74 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
David Alan Grier plays a sergeant who wields his rank as a bludgeon.
THETHEATRE
FAILING UPWARD
The dangers of ambition in “A Soldier’s Play” and “ Timon of Athens.”
BYVINSON CUNNINGHAM
ILLUSTRATION BY JAMIEL LAW
G
ive me a ladder to climb—the jun-
gle gym of the corporate org chart,
the hazy inner ranks of some large church,
the series of badges and pins upon which
military order is maintained—and I can
spin out a story about America. Hierar-
chy is our great imaginative canvas. We
don’t want to know just about the inner
workings of the mob, but also about how
the one guy became the boss; follow not
just baseball but the World Series; if the
hero’s a priest, he’d better have a plan to
be Pope. Tell us how you survived, sure,
but also how you got over.
There’s a technical aspect to this nar-
rative preference: upward motion feels
like forward motion, and success has beats
that are easy to chart and make propul-
sive. But the deeper issue is moral—
against our higher instincts, and despite
the ample evidence of experience, we
stow away a pinch of belief that there’s
more freedom at the top of the pile.
Charles Fuller’s “A Soldier’s Play”—
which débuted in 1981 and won the Pu-
litzer Prize in 1982—is obsessed with
signs of seniority. Thwarted advancement
makes the piece move. The play, which
has been revived by the Roundabout The-
atre Company, at American Airlines The-
atre, under the direction of Kenny Leon,
takes place in the mid-nineteen-forties,
on a segregated Army base in Louisiana,
where a black sergeant, Vernon Waters
(David Alan Grier), has been mysteri-
ously killed. Everybody blames his death
on the Klan, but nobody seems to really
know what happened. Waters, whom we
glimpse in flashbacks that bleed into the
present investigation of his death, is a
proud, haughty, casually abusive man who
wields his rank as a bludgeon and whose
humor—Grier’s well-honed specialty as
a performer, now spiked with rancor—
is a firearm trained on the soldiers under
his command. He’s a bully; Grier makes
his malice terrifying, but also seductive.
Waters has it in for the Southerners
in the regiment. Their regionalisms and
humble folkways—songs and jokes, man-
ners refined and reinforced by fear of vi-
olence and, often, death—seem to him
mere bowing and scraping and jiving
at the feet of the white world. Waters
thinks these men are holding blacks back
with their levity and obeisance. Better,
he thinks, to rise within the white man’s
meritocracy and eventually subvert it on
its own terms. He’s a perverse opposite
of the great writer and activist Audre
Lorde, who warned that “the master’s
tools will never dismantle the master’s
house.” Notions of uplift, shorn of love,
have made him a husk. His ascent within
the military is, to him, an accrual of human
dignity; he uses official discipline—tak-
ing away one man’s hard-earned “stripes”
over a trifle, sending another man to mil-
itary jail—to strip others of their dignity.
Yet, for all his grasping, he lacks the
respect that his success was supposed to
win. Even his pettiest order can be re-
versed by Captain Taylor ( Jerry O’Con-
nell), the white man who’s the head hon-
cho on the base. Waters hates just about
everybody, but especially a private named
C. J. Memphis ( J. Alphonse Nicholson),
a star baseball player who sings the hell
out of the blues and wins more favor
from whites by way of his talent than
Waters does by his rank. (This implicit
dismissal of art rings true even today;
Waters is a bit like the contemporary
corporate striver who brags about never
cracking open a work of fiction.)
There are two plays here: the inter-
stitial telling of how Waters’s wickedness,
born of racism and spurred on by sheer
spite, sends him spiralling downward, to-
ward the grave; and a much more rote
detective story about how his killer is
caught. “A Soldier’s Play” is weakest pre-
cisely as it strains to transition between
