A SOLDIER’S PLAY
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The U.S. Armed Forces may have evolved somewhat in the last 50 years, but the whole gays-in-the-military issue points out that it will never be an institution associated with forward thinking or generosity toward minorities. Still, it’s a shock to hear Fuller’s Captain Taylor, a white officer in command of a black troop, greet the protagonist, Captain Davenport, who’s come to investigate the soldier’s death, with an apology for staring. “You’re the first colored officer I’ve ever met,” he explains. “You’re a bit startling.” Later he says, “Being in charge just doesn’t look right on Negroes.”
But the playwright knows better than to make Taylor an evil man–he’s merely a soldier, and evidence suggests a pretty good one. And his concern that the investigation by a black officer into the death of a black technical sergeant will not be very successful in this small Louisiana post is a valid one. Davenport has overcome greater obstacles, however, as his rank indicates. This tenacious lawyer specifically assigned to police black troops discovers an insidious intolerance that’s not limited to white officers: it grows in the midst of the black barracks. But it springs from the conservative heart of the white man’s army.
