Rail rage

Dutchman is no summer of love

by Robert David Sullivan

DUTCHMAN, By Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones). Directed by Brett Milanowski. Set and lighting design by Joanne Savage. Costumes by Heather Ritchie. Sound by Ben Arons and Brendan Hughes. Music by Nathan Pyritz. Fight choreography by Robert Isaacson. With Keith Mascoll, Caroline Lawton, Cliff Odle, Nathan Pyritz, Julie Fulton, David C. Galusi, and James Scott. Presented by the Theatre Cooperative at the Peabody House, Thursday through Saturday through December 11.

In a typical scene from one of his films, Woody Allen meets an attractive woman and immediately recites a long list of smug, if accurate, assumptions about her personal life. "I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype," she responds, with a hint of sarcasm. Forget that line and instead picture Diane Keaton using the blunt end of her Annie Hall tennis racket to crush Allen's windpipe and you'll get a feel for Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, an intense urban fable about race relations in America.

Dutchman, which premiered in New York in 1964 and won that year's Obie for best new play, was written by LeRoi Jones before he assumed a Muslim name and before he abandoned metaphor in favor of explicitly political writing. The play can be viewed as an assault on theater itself, an interpretation that probably didn't lessen its Off Broadway appeal at a time when Hello, Dolly! and Barefoot in the Park were big Broadway hits.

Set on a New York subway car in the middle of summer, Dutchman opens with the kind of "opposites attract" situation that grounds so many safe romantic comedies: a clean-cut, articulate young black man named Clay flirts with a slightly older, seemingly impulsive and free-spirited white woman. The woman, named Lula, is in control here, and she claims that she already knows everything about Clay ("You're a well-known type," she says dismissively). The talk turns frankly sexual, and Lula titillates Clay with promises of a night of passion. She makes increasingly crude references to his race, and as the train fills up with white passengers, he seems increasingly vulnerable. Clay first tries to fight words with words, and much of Dutchman would fit right into a 1990s poetry slam. ("You don't know anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart.") But playwright Baraka reveals his impatience with language, especially as used by artists to channel their energies away from physical action. "If Bessie Smith had killed some white people," Clay spits out, "she wouldn't have needed that music."

The revival of Dutchman by Somerville's Theatre Cooperative is intended to "reveal gaping wounds in our racial and mental landscapes decades after the Civil Rights Movement" (to quote from the postcard advertising the play). I'm not sure whether we're meant to conclude that nothing has changed since 1964; more likely, the point is that Lula's proprietary attitude toward black men is still strong in American society. If you're not inclined to view each and every interaction between a black person and a white person in a racial context, it may take some effort to focus on this point. Since Dutchman was written, gender politics have become as contentious as race relations, and without the guidance of the playbill, some might see the character of Lula -- a wily temptress who gets Clay to munch on an apple as she asks, "Would you like to get involved with me, Mister Man?" -- as an equal-opportunity emasculator. (Would a gay version of Dutchman provide a more concentrated dose of racism?)

With this production, one must also fight the temptation to see Lula as just another lunatic on the A-train. To be sure, crazy people often act out what other people think, and Lula is clearly meant to be a representative of all the white passengers who passively watch as she taunts the "middle-class black bastard" in their midst. But I don't think Baraka intends us to see Lula as a pitiful figure, and Caroline Lawton -- under the direction of Brett Milanowski -- makes her a little too unstable to serve as a symbol of institutionalized hate. This is not really surprising, as it's easy to flinch from a heartfelt depiction of racism. Someone playing a murderer can exaggerate the universal human impulses of fear and anger, but few of us would like to admit that we carry a germ of racial bigotry that could be blown up on stage.

This Dutchman is on stronger ground when Clay begins to dominate the action. Keith Mascoll, believable as the easygoing Clay of the first scene, is mesmerizing as he takes center stage and tears into the climactic speech that begins with the simple command "Shut up and let me talk." When Dutchman reached its abrupt conclusion (the play is barely an hour long) last Saturday, the spectators gave the cast a protracted and enthusiastic ovation, then took an extraordinarily long time to leave their seats. (The panel discussion that follows the November 19 performance will surely be well attended.) I suspect that the reaction would have been different in 1964 -- more shocked silence, less exhilaration at Clay's defiant words -- but the Theatre Cooperative has shown that Baraka's work still has some potency a quarter-century later.