"A Soldier's Play" Digs Deep

As A Soldier’s Play?—?running now at the Shubert Theatre through Dec. 11?—?opens, a group of faceless and as yet nameless soldiers join in a song. Their performance is full of strength, energy, even joy. But the song is a work song, captured at Parchman Farm, the notorious maximum-security Mississippi State Penitentiary, in which inmates were made to work in conditions all too reminiscent of slavery. The parallel is clear: these Black soldiers in the U.S. Army, at (the fictional) Fort Neal in Louisiana, deep in the Jim Crow South, are in some sense prisoners...