Evento

Denzel Washington School of the Arts presents A Soldier's Play

The Denzel Washington School of the Arts presents A Soldier's Play November 3-6, 2022 Tickets are $10 with limited seats (150). Directed by its principal - Dr. Evelyn Collins

A Soldiers Play, which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 1982, is a murder mystery in which playwright Charles Fuller examines many social issues and poses provocative questions. The play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, with a citation for best American play. The screenplay adaptation, A Soldiers Story (1984), which Fuller wrote, garnered an Academy Award nomination for adapted screenplay. In 2021 a revival production garnered the Tony Award.

This production features students in grades 7 and 10-12. The students study the arts along with AP and Honor classes. Each student majors in either theatre, band, musical theatre, dance, visual arts, orchestra, or technical theatre.

A play in two acts, A Soldiers Play examines and evaluates the causes of oppression of African Americans and the obstacles to their advancement. A Soldier's Play has no particular, actual historical source. The play very realistically describes, however, the complex social issues that pervade his work: institutional, systemic racism in the U.S. Army during World War II; race relations; black genocide and the search for the meaning and definition of blackness in America; the meaning of democracy and the place of African Americans in it; and what it means to be black in a racially biased society.

A Soldiers Play is set on an Army base at Fort Neal, Louisiana, in 1944, near the end of World War II. A black soldier, Master Sergeant Vernon C. Waters, has been murdered at night on a country road near the base. The black soldiers and their white officers believe that the killing was racially motivated and probably the work of the Ku Klux Klan. In order to avoid tension between the black soldiers on the base and the local civilians, Colonel Nivens, the base commander, has not ordered a full investigation; the murder is not given the same kind of attention it would have been if a white soldier had been the victim. Captain Taylor, his subordinate, believes justice should be served, however, and he has reported the killing to Army headquarters. Consequently, an officer is sent from Washington, D.C., to investigate the murder.