Two Theater Personages of Note: James de Jongh (1942-2023)

 

[As I stated in the introduction to the memorial post for Ralph Lee on 9 June, when I read of his death, I wanted to put something on Rick On Theater in his memory, but I didn’t want just to republish his obituary.  A few days later, the report of the passing of playwright James de Jongh appeared, and I decided to post an homage to the two theater artists together.

[I began assembling various articles and reports to accompany the two obituaries.  As I developed the memorial post, it began to grow longer and longer, eventually outgrowing my maximum length for a stand-alone post.  So, now the memorial to “Two Theater Personages of Note” has become two posts.  I started with Ralph Lee and now I’m posting the homage to James de Jongh.]

“JAMES DE JONGH, 80, PLAYWRIGHT WHO TOLD STORIES OF SLAVERY, DIES”
by Neil Genzlinger

[Neil Genzlinger’s obituary of playwright and English professor James de Jongh was published in the New York Times on 23 May 2023.  I’m accompanying it on ROT with three reviews of his best-known play, Do Lord Remember Me: first, from the New York Times of the 1978 Off-Off-Broadway world première; second, of the 1982 Off-Broadway première from the New York Amsterdam News; and third, from the Associated Press, also of the Off-Broadway production.] 

His play “Do Lord Remember Me,” constructed from interviews with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, was first staged in 1978 and has been revived multiple times since.

James de Jongh, a scholar and playwright best known for fashioning oral histories left by formerly enslaved people in the 1930s into “Do Lord Remember Me,” a 1978 stage work that painted an unflinching picture of the human cost of slavery, died on May 5 in the Bronx. He was 80.

Robert deJongh Jr. [sic], a nephew, said the cause was cardiac arrest.

Professor de Jongh was a longtime member of the English department faculty at City College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he specialized in African American literature and the literatures of the African diaspora. But briefly in his early career he had been an actor, and he continued to maintain an interest in the theater. In 1975, together with Carles Cleveland [sometimes identified as “Charles” and by one source as “Carlos”], he wrote his first play — “Hail Hail the Gangs!” — about a Black teenager who joins a Harlem gang.

“I wanted to go in a completely different direction for the second play,” he told the public-access cable channel Manhattan Neighborhood Network in a recent interview.

He was drawn to a book called “The Negro in Virginia” [Hastings House, 1940], a collection of interviews with formerly enslaved people started by the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Works Progress Administration under the New Deal, and completed in 1940 by the Virginia Writers’ Project. At first, he said, his idea was to construct a fictional story using that material as background, but as he delved further into archives of interviews at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, his thinking changed.

“Many of them were quite eloquent, were quite moving, were quite touching, and some of them were in, really, the voices of the people themselves,” he said. “In other words, the interviewers had actually recorded word for word, rather than simply summarizing the content of what they said. And those words were striking.”

He realized that he could create a play made primarily of the recollections of the men and women who had experienced slavery firsthand, augmented by the words of Nat Turner [b. 1800; hanged, 1831], the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion, and by some gospel and work songs. The result was “Do Lord Remember Me,” which premiered in 1978 at the New Federal Theater on East Third Street in Manhattan [at the Pilgrim Theater, 30 March-9 April 1978], with a cast that included Frances Foster [1924-97], a leading actress of the day.

“The play, strongly felt and single-minded, has an impact far greater than one would receive from reading historical documents,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review for The New York Times [5 April 1978; see below]. “The seven actors, portraying slave owners as well as slaves, transport us, showing us the auction block in our nation’s past — when people were a commodity for speculation — linking arms and embracing a collective consciousness.”

A revised version was staged in 1982 at the American Place Theater in Midtown [24 October 1982-26 February 1983], with a cast that included Ebony Jo-Ann [b. 1945] and Glynn Turman [b. 1947]. In a fresh review [“Stage: Slavery Recalled,” 26 October 1982], Mr. Gussow called it “a moving evocation of shared servitude.”

