A Tribute to Charles Fuller (1939-2022)

 

[Playwright Charles Fuller died at 83 on 3 October 2022 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where he had lived since 1989.  He was best known for his 1981 work A Soldier’s Pay, for which he won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and which was adapted for the cinema in 1984 as A Soldier’s Story with a screenplay by Fuller.  The film was nominated for the 1985 Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.

[A Soldier’s Play was premièred Off-Broadway in 1981 by the Negro Ensemble Company of New York City, winning the 1982 Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play and the 1982 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play.  It was revived on Broadway in 2020 by the Roundabout Theatre Company and won the 2020 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play and the 2020 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play.

[I’m presenting the New York Times obituary of Fuller, published on 5 October 2022.  Then I’ll post an article from the production’s Showbill by Kathy Henderson, “A Soldier’s Play,” and a review of the début production.]

“CHARLES FULLER, 83, DIES; HIS PLAY WON A PULITZER”
by Neil Genzlinger 

He was the second Black playwright to win the award and later adapted the play into an Oscar-nominated film, “A Soldier’s Story.”

Charles Fuller, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982 for “A Soldier’s Play,” which finally made it to Broadway 38 years later, in a production that earned two Tony Awards, died on Monday in Toronto. He was 83.

His wife, Claire Prieto-Fuller, confirmed the death.

Mr. Fuller was only the second Black playwright to win the Pulitzer for drama. (Charles Edward Gordone won in 1970 for “No Place to Be Somebody.”) His plays often examined racism and sometimes drew on his background as an Army veteran. Both of those elements were evident in “A Soldier’s Play,” which was Mr. Fuller’s reimagining of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and centered on the murder of a Black Army sergeant and the search for the culprit.

[No Place to Be Somebody premièred in the Susan Stein Shiva Theater of the New York Shakespeare Festival (now known as the Public Theater) on 4 May 1969 and ran for 250 performances until 7 December.

[It played a limited engagement at Broadway’s ANTA Playhouse (now the August Wilson Theatre) from 30 December 1969 to 10 January 1970, where it played 16 performances and won, in addition to the 1970 drama Pulitzer, two 1969 Drama Desk Awards, including Most Promising Playwright for Gordone, and a Theatre World Award.

[No Place returned to Off-Broadway on 20 January 1970 and ran at the Promenade Theatre on upper Broadway at 76th Street for 312 performances, closing on 18 October.]

The play was first staged in 1981 by the Negro Ensemble Company with a cast that included Denzel Washington. Frank Rich, in his review in The New York Times, called it “a relentless investigation into the complex, sometimes cryptic pathology of hate” and praised Mr. Fuller’s delineation of both the Black and the white characters.

“Mr. Fuller demands that his Black characters find the courage to break out of their suicidal, fratricidal cycle,” Mr. Rich wrote, “just as he demands that whites end the injustices that have locked his Black characters into the nightmare.”

Hollywood came calling. A 1984 film version, retitled “A Soldier’s Story” and directed by Norman Jewison, had a cast that included Mr. Washington, Howard E. Rollins Jr., David Alan Grier, Wings Hauser, Adolph Caesar and Patti LaBelle. It received three Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Fuller’s screenplay.

In “A Soldier’s Play” and his other works, Mr. Fuller strove to serve up not idealized Black characters but ones who reflected reality.

“In the ’60s and early ’70s, Black plays were directed at whites,” Mr. Fuller told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, when the Negro Ensemble Company’s production of “A Soldier’s Play” was staged in San Diego. “They were primarily confrontational pieces, whose major concern was to address racism and white-Black relationships in this country. Now we are much more concerned with examining ourselves, with looking at our own situations — historically in many instances. We are seeing characters who are more complex, ones who have bad qualities as well as good ones.”

“A Soldier’s Play,” he told The Times in 2020, drew in part on his upbringing in a tough neighborhood of North Philadelphia.

