Playwright Charles Fuller, shown here in 1982, died of natural causes on Monday. He was 83 years old.
Bill Ingraham / AP
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Bill Ingraham / AP
Playwright Charles Fuller, shown here in 1982, died of natural causes on Monday. He was 83 years old.
Bill Ingraham / AP
NEW YORK – Charles Fuller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and playwright acclaimed as “A Soldier’s Play,” often explores and exposes how social institutions can perpetuate racism clan, passed away. He was 83 years old.
Fuller died of natural causes Monday in Toronto, his wife, Claire Prieto-Fuller, said.
Fuller’s plays are filled with complicated characters and cropping of conventions. Fuller told Newsday: “The best way to dispel stereotypes and big lies is to say something as close to the truth as possible. In a review of his work, The New York Times said “the cliches of form, plot, and character fall like skewers at a shooting range.”
Fuller’s most famous work, “A Soldier’s Play,” uses a military setting in the story of the man who killed a Black sergeant on a military base in Louisiana during World War II. It dissects the inherent racism as well as internal divisions within the Black military community, wrapping it up in a murder mystery.
The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982 and two years later was made into the best picture Oscar-nominated “A Soldier’s Story”, written by Fuller and nominated for an Academy Award.
“I just want to be considered a playwright lucky enough to write a ‘hit,’ and someone who wants to keep writing plays that break through walls,” he told The New York Times in 1982.
The work attracted an acting talent of Who’s Black. The film version stars young Denzel Washington, who appeared in his first incarnation in New York alongside Samuel L. Jackson. The 2005 off-Broadway revival attracted Taye Diggs, Anthony Mackie, and Steven Pasquale.
It made its Broadway debut during the shortened pandemic season 2020-21 with David Alan Grier and Blair Underwood and earned seven Tony nominations, including best play revival. Grier won the Tony Award for lead actor and the play won best revival.
“It is my greatest honor to carry out his words on both stage and screen, his genius will be missed,” Grier tweeted in mourning.
Born in Philadelphia, Fuller attended Villanova University and later joined the Army in 1959, serving in Japan and Korea. He later studied at La Salle University.
He was working as a housing inspector in Philadelphia when the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey, premiered his TV series “The Perfect Party,” leaving Broadway in 1969. The theme was marriage between marriages. the world’s worst interracial plays. “
Fuller has written plays for the Negro Ensemble Company, and his works have been shown at the New Federal Theater and the Henry Street Settlement. His breakthrough came with the “Brownsville Raid,” which tells the true story of Black soldiers who were discharged in 1906 after they were falsely accused of murder. Only decades later did the Army vindicate them.
Five years after “The Brownsville Raid”, Fuller uses similar themes and settings in “A Soldier’s Play”, which he was influenced by “Billy Budd” by Herman Melville. Both novels are set in the military during wartime, but Fuller uses the structure to discuss race in modern America.
In a review of the play in 2005, The New York Times said Fuller “uses explicit conventions to elicit distinctly faded shades of racism, resentment, and hatred of the black men are waiting to fight in the Army of the Whites”, adding, “Confusing, confusing, conflicting sentiments”. (In the play, a Black sergeant applauds. imprisoning a Negro private: “one less fool to put the race to shame.”)
Fuller said he was drawn to the military in his plays because “historically, it was the only place where blacks rose to par with whites,” he told Newsday in 1988.
One of his other successful plays was the 1980 domestic drama “Zooman and the Sign,” about an award-winner whose 12-year-old daughter is killed while playing. None of his neighbors will come to identify the killers. When the father put up a sign asking for help, it attracted the press. But that makes him – not the killer – a neighbor.
The New York Daily News called the 2009 revival of the play “simple speech with power, if less subtlety.” Chadwick Boseman played Zooman in 2000 at the age of 23 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Fuller wrote a television adaptation of the play in 1995.
Fuller also produced a cycle of Civil War-era plays including “Sally,” “Prince,” “Jonquil” and “Burner’s Frolic.” His other credits include the coming-of-age drama “The Sky Is Gray” for PBS and “A Gathering of Old Men” for CBS in 1987.
Fuller returned to the military theme with the 2013 play “One Night…” about a former army truck driver whose life has been unstable since she was publicly accused of rape. three colleagues in Iraq. In one scene, she asks the Department of Veterans Affairs for disability benefits. “Why am I a hero if I die,” she said, “and a nuisance if I live?”
In addition to his wife, Fuller is survived by a son, David, a daughter-in-law, and four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
