Playwright Charles Fuller, who created
Playwright Charles Fuller, who created "A Soldier's Play," passes away at the age of 83
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Charles Fuller, the writer of the incisive and lauded A Soldier’s Play and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, has passed away. Fuller frequently examined and revealed how societal institutions may support prejudice. He was 83. According to his wife Claire Prieto-Fuller, Fuller passed away on Monday in Toronto from natural causes.

Complex characters and a subverting of traditions were prevalent in Fuller’s plays. According to Fuller, speaking the truth or a version of it that comes the closest to it is the best approach to combat stereotypes and outright lies. Clichés of form, story, and character “shatter like skeets at a shooting range,” according to a review of his work in The New York Times.

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In his most well-known work, A Soldier’s Play, Fuller used a military backdrop to tell the story of the hunt for a Black sergeant’s killer on an Army installation in Louisiana during World War II. It examined ingrained racism as well as conflicts within the Black military community while encasing it in a murder mystery.

Following the play’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama win, it was adapted into the best picture-nominated A Soldier’s Story, which Fuller authored the screenplay for and for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Who wants to keep on making plays that burst through the wall, he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1982. I’d just like to be thought of as a playwright who was fortunate enough to have created a hit.

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The work has drawn the cream of the crop of Black acting ability. Young Denzel Washington, who had appeared in the play’s original stage production in New York with Samuel L. Jackson, played the lead role in the movie adaptation. Taye Diggs, Anthony Mackie, and Steven Pasquale were drawn to an off-Broadway revival in 2005.

In the pandemic-shortened 2020–21 season, it had its Broadway debut starring David Alan Grier and Blair Underwood. It received seven Tony nominations, including best play revival. Both the show and Grier took home Tony Awards for best featured actor. Grier wrote in sorrow, “His creativity will be missed. It has been my greatest honour to interpret his lyrics on both stage and screen.”

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Fuller, who was raised in Philadelphia, graduated from Villanova University before enlisting in the Army in 1959 and serving in South Korea and Japan. Later, he went to La Salle University to study. When his play “The Perfect Party,” which was later performed off-Broadway in 1969, was staged at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey, he was working as a housing inspector in Philadelphia. Although the play’s premise was intermarriage, Fuller quipped that it was among the worst interracial plays ever written.

Five years after The Brownsville Raid, Fuller drew inspiration from Herman Melville’s Billy Budd for A Soldier’s Play, which also had comparable themes and situations. Although the military served as the setting for both books’ wartime plots, Fuller used the framework to explore race in contemporary America.

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Sally, Prince, Jonquil, and Burner’s Frolic were among the plays by Fuller that were staged during the Civil War. His other works include The Sky Is Gray, a coming-of-age drama for PBS, and A Gathering of Old Men, a 1987 CBS production. With the play One Night…, written by Fuller in 2013, he returned to the subject of the military. The play was about a former Army truck driver whose life has fallen apart since she came forward with accusations of rape against three other service members in Iraq.

She requests disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs in one scene. She questions why she is a nuisance if she lives and a hero if she dies. Fuller leaves behind his wife, a son named David, a daughter-in-law, four grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

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