The play, which has been restaged a number of times over the decades, has dashes of humor and a theme of triumphing over adversity. But it is also blunt in its language and its depiction of the cruelties of slavery, the kind of historical realism that is being erased from educational curriculums in some schools and libraries today. In one scene, a woman shares the back story of her facial disfigurement: As a child, she was punished for taking a peppermint stick by having her head placed beneath the rocker of a rocking chair and crushed.

In the interview with Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Professor de Jongh said that although he was not a particularly religious man, he saw creating the play as a sort of calling.

“Somehow, I felt I had a task,” he said, “and the task had found me.”

James Laurence de Jongh was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. His father, Percy, was the commissioner of finance for the government of the Virgin Islands, and his mother, Mavis E. (Bentlage) de Jongh, was an assistant director for the U.S. Customs Service and ran a poultry farm and plant store.

Professor de Jongh attended Saints Peter & Paul Catholic School on St. Thomas and then Williams College in Massachusetts, where he appeared in theatrical productions and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1964. He received a master’s degree from Yale in 1967 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1983.

Professor de Jongh continued to act for a time after his days at Williams College, but teaching was his vocation beginning in 1969, when he spent a year as an instructor at Rutgers University. The next year he joined the CUNY faculty; he remained there for decades and added the Graduate Center to his portfolio in 1990. He took emeritus status in 2011.

Professor de Jongh wrote numerous academic articles on Black theater, the art scene in Harlem and related subjects, and in 1990 he published a scholarly book, “Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination” [Cambridge University Press, 1990]. He also served on the board of the New Federal Theater, whose current artistic director, Elizabeth Van Dyke, called him “a quiet, gracious powerhouse.”

Professor de Jongh, who lived in the Bronx, leaves no immediate survivors.

The 1982 production of “Do Lord Remember Me” was also presented to inmates at Rikers Island [in the week of 7 November 1982; reported in “‘Do Lord Remember Me’ visits Riker’s” by Lionel Mitchell in the New York Amsterdam News on 20 November] — according to news accounts, it was the first complete professional production staged at the prison [Robin Herman and Laurie Johnston, “NEW YORK Day by Day: Chance for a Playwright And His Young Audience,” New York Times 12 November 1982]. Professor de Jongh attended and found the inmates more boisterous than traditional theatergoers.

“There was an element of risk in the entire situation,” he told The Times that year [see note above]. “The audience reacted with anger as well as humor. It was not just a play about remembering — their own freedom was circumscribed.

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

*  *  *  *
“STAGE: FORMER SLAVES REMEMBER ‘DO LORD’”
by Mel Gussow

 [James de Jongh’s Do Lord Remember Me (the title comes from a 19th-century spiritual) began when the writer was doing research for a play to be set during the Civil War period.  He came across the collected interviews of former Virginia slaves [Virginia Writers’ Project, The Negro in Virginia (Hastings House, 1940)] that had been an oral-history undertaking of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, published as the Slave Narrative Collection in 1936-38.

[Woodie King (b. 1937), the founder and artistic director if the New Federal Theatre (which produced the world première of Do Lord, told Leo Seligsohn, theater reviewer for Long Island’s Newsday (“on theater: The PAF play-picker,” 31 March 1978), at the show’s opening that de Jongh had been inspired by some photographs of slaves that had been found in Boston in 1975 and published. 

[“They aroused DeJongh’s [sic] interest and mine, too,” declared King.  Searching further, de Jongh found the WPA interviews in a Harvard University archive, some in long-out-print books and others unpublished.  As Earl Caldwell quoted the writer and teacher in the New York Daily News (“Some good words from a bad time,” 27 December 1982), he “decided to become in a sense a medium for the voices of these former slaves.  They had in effect done their own playwriting.” 

[De Jongh wrote no dialogue for Do Lord; he used the words of the interviewees verbatim, adding nothing,  He used only people who’d been enslaved in Virginia, in their 80’s and 90’s when they were interviewed (making them young children when the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished nationwide).  They were all residents of  an “old folks home for the colored.”

