Color Line

By T.E. Kalem

A SOLDIER'S PLAY by Charles Fuller

The light is all but gone. One can barely make out the drunken, lurching figure in the center of the stage. "They still hate you!" he howls in a voice of blistered gravel. "They still hate you!" Two rifle shots ring out as if to verify his charge, and the man falls dead.

This is the opening scene of A Soldier's Play, which inaugurates the Negro Ensemble Company's 15th season. It is a drama of tensile strength that almost deflects attention from its flaws. The dead man is Technical Sergeant Vernon C. Waters (Adolph Caesar), a regular Army, "all Army" noncom who fought in World War I. The time is 1944; the place Fort Neal, La. Apart from its white officers, this is a black outfit consigned to menial and, sometimes, degrading tasks.

The first surprise for Commanding Officer Charles Taylor (Peter Friedman), a West Pointer, is to meet Captain Richard Davenport (Charles Brown), the black officer assigned by the Army to investigate Waters' murder. Almost inadvertently, he says to Davenport: "Being in charge does not look right on Negroes." Besides, the prime suspects are local stalwarts of the Ku Klux Klan. What Deep South white man would testify before a black? Davenport is a seasoned skirmisher on the color line. He is adamant, but scrupulously fairminded.

What follows is a kind of courtroom trial in which Davenport interrogates everyone and reconstructs the crime in flashback. The flashback is a tell-and-show device. It can be used with fluid emotional mastery, as Arthur Miller used it in Death of a Salesman; here it seems more like a dry studied exercise on a schoolroom blackboard.

More interesting than the whodunit part of Fuller's play is the "Who the hell was he?" aspect in which Waters' complex character is explored. Waters has tried to scour himself to whiteness through discipline and excellence. He is a martinet who addresses his recruits as "shiftless lazy niggers" and hounds one guitar-strumming vagabond singer, sweetly played by Larry Riley, to his death. "They ought to work you niggers till your legs fall off," he screams at his charges, meaning "snap to and measure up," the one-line basic English catechism of the U.S. regular Army sergeant. Waters does not hate his men. He simply, heartrendingly, knows that a black may snap to, and yet never measure up, in a white man's universe.

In taut, forceful direction, Douglas Turner Ward elicits splendid performances from his cast. Adolph Caesar's portrayal of Waters merits an acting medal of honor. -- By T.E. Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.