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The 60-minute play, about an encounter between a black man and a white woman on a subway, has been brushed off in the past as a mere diatribe by the African American playwright, poet, and activist. After all, at the time the play was written in 1964, he was about to break away from his white wife, change his name from LeRoi Jones, and become a loud and incendiary voice in the black power movement. Doubtless, Mr. Baraka was never shy about stirring up controversial issues regarding race relations in the U. S. and agitating about the risk to life, limb, and livelihood of being black in a white-dominated world. But before labeling Dutchman as an idiosyncratic rant, first consider the currency of stop and frisk, stand your ground, and death-by-chokehold, and a long list of names that includes Sean Bell, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and Eric Garner. In this light, Dutchman hardly seems a product of the past at all, nor does it seem over the top. The entire play takes place aboard a subway. A well-dressed young African American man named Clay (Michael Alcide) is quietly reading. Without warning, he is accosted by a white woman, Lula (Ryan Jillian Kilpatrick), who alternately comes on to him, teases, taunts, and harangues him. Goaded as he is, Clay launches into a lengthy tirade, and the play ends in an act of violence that comes off as shocking both in its suddenness and in the way it is treated as trivial. Director Woodie King, Jr. has provided a number of significant touches that help to turn the subway ride into an allegorical journey to hell. There is the hallucinatory look of the set (by Chris Cumberbatch) and lighting (Antoinette Tynes), and the black-and-white advertisements posted around the subway car ("The French know how to whiten skin," reads one). The movement of the train, which hurtles on and on, is eerily captured by Bill Toles' sound and visual design. Finally, though, and most brilliantly, there is the casting of a black actress in the role of the scary, sleazy Lula, a perverse Eve figure who chomps on an endless supply of apples, feeds them to Clay, and tosses the cores all over the car. Consider the implications of Ms. Kilpatrick, wearing a blond wig and a white domino mask, accusing Clay, a college graduate dressed in a three-button suit, of acting white. While Dutchman is essentially a two-character play, there are other performers onstage, all African American, some of them wearing white facemasks, who mostly ignore (or choose to ignore) the increasingly raucous interactions between Clay and Lula. Both Mr. Alcide and Ms. Kilpatrick give strong performances as characters that serve as representative types in this mythic tale, but it is the conceiving of this production that lifts it beyond the angry story and turns it into a parable for our time.
Dutchman
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