“I grew up in a project in a neighborhood where people shot each other, where gangs fought each other,” he said. “Not white people — Black people, where the idea of who was the best, toughest, was part of life. We have a history that’s different than a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t cheat on each other, kill each other, love each other, marry each other, do all that, things that, really, people anywhere in the world do.”

Charles H. Fuller Jr. was born on March 5, 1939, in Philadelphia. His father was a printer, and his mother, Lillian Teresa Fuller, was a homemaker and foster mother. He was a student at Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia when he attended his first play, a production performed in Yiddish at the Walnut Street Theater.

“I didn’t understand a word,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1977, but somehow it sparked his interest in becoming a playwright.

He studied for two years at Villanova University and then joined the Army, where his postings included Japan and South Korea. After four years, he returned to Philadelphia, taking night classes at LaSalle College (now University) while working as a city housing inspector.

In 1968, he and some friends founded the Afro-American Arts Theater in Philadelphia, but they had no playwrights, so Mr. Fuller gave it a try.

One result was his first staged play, “The Village: A Party,” about a racially mixed utopia, which was produced in 1968 at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.

“What the evening proves,” Ernest Albrecht wrote in a review in The Home News of New Brunswick, N.J., “is that the theater is not Fuller’s bag.”

But Mr. Fuller kept at it. In the 1970s he relocated to New York, where the Negro Ensemble Company in 1974 staged his drama “In the Deepest Part of Sleep” and opened its 10th-anniversary season in 1976 with another of his plays, “The Brownsville Raid,” based on a 1906 incident in Texas in which Black soldiers were accused of a shooting. Walter Kerr, writing in The Times, praised Mr. Fuller for not making the play a simple story of racial injustice.

“Mr. Fuller is interested in human slipperiness, and his skill with self‐serving, only slightly shady evasions of duty helps turn the play into the interesting conundrum it is,” Mr. Kerr wrote.

Although he set out as a playwright to examine difficult questions, Mr. Fuller did so with a certain degree of optimism about the future of the United States.

“America has an opportunity, with all its technology, to develop the first sensible society in history,” he said in the 1977 interview with The Inquirer. “It could provide all its people with some rational way to live together while still glorying in their cultural diversity.”

By the late 1980s, though, he had tired of New York and moved to Toronto, where he was living at his death. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, David; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

“A Soldier’s Play” was finally produced on Broadway in 2020 by the Roundabout Theater with a cast that included Mr. Grier and Blair Underwood. It was eligible to win the best-revival Tony even though it had never been produced on Broadway previously — the more familiar prerequisite for the category — because, under Tony rules, it was by 2020 considered “a classic.” Mr. Grier himself won a Tony for best actor in a featured role in a play.

“It has been my greatest honor to perform his words on both stage and screen,” Mr. Grier said of Mr. Fuller on Twitter, adding that “his genius will be missed.”

[Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries desk. Previously he was a television, film, and theater critic.]

 *  *  *  *
BRIEF PLOT SYNOPSIS OF A SOLDIER’S PLAY 

At Fort Neal, a Louisiana army camp in 1944, Tech/Sergeant (the equivalent of today’s sergeant first class) Vernon C. Waters, the sergeant of a black company in the segregated army of the time, is walking back to the post from town after a night of drinking. 

Suddenly, he’s shot by an unseen gunman.  Captain Charles Taylor, the white company commander, thinks first that the murderer is a local Ku Klux Klansman.  Then the captain fears it might be a racist white officer.

Captain Richard Davenport, a black army lawyer, is sent by the Department of War (the predecessor of today’s Department of the Army) to investigate.  Taylor, worried that the assignment of a black investigator means the case will be swept under the rug, attempts to discourage Davenport.  

But Davenport perseveres, uncovering deep-seated hatred and corruption among the men in the company.  He discovers the killer was one of the black soldiers under Waters’s command.  The men hated the NCO because he treated Southern black men with contempt.  He singled out Private C. J. Memphis for special torment, driving him to suicide.  

Despite each soldier’s motive for the killing, Davenport eventually solves the case.  In doing so, he also unveils some deeply hidden feelings.

