• Presents a psychotic teenager who kills a 12 year-old girl on her own front porch. Due to the apathy of his neighbors, her father hangs a sign over the porch chastising the neighbors for not speaking out. After ranting to the audience, Zooman is finally compelled to tear down the sign which leads to his death. Fuller won the Obie award for playwrighting in 1980.
  

• Fuller seems to be saying that Zooman's every action is a righteous response to the aggression of women who will not let go of their purses, little girls who insist on being in the line of a stray bullet, and old people who just get in the way. He is presented to some degree as a product of the environment that created him and his kind. Therefore, is society just as guilty for Jenny's death as Zooman is?
  

• Through the father, Rueben Tate, his use of the sign to challenge his apathetic neighbors to tell the truth, Fuller's message seems to be that if society doesn't stand up for justice, it will be destroyed by it's apathy.
  

• Zooman and the Sign was presented at Cass Technical High School in Detroit during November of 1991.
  

  ---

  A SOLDIER'S PLAY

• November 28, 1981 - First produced at Theatre Four, New York City by the Negro Ensemble Company under the direction of Douglas Turner Ward. It had a lengthy run and won Fuller Pulitzer prize for Drama.
  

• The play is murder mystery or "courtroom" drama which involves the search for the murderer of Sgt. Vernon Waters, chillingly played by Adolph Caesar on stage and in the film. The story deals indirectly with the search for the meaning Sgt. Waters' last words, "They still hate you!" The search for the culprit soon becomes secondary to the analysis of black roles in white society.
  

• Cpt. Davenport is the protagonist. His superobjective is to find the truth behind the death of Sgt. Waters. He accomplishes his superobjective when he discovers, in the face of white racist obstruction, not only the murderer of Sgt. Waters, but the painful reason for this fratricide.
  

• Irony is presented in Cpt. Taylor's racist impulse to compliment Cpt. Davenport. More irony is observed through the black troops' elation over finally being shipped off to war. Our sense of irony and distress are compounded by many factors.
  - the men's eagerness to prove themselves
  - their almost equal eagerness to be relieved by their present boredom
  - the echo of Waters' disastrous ideals
  - the fact that breaking up the camp will further destroy the chance to completely solve the case
  - Cpt. Taylor's contradictory praise of the men
  

• A Soldier's Play was presented in July of 1994 at the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre.
  

• Fuller has improved upon his use of the flashback and time shifts since he wrote Zooman and the Sign.
  

Of Adolph Caesar's performance: "It's a fascinating performance, full of contradictions that always leave the audience on edge. As such, Mr. Fuller's play, which tirelessly insists on embracing volatile contradictions because that is the way to arrive at the shattering truth."

About the play's compassion: "The playwright has a compassion for blacks who might be driven to murder their brothers--because he sees them as victims of a world they haven't made."

Fuller doesn't let blacks nor whites off the hook: "Mr. Fuller demands that his black characters find the courage to break their suicidal, fratricidal cycle--just as he demands that whites end the injustices that have locked his black characters into a nightmare."

Walter Kerr of The New York Times compared the plays focus to the piecing together the face of Sgt. Waters until it focuses into a sharp clear image. Through the use of flashbacks, Sgt. Waters is gradually pieced together to become the disturbed character we meet.

Perhaps the toughest critic was Amiri Baraka in this 1983 essay: "I always try to hook up Fuller to Russell's Five on the Black Hand Side, which was a pretty superficial look at the contradictions in the black community, particularly between the "intergrationist" sector and the cultural nationalists. .... The captain tracks the militant down, condemning him because he lacks compassion for the black-hating sergeant. Fuller says that is our real problem, that the black militants lack compassion for the black-hating Negroes."

"My argument is on the stage. I don't have to be angry. O.K.? I get it all out right up there. There's no reason to carry this down from the stage and into the seats. And it does not mean that I am not enraged at injustice or prejudice or bigotry. It simply means that I cannot be enraged all the time. To spend one's life being angry, and in the process doing nothing to change it, is to me ridiculous. I could be mad all day long, but if I'm not doing a damn thing, what difference does it make?"

Baraka, Amiri. "The Descent of Charlie Fuller into Pulitzerland and the Need for African American Institutions." Black American Literature Forum, (Summer, 1983): 51-54.

Fuller, Charles and Esther Harriott. American Voices: Five Contemporary Playwrights in Essays and Interviews. McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers, 1988, pp. 112-125.

Kerr, Walter. "A Fine Work from Forceful Playwright." The New York Times. (December 6, 1981): 3.

Metzger, Linda. Black Writers. Detroit: Gale Research, Inc. 1989.

Rich, Frank. "Negro Ensemble Presents 'Soldier's Play'." The New York Times. (November 27, 1981): 3.

-----. Contemporary Literary Criticism 25, pp. 181-182.