is as relevant as ever

Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play opens tonight at the Forrest Theatre, following a successful Broadway debut in 2020, where the play won a Tony Award for Best Revival.

Fuller, a Philadelphia-born playwright, earned the Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama in 1982, after the play’s off-Broadway debut by the Negro Ensemble Company in November 1981.

Fuller died Oct. 3, only months before A Soldier’s Play’s Philadelphia run.

While the play’s ostensible plot is about an investigation of a Black Army sergeant’s death on a segregated Army base in Louisiana in 1944, the larger elements of the play are about intra-racial conflict and classism.

The 2020 deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor took place in the same year A Soldier’s Play went to Broadway. The play’s issues gain added prominence at a time when much of America has been challenged.

Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, an associate professor of theater studies and playwriting at Temple University, said in an interview, “We see this played out in the Black community. We see it played out by class, by complexion, by education, but we don’t really understand some of the reasons for it. They [Black people like the sergeant] display hostility toward their own, but they are [themselves] getting kicked in the butt by white folks.”

There are also interracial confrontations and violence between Black soldiers and the white soldiers and officers at the base.

Kenny Leon directed A Soldier’s Play on Broadway. Norm Lewis plays Capt. Davenport, the Army lawyer sent to Louisiana to investigate the murder of a Black sergeant who was hated by his men. Eugene Lee, who was part of the original 1981 cast, then playing one of the young Black soldiers, plays Sgt. Waters in the current production.

Sgt. Waters was known to bully Black soldiers, especially those from poor Southern backgrounds, whom he saw as buffoons and beneath him. So what is it like to be in A Soldier’s Play after all these years?

“It’s like going full circle,” Lee, who is still finding nuances to this play 40 years later, said. “He’s a really conflicted man. As one of the other characters says about him: ‘Any man who don’t know where he belongs has got to be in a whole lot of pain,’ ” Lee said, calling Sgt. Waters “a spit-and-polish soldier. He’s abandoned self-love and replaces it with a kind of self-hate.”

Capt. Davenport has to overcome opposition from the white commanding officer who doesn’t want the lawyer interviewing white soldiers as possible murder suspects.

When it comes to race relations, Lewis believes A Soldier’s Play is “beautiful storytelling.” George Floyd’s murder birthed what Lewis referred to as a “wave or tsunami of Black artists’ work being presented in the theater.” “To me,” he said, “this is a revisiting of some amazing storytelling, by a Black writer, back in the day. It was resonant then and now.”

The Black soldiers in the play all got into the Army believing they would be accepted by Americans. “They are thinking, if we fight for our country, then the dominant culture will accept us as equals,” Lewis said.

But they find out that’s not true.

“When Mr. Fuller was writing this play, he also was writing a play about self-hatred,” Leon, the director, said. “I love his courage. When you write a play and write the truth, you’re not trying to get people to like you.”

Leon was born in Tallahassee, Fla., and reared in St. Petersburg. He went to college at Clark Atlanta University, where he got involved in theater as an elective. He’s been an actor, and a director. But once he directed his first play, he knew directing was his purpose.

What does a director hope for in telling this story?

“I’m in pursuit of the truth. I want Black people and white people sitting in the audience to learn from each other. [A lot of differences between the races] I think it’s not racial, I think it’s cultural,” Leon said. The play is Leon’s way of sharing “our cultural habits and our myths. When I go see a play and see a woman straightening someone’s hair with a hot comb, or I see them taking people to the river and baptizing them, that’s something I know what it’s like.”

He is quick to point out that A Soldier’s Play goes beyond being a “Black story.”

“I love this play, it’s funny, it’s musical, and it’s impactful. It was written 40 years ago, about a time period that was 40 years before then,” he said. “There’s nothing old about this production, it’s so fresh, it’s so fresh.”

“A Soldier’s Play,” originally scheduled through Feb. 5, will now only run from Jan. 24 to Jan. 29. Forrest Theatre, Kimmel Cultural Campus, 1114 Walnut St. Tickets available at https://bit.ly/3ZT5O1z.