*  *  *  *
“A SOLDIER’S PLAY”
by Kathy Henderson 

It's all good news for this Pulitzer Prize winner

[This article ran in the Showbill of August 1982, “Theatre Four: Negro Ensemble Company” (the program booklet for A Soldier’s Play). 

[I saw the NEC production of A Soldier’s Play in August 1982, eight months after it opened at Theatre Four on West 55th Street in Manhattan, and four months before it closed to go on a 13-city U.S. tour.  There were a number of cast changes from the opening night company.

[A Soldier’s Play started previews at Theatre Four on 10 November 1981 and opened on 20 November.  It closed on 2 January 1983, a run of 468 performances.  In addition to the Pulitzer and the Drama Critics’ Circle Award, which both went to Fuller, and the Outer Critics’ Circle Award, which went to the play, the world première of A Soldier’s Play also garnered three other awards.

[The 1982 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play went to Adolph Caesar as Tech/Sergeant Vernon C. Waters and the 1982 Clarence Derwent Award for Most Promising Male Performer went to Larry Riley as Private C. J. Memphis.  The 1982 Obie Award for Distinguished Ensemble Performance went to Caesar, Riley, and Denzel Washington (Private First Class Melvin Peterson).]

Theatrical magic.  The hope of achieving it keeps artists at work; the hope of sharing it keeps audiences buying tickets.  When it happens, as it has with A Soldier’s Play, the magic seems so natural that everyone wonders why it is so rare.

Produced by the Negro Ensemble Company, A Soldier’s Play opened last November for a six-week run that shows no sign of ending.  Its author, Charles Fuller, won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for drama and has signed with Warner Brothers to write the screenplay, reportedly for $200,000 [worth about $615,000 in 2022].  A second company opens this month at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles [19 August-2 October 1982; West Coast première].

“It’s just been one high after another,” says cast member Brent Jennings [Private Tony Smalls], a sentiment echoed during a series of conversations with the Soldier’s Play actors.  Playwright Fuller, already at work on the movie script, added a few thoughts on the state of the theatre and the spoils of success.

[The film adaptation, A Soldier’s Story, was in production in Alabama, with Fuller’s screenplay directed by Norman Jewison, in September and November 1983.  It was released in New York City and Los Angeles on 14 September 1984 after premièring at the Toronto International Film Festival on the 13th.]

The soft-spoken Fuller wears his acclaim well.  He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two sons and shows no inclination to abandon the stage for Hollywood.  “Are you kidding?” he says mildly.  “Oh, my God, never.  Movies are another side of things, but writing for the theatre brings me the most joy.”

Actor Charles Brown, who appeared in the playwright’s first hit, The Brownsville Raid [first staged at the O’Neill Theatre Center, Waterford, Connecticut, in 1975; produced by NEC, December 1976-February 1977, directed by Israel Hicks], recalls the excitement he felt after reading A Soldier’s Play.  “I told myself this play was going to go all the way and win every award because it is a true American drama,” he says.  Brown, a Tony nominee in 1980 for [Samm-Art Williams’s] Home, plays Captain Richard Davenport, a lawyer sent to investigate the murder of a black sergeant at Fort Neal, La., in 1944. 

[NEC’s Home, directed by Dean Irby, débuted at the St. Mark's Playhouse in the East Village, December 1979-February 1980.  It transferred to Broadway’s Cort Theatre (now the James Earl Jones), May 1980-January 1981, with Douglas Turner Ward assuming the direction.  Brown was nominated for the Best Actor in a Play Tony and the Outstanding Actor in a Play Drama Desk Award.]

Although the actor (along with Adolph Caesar as the sergeant [Tech/Sergeant Vernon C. Waters]) has a large, central role, he points out that the playwright “has written complete parts for twelve people, and every member of the cast has a full moment to shine.”  The company’s ensemble work, which drew unanimous critical praise, was colorfully described in [New York City’s African-American newspaper,] the Amsterdam News: “They lined up all these dynamite, power-pack[ed] dudes, and under Douglas Turner Ward’s able hand, the thing went off like a firecracker.”

