‘A Soldier’s Play’ is a deep meditation on race in America, through the years

Imagine Sidney Poitier as a Howard University-educated lawyer investigating the murder of a Black sergeant on a segregated Louisiana Army base in the middle of World War II.

Then you’ll have a clue to the gravitas and dignity that Philadelphia playwright Charles Fuller accords Capt. Richard Davenport, the protagonist of A Soldier’s Play, a man caught in the vortex of complex racial currents, military imperatives, and social change.

More than four decades after Fuller’s play was first produced Off Broadway, and less than four months after the playwright’s death, his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama is finally back in Philadelphia, through Sunday, at the Forrest Theatre. One of its stars — a terrific Eugene Lee, as the self-hating murdered sergeant, Vernon C. Waters — had a small role in the Negro Ensemble Company’s original 1981 staging. That production played the Walnut Street Theatre in 1983.

Directed by Kenny Leon, this touring version of the Roundabout Theatre Company production, which won a 2020 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play, is taut, riveting, beautifully lit, and acted, and still resonant.

The drama takes the form of a whodunit, but Fuller’s principal interest was in illuminating the ways in which racism poisons relationships — not just between whites and Blacks, but also among those who are its targets. The hierarchical military setting heightens the power dynamics, which are upset by Davenport’s unexpected leadership role.

Fuller’s narrative unspools in two time frames: the 1944 present, in which Davenport (Norm Lewis, stolid and understated) investigates the murder, and flashbacks that reveal the events leading to the tragedy. It’s a well-worn device, but any dramaturgic creakiness is mostly overcome by the economy of Fuller’s writing and the propulsive drive of this production.

In Leon’s smart staging, the gunshots marking the murder are echoed throughout by the soldiers’ percussive stomping and marching, and bluesy musical interludes deepen the play’s emotional undertones. Derek McLane designed the spare two-level barracks set, and Allen Lee Hughes created the hazy, atmospheric lighting.

As he interrogates suspects, Davenport confronts the initial hostility of his white counterpart, Capt. Charles Taylor (a convincingly conflicted William Connell), and unravels the interpersonal dynamics within Waters’ platoon of Negro League veterans, consigned to baseball games and cleanup duties.

Among Davenport’s discoveries is that Waters nursed a particular animus towards the blues-playing Southern farm boy, Private C.J. Memphis (a heartbreaking performance by Sheldon D. Brown), whose demeanor he regarded as inimical to racial progress. Waters had a more complicated relationship with Private First Class Melvin Peterson (Tarik Lowe, excellent in the part originated Off-Broadway by Denzel Washington), who pushed back on his bullying.

What may be most fascinating about this cunningly constructed drama is its ability to speak simultaneously to different American eras. While focusing on the U.S. military and the American South in the 1940s, on the brink of integration, Fuller, writing at the dawn of the Reagan presidency, was challenging backlash against the civil rights gains of the 1960s and ‘70s.

The Roundabout production opened on Broadway in January 2020, before the George Floyd-inspired racial reckoning. But it still manages to address this charged contemporary moment in U.S. race relations — not least in its concluding mix of tragic irony and optimism.

This article was updated Saturday, Jan. 28, to correct when “A Soldier’s Play” was first performed in Philadelphia.

“A Soldier’s Play” is presented by the Kimmel Cultural Campus, in partnership with the Shubert Organization. At the Forrest Theatre, 1114 Walnut St., through Jan. 29. Tickets: $35 and up. Information: 212-239-6200 or www.telecharge.com.