[De Jongh relied heavily on Weevils in the Wheat (University Press of Virginia, 1976), a book of the unedited transcripts of 15 of the former Virginia slaves edited by Charles L. Perdue, Jr.; Thomas E. Barden; and Robert K. Phillips.  The only words that weren’t from the WPA interviews were those of Nat Turner, the rebellious slave, added for balance from the confessions of Nat Turner.  

[The playwright used slave spirituals and work songs to transition between scenes, but they were songs the elderly men and women spoke of in the recollections.  The Civil War-era title spiritual, “Do, Lord, Remember Me,” is sung from off stage.

[Satisfied with the results of his work, de Jongh decided not to return to the original Civil War drama he’d planned when he began his research.  After its world première, Do Lord was revived by theaters all across the U.S. and beyond.  Perhaps counterintuitively, the play had tremendous appeal to children—perhaps because, though the characters are old folks, what they are remembering is their own childhoods.

[I’m presenting three critical notices of two productions of Do Lord from different publications.  

[The only review I could find of the world première of Do Lord, Off-Off-Broadway at the New Federal Theater was in the New York Times.  Mel Gussow, who would rereview the play when it reopened Off-Broadway at the American Place Theater in 1982, published his notice on 5 April 1978 in “The Living Section” (sec. C).

[The two-hour, intermissionless play’s début ran at the Pilgrim Theater, home to NFT productions at this time, on Thursdays through Sundays, 30 March-9 April; admission was free.

[Directed by Regge Life (sometimes identified as Reggie), with a cast of seven actors (reduced to five when it débuted Off-Broadway), each playing multiple roles, the setting was by C. Richard Mills, the lighting by Sandra Ross, the costumes by Benny Parks.

[NFT revived the show several times, often in different venues, before, during, and after the American Place mounting.  Well into the 2000s, Do Lord was presented by regional theaters, community groups, and schools—high schools and colleges (one of which even increased the cast to 13).  It easily became de Jongh’s best-known and most-produced play.  It’s also been the subject of scores, if not hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, including reviews, and even a few dissertations and theses.]

There is a transcendent moment at the end of “Do Lord Remember Me” when Frances Foster, as a woman of 86; casts her mind back to the days when she was 8 and was treated as human chattel. The recollection is clear-eyed, unmarred by myopia or the withering of time. For almost 80 years the woman’s past has been her daily reminder of a nation’s inhumanity.

The significance of the scene can be partly attributed to the authenticity of the story. As dramatist, James de Jongh has compiled and structured this anthology from interviews with former slaves conducted in the 1930’s under the Federal Writers Project. It is also a tribute to the authenticity of Miss Foster’s performance.

In previous roles, this admirable actress has played everything from foxy grandmothers (“The River Niger” [Negro Ensemble Company (Off-Broadway, 1972-73); Broadway (1973)] and “First Breeze of Summer” [NEC; Broadway (1975)]) to the stoical young Lena in Athol Fugard’s “Boesman and Lena” [NEC (1975)] In a single scene in “Do Lord Remember Me,” she straddles a century. Through octogenarian eyes, she communicates the stain of childhood memory and the horror of slavery.

Dramatically, the moment reminds us of Gloria Foster’s [no relation to Frances Foster] Soliloquy at the end of “In White America” [Sheridan Square Playhouse (Off-Broadway, 1963-65)]—a mature actress transformed into a 15-year-old black girl trying to go to school against impossible opposition.

“Do Lord Remember Me,” a Henry Street Settlement production, is not the searing experience of “In White America.” Despite the conviction of these first‐hand impressions, there is a repetitiveness about some of Mr. de Jongh’s selections and there is a slowness in Regge Life’s staging that makes the evening less than completely enthralling. The anthology is interspersed with occasional songs, in which we see the antidote to injustice—the determination and the will for survival. More music would help.