A pleased Charles Fuller says, “We set out to make a piece in which no one got lost.  The last time we had a black hit with as many people in it was The River Niger (1973).”  The actors, in turn, are aware of A Soldier’s Play’s value as a showcase.

[Joseph A. Walker’s River Niger was premièred by NEC in December 1972 under the direction of Douglas Turner Ward; it ran at the St. Mark’s Playhouse until March 1973 with a cast of 12 that included Ward, Roxie Roker, and Frances Foster.]

Steven Jones, terrific as the sergeant’s fawning flunky [Private James Wilkie], says, “I haven’t had much exposure, so this was a great opportunity.  Everyone in the city connected with the business has come to see it.”  Jones, who commutes on weekends to Washington, D.C., hopes the play will help hm get an agent and, eventually, move his family to New York.

Brent Jennings speaks plainly of what his small but pivotal role has meant: “I’ve been working from October to the present—that’s the longest I’ve ever been employed continuously on the stage in the seven years that I’ve been in New York.  It’s also been one of the nicest groups of people I’ve ever worked with.  No prima donnas, no tempers—everyone respects each other.”

Adds Eugene Lee [Corporal Bernard Cobb], a former schoolteacher who’s been in New York for a year and a half, “It’s a wonderful feeling to be working with pros like these people.  Now I feel like I’m an actor.”

A different perspective comes from Peter Friedman, whose character, a white captain [Captain Charles Taylor], does a lot of verbal sparring with the black investigator.  Though the part is first-rate, and so were his reviews, Friedman has gotten used to the fact that he’s in the background here.

“When people come from Hollywood and they need a black actor, they come immediately to see this show—but not people who need a white actor,” he says matter-of-factly.  “It’s the same with the audience.  Early on, it was about 99 percent black, and it was clear at the curtain call that they hadn’t come to watch the white experience.  Now the audience has evened off quite a bit, which makes it easier for me.

“I’m getting in miniature what black actors have gotten for years,” he points out, “being the outsider.  But when I leave the theatre after the show, it’s the black people who come up and look me in the eye and say ‘Wow.’  The white people can’t really look at me.  I think it’s embarrassing for a white person to identify with the bigotry.”

Whites aren’t the only bigots in A Soldier’s Play; much of the richness of the piece comes from its multifaceted examination of racism.  NEC Managing Director Leon Denmark comments, “Charles tackles difficult subject matter, shows several points of view without being didactic and gives you a good play at the same time.  That’s very difficult.

“The two words for Charles,” he goes on, “are honest and courageous.  To discuss the color problem that existed among blacks—light-skinned people lording it over darker-skinned people, this feeling of self-hatred that still affects black people today—that’s being very courageous.  A lot of black people will say he’s washing our dirty linen in public.  But his honesty about the subject, combined with skilled craft, saw him through.”

In typically modest fashion, the playwright remarks, “I’m not the sort who believes you can beat audiences over the head and say, ‘You must come see this.’  I must convince you that what I do is worth your attention.’

Fuller dismisses the suggestion that he is one of the few current dramatists dealing with serious issues.  “I really am not,” he says.  “I’m the only one who people have noticed lately.”  His voice rises in ridicule at “experts” who say nothing challenging is being written.  “Since theatre is a multiracial matter, it’s inconsistent and, finally, in bad taste to assume that Asians aren’t doing anything, that Puerto Ricans aren’t doing anything, that blacks aren’t doing anything.  It’s racist, quite frankly, and simple-minded.”

As he discusses the Soldier’s Play movie, Fuller muses about the money now coming his way, “Certainly I am reasonably secure, but I don’t have enough to do what I want.  I’d like to write films that I can also produce, support playwrights I’m interested in, do some things in television.”

