A gripping depiction of the cancerous war inside.David Alan Grier and Blair Underwood head the cast in director Kenny Leon's Broadway premiere of the Pulitzer-winning 1981 race drama by Charles Fuller, set on a Louisiana Army base during World War II.
The structural bones of a procedural investigation thriller laced with cinematic flashbacks might be timeworn after years of movies and TV, but Leon invigorates the drama with interludes of song and movement that draw a blistering line connecting the men serving their country during wartime to those working as slave or prison chain-gang labor.
The arrival of Davenport, a briskly confident lawyer whose job in the segregated Armed Forces he describes as "policing colored troops," initially ruffles Capt. Taylor, who admits with clumsy bluntness during their first encounter that he finds the unfamiliar notion of a black officer both novel and uncomfortable. Davenport is unfazed by Taylor's casual racism and also by his assertion that any arrest of a white murderer by a black investigating officer will not hold up.
The most harrowing of these involves guitar-playing Pvt. C.J. Memphis , whose sleepy-eyed smile and lack of education made Waters tag him as an indolent clown. The tech sergeant's scathing dismissal of Southern black men like C.J. as confirmation of the white man's stereotype of "lazy, shiftless Negroes" holding back other African Americans is part of a legacy of self-hatred passed down by Waters' father.
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