Nevertheless, the play, strongly felt and single‐minded, has an impact—far greater than one would receive from reading historical documents. The seven actors, portraying slave owners as well as slaves, transport us, showing us the auction block in our nation’s past—when people were a commodity for speculation—linking arms and embracing a collective consciousness. Whether in the kitchen or in the fields, pampered or brutalized, “it was slavery no matter where you are.”

The actors are all inseparable from their material, but special mention should be made of Louise Stubbs, Brel Barbara Clarke, Miss Foster and Joe Attles. Tall, slim and angular, the ageless Mr. Attles, a 50‐year veteran of the American Theater, is himself an icon of indomitability.

“Do Lord Remember Me” will play tomorrow [Thursday, 6 April 1978] through Sunday [9 April] at the Pilgrim Theater, 240 East Third Street [far East Village, between Avenues B and C in Alphabet City].

[There were no other reviews of the first production of de Jongh’s play that I could locate using the Internet.  (I didn’t make a trip up to the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to look through the review scrapbooks and the clipping folder; I may do so at some point, and I’ll make corrections if I find this isn’t accurate.)  The Amsterdam News ran an announcement of the upcoming production on 1 April 1978 (“Ex-slaves speak in new play”), but didn’t review the play until the American Place production opened in 1982 (see below).]

*  *  *  *
“JAMES DEJONGH’S ‘DO LORD REMEMBER ME’”
by Lionel Mitchell
 

[The review by Lionel Mitchell, the New York Amsterdam News’ longtime theater reviewer, of the Off-Broadway première of Do Lord was published on 30 October 1982.  (The Amsterdam News is one of the oldest newspapers in the United States aimed at an African-American readership.)  The show ran at the American Place Theater, 111 W. 46th Street in the Theatre District, from 24 October 1982 to 26 February 1983.]

James DeJongh [sic] was looking through some slave narratives and came across the materials that form his newest work at American Place Theatre, “Do Lord Remember Me.” It’s all authentic stuff with nothing added or taken away. I found it difficult to keep a dry eye — that’s how moving it was.

Perhaps W.E.B. Du Bois [1868-1963], in his own words, conveys the mood of this period in his “Black Reconstruction in America” [1935; latest edition: Black Reconstruction (Library of America, 2021)]. He has a chapter called “The Coming Of The Lord,” the eve of Emancipation, the great Union advance into the South (1864-65): “There was a joy in the South. It rose like perfume — like a prayer. Men stood quivering. Slim dark girls, wild and beautiful with wrinkled hair, wept silently; young women, Black, tawney, white and golden, lifte[d] shivering hands, and old and broken mothers, black and gray, raised great voices and shouted to God across fields, and up to the rocks and the mountains.”

That is the mood which the play conjures once again. Something about that material is absolutely irresistible. It makes one feel pure, justified, confirmed, affirmed, as in the old spiritual: ‘Done Got Ova AT [sic] Last!”

Blending past and present

The long millennium of the African Diaspora opens up. The past and present re-link. One dances on the streets of the Rebel capital as Grant and Sheridan ride up through the Shenandoah and with Black troops at their head, break into Richmond [3 April 1865].

One is there as Lincoln, a few days later, steams down to the broken Confederate capital to walk through the streets unguarded by anyone except the joyous ex-slaves [4 April 1865].

But more than that, more than seeing history through the eyes of the slaves, that cast, consisting of dynamos Frances Foster, Ebony Jo-Ann Pinckney, Glynn Turman, Lou Myers, and the indomitable Charles H. Patterson, paints the agony with wonder and exuberance. One experiences the personal tragedies, triumphs, the human victories over slavery. I kept recalling my German-Jewish professor of history, himself a survivor of the Lotz Ghetto [sic; Łódź (or Lodz) Ghetto in Poland, second-largest Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe] where he had weathered the Final Solution, exclaiming before a predominantly red-neck history class: “In one century, the Negroes have outstripped your slave system and they are sitting beside you in this classroom. Who knows what will happen, what relation they will bear to you in another century?”