[Aside from his screenplay for A Soldier’s Story, Fuller wrote teleplays for three TV movies and segments for two others: The Sky Is Gray (1980), A Gathering of Old Men (1987), Zooman (1995; from his 1980 play Zooman and the Sign), The Wall (1998; segment "The Badge"), Love Songs (1999; segments “A Love Song for Champ,” “A Love Song for Jean and Ellis,” “A Love Song for Dad”; also producer).

[In addition to the plays already named, Fuller’s earliest stage works are The Perfect Party (aka: The Village: A Party; 1968) and In the Deepest Part of Sleep (1974).  After A Soldier’s Play, the dramatist wrote the book for Urban Blight (1988), then Prince (1988), Sally (1988), and Burner’s Frolic (1990), all for NEC.  In 2013, he composed One Night . . ., which ran at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village.]

Steven Jones sums up the actors’ goals when he says, “I’d just like to keep my career moving on an upward angle.  But Peter Friedman has a more specific part in mind: “I can’t wait to play some sort of hippie screw-around who mumbles a lot and sits crumpled up instead of being ramrod straight and talking with perfect clarity.”

For now, though, he’s enjoying being part of the magic.  “Even though a whole week can go by when you feel like nothing creative has happened, all of a sudden you come on a whole new vein—it’ll be like getting on a jet plane and it will take you for a ride.”

[Kathy Henderson is a freelance entertainment writer, specializing in theater, who’s written for Playbill (which owned Showbill at the time of this publication), Variety, InTheater, Broadway.com, and other outlets.  (Showbill is similar to Playbill, but with a different mix of advertisers.)]

*  *  *  *
“CHARLES FULLER'S INCISIVE LOOK INTO ‘A SOLDIER'S PLAY’”
by Lionel Mitchell 

[This is the review of the première production of A Soldier’s Play at NEC from the New York Amsterdam News that Kathy Henderson quotes above.  Because of that and because I think it’ll be interesting to read what New York’s black newspaper thought when the play first came out on stage, I decided to run this notice.  (The critical reception for A Soldier’s Play, however, was pretty much unanimous.)  It was written by Lionel Mitchell and ran on 12 December 1981.]

Charles Fuller’s, “A Soldier’s Play,” is another of the works of high excellence that he seems perennially to turn out.  It is particularly fine in that it casts light upon an era that I have always felt seemed shrouded in near-total mystery: How did Black people fare in the decade I was born in — the nineteen forties?  Indeed, very little seems to have been written about that era.

Fuller has opened it up as never before.  (Larry Neal had tried to do this in his, “Glorious Monster in the Bell of the Horn,” but that piece failed upon the inability of the director to gain mastery over the material).  However, Fuller, with Douglas Turner Ward directing, has indeed succeeded in putting together a classic.  His play creates a mood that ought to recommend it highly to a 90-minute showing on Public TV, a Masterpiece Theatre or Playhouse 90-type of thing.

[Most readers are familiar with the PBS program Masterpiece Theatre (now known simply as Masterpiece).  Playhouse 90 was an anthology drama series that aired on CBS from 1956 to 1960.]

The time is 1944 — some two years after this writer was born, and the place setting is Fort Neal, Louisiana.  Sergeant Vernon C. Water[s], a Black career army-man from the old school, [is] an upward-looking Northerner who despises Southern Blacks.

I’ve been saying for a long time that there are these regional differences between Blacks but Fuller dramatically reveals the contempt which Northern Blacks felt for the homely, folksy types and how that leads to the murder of Sergeant Waters.

Charles Brown tears up the stage with Capt. Davenport, the first time a Negro Captain-lawyer is sent to investigate the death of a Negro NCO in a Southern military base,  Adolph Caesar wasn’t laying down on the job with the role of Sergeant Waters either, this was all some very fine high powered stuff.

Samuel L. Jackson was there too, along with Denzel Washington and James Pickens, Jr. and Larry Riley with his guitar-pickin’ self.  Boy, they lined up all these dynamite, power-packed dudes and under Douglas Turner Ward’s able hand, the thing went off like a firecracker.

