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What took so long?
The play itselfwon a Pulitzer.But Kenny Leons production for Roundabout Theater Company is only now coming to Broadway.
Plays only stay in the imagination if theyre revived or taught.
Its also almost fetishistically male.
Thats a hard quality to capture in a classroom.
A Soldiers Playopenswith a murder.
Theyll still hate you!, he shouts at an unseen figure, laughing strangely.
They still hate you!
In casting, he has clearly focused on the fact that the company is also a baseball team.
The star players, Private C.J.
Theres a palpable sense of a team at work.
It also might explain the look of this production.
Derek McLanes huge wooden matrix seems at times like a ships dockyard scaffolding extending out of sight.
In 1983, Amiri Baraka took serious exception toA Soldiers Playand Fullers descent into Pulitzerland.
But then Barakas rhetoric was often this way a bazooka at a knife fight.
you’ve got the option to understand a little of what was eating at him, though.
First,A Soldiers Playis safely set far away in the South, where those real bigots live.
That small soft spot remains in this production.
For instance, at their farewell encounter Captains Davenport and Taylor finally and meaningfully shake hands.
In this, Kenny Leons staging echoes a moment in Norman Jewisons film of the play.
Theres a world of absolution and reassurance in that kind of handshake.
Captain Taylor, though, is a pinprick.
But when it comes to the production, the medal has to go to David Alan Grier.
His performance has size and precision, monstrosity and humanity.
Technically, he was playing Waters.
But it seemed at times as if he was playing an entire Shakespeare play.
Sometimes he was Iago; sometimes he was Othello.
A Soldiers Playis at the Roundabouts American Airlines Theatre through March 15.
