Drama note

Readers who live in the national capital area should keep an eye out for A Soldier's Play, starring the fabulous Norm Lewis. It runs through tonight at New Haven's Shubert Theatre, where it got this thoughtful and accurate review in the Independent. Its run at Washington's Kennedy Center begins on December 13, according to this site.

The play, which received a Pulitzer Prize in 1981, is powerful and timely. Brian Slattery wrote in the Independent:

The play works as a satisfying police procedural, but like the best mysteries, the investigation into the crime itself is a journey to exposing larger, deeper, and tougher social truths, about the greater injustices lurking behind criminal and legal victories, and about the way a system built on racial oppression has a way of infecting everyone within it. In the context of the double hindsight the play offers — it’s 2022, and we’re revisiting a play written four decades ago about an era four decades before that —  A Soldier’s Play asks a contemporary audience to investigate how far we’ve really come since the days of the deeply segregated Jim Crow South. Sure, some things have changed. But it’s possible that if we dig a little deeper, we won’t like what we find.