Of special note is the deep probe into inter-Black relationships and how they are affected by the atmosphere of World War II; the gradual acceptance of Blacks to combat zones; the slow opening up of the Armed Services to Blacks which the press of the war on two fronts made inevitable.  This is done with a sensitive and keen understanding of the history of what was a crucial decade for Blacks in this century.

[Black units were first sent into combat in Europe during World War II in 1944 when the 92nd Infantry Division, known as the Buffalo Division, landed in Italy in July.  President Harry Truman (1884-1972; 33rd President of the United States: 1945-53) desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces in July 1948.  Full integration, however, would not occur until the Korean War (1950-53).]

Fuller’s play is a masterpiece and will prove one of the better works to have ever come from the Black Theatre Movement.

[Lionel Mitchell was a journalist, poet, novelist, memoirist, and playwright, who wrote for the East Village Other in the 1960s, where some of his poetry was also published occasionally, and reviewed theater for the Amsterdam News.  He was born in 1942 in a small town in Louisiana before coming to New York City and settling in the East Village, where he was a fixture until his death in 1984 from an AIDS-related illness.  His one known published book was an autobiographical novel, Traveling Light (Seaview Books, 1980).

[Mitchell reviewed A Soldier’s Play the month after it opened Off-Broadway.  By the time I saw it, there had been cast changes.  For the record, the role played by Adolph Caesar (T/Sgt. Waters) in the opening cast was played by Arthur French in August 1982; Samuel L. Jackson (Pvt. Henson), Robert Gossett; Larry Riley (Pvt. Memphis), David Alan Grier; Cotter Smith (Lt. Byrd), Dan Lutzky; and Denzel Washington (Pfc. Peterson), O. L. Duke.

[In the review above, Mitchell refers in passing to Larry Neal (b.1937), a playwright, critic, arts administrator, and “collaborator with Immamu Baraka [playwright formerly known as LeRoi Jones (1934-2014)] on several anthologies,” according to the Amsterdam News.  He was also Charles Fuller’s friend of 35 years at Neal’s death on 6 January 1981, a scant 10 months before A Soldier’s Play started performances.

[Barbara Lewis wrote briefly of Neal in “‘A Soldier’s ‘Play’ dedicated to Larry Neal” (Amsterdam News, 2 January 1982).  In a section sub-headed “Dedicated to Larry,” Lewis said:

“This particular play. ‘A Soldier’s Play,’” Fuller said sitting in a conference room of the NEC offices overlooking Duffy Square [the northwest quadrant of Times Square at 47th Street], “I dedicated to Larry Neal.  We grew up four doors from each other.  We went to the same high school in Philadelphia.  We started writing about the same time.  Larry wrote a play called [‘]Glorious Monster in the Bell of the Horn[’] (produced in the late 1970’s).  The chief character was Richard Davenport.  I made the Black lawyer, Capt. Davenport, a Larry Neal figure uncovering and solving the problem in Ft. Neal, Louisiana.  I made up the town.  I dealt with some of the same things that concerned Larry in his writing: Racial consciousness, the merging of the rhythmic and what we know about the technology of America.  We have to merge the law and the rhythmic.”

[Neal’s play Glorious Monster in the Bell of the Horn was presented by New York City’s New Federal Theater, under the direction of Glenda Dickerson, in July 1979.

[In the same interview, Fuller covered another interesting aspect of his play:

“Another thing I wanted to do was take an American classic and recast it.  I patterned Waters on Claggart, the evil figure in [Herman] Melville’s [‘]Billy Budd[’].  So often Black people are drawn as capable only of unpremeditated violence.  We are as devious as anyone else.  I no longer believe that Black people have innocence in this society.  We are not innocents abroad.”

[Aligning A Soldier’s Play with Billy Budd (published posthumously in 1924 in Britain and 1962 in the U.S.; dramatized by Louis O. Coxe and Robert H. Chapman in 1949, with a Broadway début in 1951) makes Private C. J. Memphis the pure-hearted seaman Billy, the object of Master-at-Arms Claggart’s hatred.]