Next week marks the anniversary of the Negro Ensemble Company's acclaimed 1981 stage production of “A Soldier's Play,” by Charles Fuller. The original cast included Adolph Caesar as Sgt. Vernon Waters, Denzel Washington as Private Peterson, Samuel L. Jackson as Private Louis Henson and Peter Friedman as Captain Charles Taylor.

With the plot of a murder mystery, “A Soldier's Play” was written to explore the topic of intra-racial discrimination in the black community.

Set in the 1940’s, the story takes place in Fort Neal, Louisiana. During those years, the military was racially segregated on and off the battlefield.

Sgt. Waters, the African-American murder victim in the play, speaks his final words in Act One, Scene One. “They still hate you!” was the phrase that set the tone and switched the focus from murder to race relations in america.

With a natural and timely desire to investigate hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, “A Soldier's Play” pulls a racial twist when the crime's black investigator, Captain Richard Davenport, discovers the killer was actually one of the black soldiers under the victims' command. The sergeant was killed by the very men he hated himself – Southern black men with cultural characteristics that he considered lazy and shiftless. It was at his moment of death that the victim renounced his hatred and realized no matter how he tried to conform to whites, they still felt the same about blacks. 

“A Soldier’s Play” ran for 468 performances and won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

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