I never failed to score in the upper 90’s in that class! This play is like that — every Black man and woman ought to make it a holy obligation to see it. In addition, all people in this country ought to see it.  “Do Lord Remember Me”, [sic] as I pointed out in the discussion last Sunday at the American Place Theatre [opening night, 24 October 1982], rediscovers perhaps the best lost literature of the Civil War period. It is material that even the great Edmund Wilson [writer, literary critic, journalist, and dramatist; 1895-1972] overlooked in his study of Civil War literature, “Patriotic Gore” [1962].

Reggie Life gets authenticity

Reggie [sic] Life has the cast doing some very authentic foot-stomping slave spirituals and Ebony Jo-Ann takes the lead in these. Madame Frances Foster is far the most powerful dramatic Black actress on the scene in years.

Glynn Turman both acts and dances to a fare-thee-well and I suspect he choreographed some of the movements he does as well.

That is a chromo [a color lithograph] for directing, for visual statement. Charles Patterson deserves applause for his narration — through a street man’s eyes. Absolutely superb!

[The cast, still under the direction of Regge Life, was largely the same (minus two actors) at the American Place as at the Pilgrim Theater 4½ years before.  The Off-Broadway set was designed by Julie Taymor (soon to be well known in her own right as a director), the lighting by Sandra L. Ross (who lit the Off-Off-Broadway début), and the costumes by Judy Dearing.

[Lionel H. (for Hampton—his father was a jazz musician in New Orleans) 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 New York 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).] 

*  *  *  *
“NEW PLAY OFFERS AN EVENING OF ORAL HISTORY OF THE SLAVERY ERA”
By Mary Campbell, Associated Press

[Neither Mel Gussow’s notice for the Off-Off-Broadway world première, nor Lionel Mitchell’s of the Off-Broadway début (both above) were particularly detailed about the production, but I wanted to get them on record.  I’ve selected one more review, the Associated Press notice of the American Place mounting published in the Bridgewater, New Jersey, Courier-News of 30 October 1982, for its description of the play and performance.]

new york – James de Jongh, who wrote “Do Lord Remember Me,” playing off-Broadway at the American Place Theater, has taken oral American history – of slavery – and made an engrossing evening of theater out of it.

The oral history was recorded in the 1930s. Among the New Deal jobs created to give people something to get paid for doing was the job of asking former slaves what slavery had been like. Most still alive in the 1930s were infants or children during slavery.

But they had memories and memories of stories told to them. De Jongh, who teaches at the City College of New York, has given this theatrical form. A fine cast of five – four of them acting like old people – string the anecdotes together and act them out.

The tone of it all is interest in America’s past, not an incitement to racial hatred or guilt.

Many of the anecdotes are brief. Few detail atrocities. Those that do are vivid enough to be memorable.

One striking thing is how often one hears of a lively individual spirit that slavery did not quench or sour. Sukey, whose master tries to undress her while she’s boiling lye soap, pushes his backside into a pot of the stuff. When he sells her and hands pry open her mouth to look at her teeth, she still has something saucy to say. Uncle Jackson, left on guard in slave quarters while the men hold a meeting in the woods, leads the suspicious master a chase, outsmarting him.

“Do Lord Remember Me” tells of things from slavery that one may know, like children being sold and the parents never seeing them again and marriage by jumping over a broomstick. And it tells of things that one may not know, like slave church services only allowed when a white preacher is present and slaves who escape from the fields into the woods, not forever, and are allowed back.

De Jongh found the interviews stored in Smithsonian Institution archives. He used them verbatim and he used only those with slaves who’d lived in Virginia.

There is one section in which Glynn Turman speaks as Nat Turner. This gives variety – he thought he was a prophet. But the play probably would be better without it. It’s a very jarring note to have a man hanged in the 1800s among those reminiscing in the 1930s.

[A number of other review-writers expressed this same sense of displacement.

[Nat Turner (1800-31) was an enslaved African-American preacher who organized and led a rebellion of enslaved and free black people in Southampton County, Virginia (21-23 August 1831).  The rebellion was quickly suppressed, but Turner went into hiding and wasn’t captured until 31 October and imprisoned.

