2020 LOOKS BACK ON 1944 (NO ZOOM LENS NEEDED) . The cast of the first Broadway production of “A Soldier’s Play,” directed by Kenny Leon, at the American Airlines Theater. The limited run is scheduled to close on March 15.
LET’S START WITH a few things you may not know about “A Soldier’s Play.” In photo: Blair Underwood (left) and Kenny Leon, the director, at rehearsal.
It won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982.
It was a movie in 1984 (“A Soldier’s Story”).
David Alan Grier was in the movie, and he’s in this stage production. In 1984, when he was 29, he played Corporal Cobb. Now, at age 63, he’s Sgt. Vernon C. Waters, the murder victim and central character. (Cobb is played here by Rob Demery.)
At 29, Denzel Washington was in the movie. He was P.F.C. Peterson, who is played in the Broadway production by Nnamdi Asomugha.
If Kenny Leon is not the theater director of the moment, he’s pretty close. (That’s him, at right in the photo, all in black, at rehearsal with Blair Underwood). This is Leon’s 11th Broadway production — past shows include “The Mountaintop,” “American Son” and three August Wilson dramas — and he won the best-director Tony Award for the 2014 revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.”
After several Off Broadway productions (the most recent one by Second Stage in 2005), this is the play’s first time on Broadway.
‘A SOLDIER’S PLAY’: THE PLOT IN PICTURES
SELF-LOATHING This is Sergeant Waters (David Alan Grier), who is shot to death in the first scene as he’s stumbling back to the base after an evening of heavy drinking. (But don’t worry; he appears in flashback after flashback.) Waters is a stern officer in a black regiment in Louisiana in 1944, waiting to be shipped out to fight in World War II. His last words, mysteriously, are “They still hate you.”
THEY CALL ME MR. TIBBS Capt. Richard Davenport (Blair Underwood) is the officer sent to Louisiana to investigate the death. At the performance that Press Nights attended, , Underwood’s bare chest received entrance applause at the beginning of Act II.
GUESS WHO’S COMING TO VOIR DIRE Capt. Charles Taylor (Jerry O’Connell) has never met a black officer before. Not surprisingly, he says all the wrong things to Davenport (Underwood). The local theory is that the Ku Klux Klan killed Waters — or just a random group of local whites.
KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING? As Davenport interrogates the men on the base, he learns that pretty much everyone had a motive for killing Waters. “A Soldier’s Play” is structured like a police procedural, which some critics liked and others found ineffective. The headline on Variety’s review called the show “a crackerjack revival.” From left, Warner Miller, Nnamdi Asomugha and Underwood.
A WORLD OF ITS OWN Variety’s critic, Marilyn Stasio, liked the parallel between race relations on the Army base and those in the outside world. Jesse Green of The New York Times praised the production’s powerful acting but found the staging “too distracted to make the case” it wanted to argue. From left, Rob Demery, J. Alphonse Nicholson and McKinley Belcher III. The set, which is a knockout when it looks like a wall of brown shutters, is by Derek McLane.
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