what kind of play do you think was the poet watching in the theatre
Answers
Charles Fuller: Write Without Fear or You’re Wasting Time
Though his 1982 hit ‘A Soldier’s Play’ is now on Broadway, its writer’s only real ambition has been to tell the truth about people he’d never seen onstage.
BY NATHANIEL G. NESMITH
With Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway revival of A Soldier’s Play now in previews, I took the opportunity recently to speak with its author, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist Charles Fuller, who won the 1982 Pulitzer for the play, later adapted into the film A Soldier’s Story. Among Fuller’s other notable plays are The Perfect Party (1969), In the Deepest Part of Sleep (1974), Zooman and the Sign (1980), and One Night (2013), dramatizing topics ranging from racial tensions among a group of mixed-race couples to violence in Black neighborhoods to sexual assault in the armed forces. A native Philadelphian, he now calls Toronto home (his wife is Canadian, he explained).
NATHANIEL G. NESMITH: You have been involved in theatre now for more than five decades. What first drew you to it?
CHARLES FULLER: It was the immediacy of it. You can sit in the theatre and watch what you wrote and know that it is either terrible or operating in the way you want it to. You can’t do that with anything else. If you write a book, you have to wait for people to tell you that it was good. Or if you write an essay, you have to have the editors tell you everything is fine. The theatre is a place where immediately you know that it is working or it is not. People will start shifting themselves in the seats or scratching or turning towards each other whispering. For me, the theatre is an immediate scale; it is either good or it is terrible, or it is working. It is not always wonderful the way you thought it would be, but you get right away if the audience is with you or not.
Many of your plays have drawn extensively on historical research: The Brownsville Raid, the We Plays (Sally, Prince, Jonquil, and Burner’s Frolic), and, of course, A Soldier’s Play. Do you feel a different ethical responsibility when dramatizing historical content?
I do that because I like to look at the history from our point of view. Nine times out of 10, our history is written by people who are not Black. What my feelings were when I began to write plays was that I would try my best to bring out all the things that had happened and try to let them happen on the stage so my audience would be hearing this and watching this from someone whose history was a part of it, in a very real way. One thing to doing history, from my point of view, is really trying to get on with what happened, what the situation was at the time that those things occurred.
Who are the writers that influenced you?
In terms of plays: Arthur Miller. In the theatre: Amiri Baraka. I liked what he was doing. [Also] the people who look at the world they are in and connect that world with Black people. Baldwin, Ellison—those are writers whose works I really enjoyed. What I read the most are things that connect African Americans to the history of the world; that is one of the things that drives me to continue writing.
Which of your plays do you admire most, and why?
I like them all, really, because in each one I am trying something different, a different space, a different place, a different way of looking at things, creating characters I have not dealt with before. Each one is new, and for me, the work isn’t of great value if I keep doing the same thing all the time. I do history because there is so much of it that we are involved in, and we have not looked at that portion of our history in this country. I try to pick up things that I care to deal with—that are connected to the United States, and to us. I am always confident when I look back on my own life because I was in the Army—I gave time from my life to the United States. I look at that and go back to that time whenever I start writing.
A Soldier’s Play, which explores racism and intra-racism, is tightly constructed. Did you think a great deal about its structure while you were writing it?
To be honest with you, the structure comes as I work. I always tried to do things that I have not seen on the stage or in a play I’ve read. I try to do new things, different things, so that the audience is not tired of watching the same old thing every time I do something.