[He was tried for rebellion and insurrection on 5 November, found guilty, and hanged at 31 on 11 November.  The rebellious African Americans killed 55-65 white Virginians, and after the revolt was suppressed, the local militia and frightened mobs killed up to 120 blacks, most uninvolved with the rebellion. 

[In 1967, William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner, a popular novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1968.]

Lou Meyers, bald, Charles H. Patterson, gray, Ebony Jo-Ann and Frances Foster are the four old folks, going stiffly up and down porch steps and telling almost all the stories. They break the two hours without intermission into sections with occasional hymns. Reggie [sic] Life directed. The show opened last Sunday.

[Turman, the fifth cast member, plays various manifestations of The Slave, who, de Jongh said, “gets called into being” by the recollections of the four older characters. In Turman’s words in an interview with Marie Moore in the Amsterdam News (“Glynn Turman returns in ‘Do Lord Remember,’” 23 October 1982), the role is “sort of like the thread that is used to weave through the piece.” He’s “the spirit that either starts these people to talk or [is] conjured up as a result of their conversation.”]

In case one feels “Do Lord Remember Me” is too soft or has too much humor, it ends with Foster, 86 years later, telling of being a girl house slave, almost starved.  She stole a piece of candy and the mistress held her face down under her rockingchair’s [sic] rocker so she could beat her.  Facial bones were crushed on one side, her eye was permanently reddened and she was never again able to chew.

[Back in 1985, when I was a grad student at NYU, I took a production dramaturgy class that focused on stage adaptation of non-dramatic material, a dramaturg’s frequent assignment.  The instructor was Cynthia (C. Lee) Jenner, who’d been literary manager at the American Place Theater before taking the Performance Studies teaching gig.  She had served as a dramaturg on APT’s 1982 presentation of Do Lord Remember Me.

[Needless to say, Do Lord was one of Cynthia’s prime examples of a successful adaptation.  In February, James de Jongh was Cynthia’s guest in the class.  The discussion was principally focused on de Jongh’s work on the script (which was where a dramaturg’s efforts would have been directed).  Here’s a transcription of my notes (lightly edited for readability) from that sessions:

De Jongh:  A playwright’s work is invisible.  S/he doesn’t write just dialogue – writes behavior, creates scenes.  Plays that read well don’t necessarily play well.

With Do Lord, de Jongh wrote no dialogue – all language was from the interviews.  He created the structure of the play.  The arrangement of the scenes shapes the pay.  He found his ending early – knew where he was going.  Had to decide how to get there.  Assembled material into “categories” – but was it a scene?  Did it have an action?

Had to create a through-line – created an outside character (“The Slave”).  Looked for pieces that “felt like present action.”  Occasionally had to “distort” pieces to make it feel like present action.  (Idea derived from a distorted memory of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.)

De Jongh had 3 structures operating in Do Lord – string of beads (categories of slave memories), through-line (from The Slave), and action peaks (builds and climaxes of action).

[That last comment, about the unifying and cohesive structures evident in Do Lord, was a later remark by Cynthia, made after the guest session with de Jongh.  (I said Do Lord was a frequent touchstone in the class for a successful adaptation.)  I don’t know if the playwright created those structures intentionally, with forethought, or if they came organically from his intuition.

[I suspect that, whether these structure were intuitive or purposeful, they were something that Cynthia picked up on independently—that is, de Jongh didn’t point them out to her—either while helping the writer develop the script or from a post-mortem analysis to determine why Do Lord worked on stage. 

[If I apply the analytical method I learned from Michael Kirby in his Theatrical Structure class (see my two-part post on 15 and 18 February 2011), I can identify several more structural devices at work.  Two come to mind immediately: the unit setting, the same all through the performances (Continuity Structure), functions as a unifying device; the small cast with the same five (usually) actors throughout the show is a variation on Character Structure as a small ensemble of actors forms a constant, unifying presence.]

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.]