Tin Soldiers

Charles Fuller’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize winning A Soldier’s Play, when performed well, is a searing drama laced with racial tension and issues of power, privilege and assimilation, wrapped around a murder investigation on a segregated US Army base in Louisiana during World War II. It should evoke feelings of frustration over the slow pace of social change and the sometimes misguided ways in which people attempt to prove their self-worth.

However, when staged badly, as in the case of the first major New York revival of this play currently in production at Second Stage Theatre, the telling of this still timely story can be impaired by superficial, one-dimensional acting, unclear motivations and general miscasting.

This is one of those “testosterone plays” of all-male casts, for which the theatre community has become famous. Inherent in all of them and this one in particular, is an analysis of the emotionally distant ways in which men communicate with one another. Add a racially segregated military setting and we see power dynamics at play across several levels, with the resultant dysfunctional behavior by all affected parties.

Fort Neal is an Army base of Black enlisted men and White officers set in a small, notoriously red-neck and hostile community in Louisiana. The platoon commanded by Tech/Sergeant Vernon C. Waters (James McDaniel) is comprised of many former Negro League players and has been formed primarily to represent the base as a baseball team. When not playing, they also have to do the grunt work of hauling garbage, painting barracks and policing the grounds. Not quite what they enlisted for, the men have grown bored beating White Army ball clubs and are anxious to see action in Europe to show they can fight Nazis just as well as anyone else.

When Sgt. Waters turns up murdered off the base, the Ku Klux Klan are the presumed culprits. High level foot-dragging ensues as top brass make every effort to just make the case go away. They want neither the wrath from the neighboring community, scrutiny from the Negro newspapers nor unrest from Black soldiers.

The only Black lawyer in the Army’s investigative unit, Captain Richard Davenport (Taye Diggs) is sent from Washington to take over, but his arrival only creates more tension for Captain Charles Taylor (Steven Pasquale) the White officer who has been handling things to date. He can’t understand how a Black man will be able to make any headway in this environment and believes Davenport has been set up to fail. That, and having to now take orders from the first Black officer he’s ever seen, heightens his frustration.

By interrogating the men in the platoon and other suspects, Davenport gets a picture of who Waters was and why anyone might want to kill him. What he learns is that the Sargeant was perceived by his White superiors as a hard-driving and disciplined platoon leader, but to his men, seen as vindictive and punitive, hell-bent on weeding out those he deems as weak or an embarrassment to the Black race. To get ahead of the White man, Waters believes, we must be seen at all times as better than them. Thus the slow talking, guitar picking and grinning country boys like Private C.J. Memphis (Mike Colter) must be rooted out.

With the right personnel, you can prepare an army for any battle. In the case of this production, this unit isn’t quite up for the fight. It is hard to pinpoint whether producers simply cast the parts wrong, Director Jo Bonney failed to focus their performances, or the actors themselves simply failed to understand and convey who their characters are. But something was amiss in Tuesday night’s performance.

Capt. Davenport needs to be a man able to demonstrate great self-confidence even if inwardly uncertain. He’s the only Black officer/lawyer in the U.S. Army and he’s being sent into a potential hornet’s nest! That requires a commanding presence and a steely resolve. Taye Diggs gave audiences none of that. Instead of being a cocksure officer, he came off as an actor trying to play a cocksure officer. Note to Costume Designer David Zinn: cut Diggs’ uniform jacket a little shorter and take it in at the waist. Visually, he looks like he has not fully grown into this role.

James McDaniel’s Sgt. Waters was equally tepid. He had the bluster and verbal noise without any of the physically imposing posture of an Army sargeant. There is little wonder why his Waters was murdered. He gave little to show why his men were afraid of him nor a true sense of the crusade he’s on to uplift the race.

Michael Genet did little with Private James Wilkie, the one-time Master Sargeant himself who gets busted down to a private by Waters. Beyond speaking the lines Fuller wrote, he demonstrated none of the bitterness a real man would have who has seen his career taken from him and Genet at times seemed too over the top.

Perhaps Steven Pasquale has lived in integrated environments and is unfamiliar with being a White man forced to accept a Black man as his superior but his Capt. Taylor seemed more confused by Davenport’s arrival than incensed over the snubbing. This is supposed to be 1944 and no White man would have accepted the change so calmly.

Anthony Mackie does a decent job as Private First Class Melvin Peterson, but at times seemed to rush his lines. He gave one of the few natural performances and has a genuine stage presence. One can only wonder what he might have done in the Davenport role.

In a small role, but actually one of the best performances of the evening, Nelsan Ellis as Corporal Bernard Cobb, had a moving moment in his testimony about what happened to his good friend C.J. Audiences could sense their bond and his loss and the character’s uneasiness at talking about it. This was not the laborious acting of some of his fellow performers but feelings expressed by a real man.

Unfortunately, Mike Colter as C.J. lacked the range to show more than a big ole country boy. The internal pain he goes through being imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit was never fully realized.

The first public performance of a play usually generates either of two scenarios: the actors are tired of rehearsing and have put everything into giving a great show to start the run off on the right foot, or it’s still a work in progress and they are finding their way. Tuesday evening’s show proved to be the latter, right down to the very awkward way in which the company fumbled their curtain call.

Let’s hope that by the time the play officially opens on October 17, they will have ironed out the rough spots and gotten this platoon to march in formation.