Passage Theatre presents Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and The Slave

Baraka (1934-2014) was an important political writer, critic, activist, teacher, and cultural leader. He founded the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and was the seminal poet of my teenage years. Dutchman, the first act of Passage’s new production, won a 1964 Obie for best Off-Broadway play and inspired two film adaptations. The Slave makes up the second act. Both plays address continuing racial tensions.

Dutchman surrounds Lula, a white woman (Deirdre Rose), who seduces then attacks a young Black man, Clay (Phillip Brown) on the subway. The Slave follows Walker, a Black revolutionary (Brown), who sneaks into the house of his white ex-wife, Grace (Rose), and her new white husband Bradford (Peter Bisgaier).

Seeking emotional resonance

Both plays are intense psychodramas with heightening tension meant to unsettle and discomfort the audience. Baraka ruthlessly voices the unspoken thoughts of liberal Americans by making standard micro-aggressive statements blatant. Lula belittling Clay for dressing too well as a Black man (“What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave”) echoes comments I’ve heard multiple times from white former acquaintances.

But despite knowledgeable director Ozzie Jones at the helm, and an excellent lead actor in Brown, I found the production lacking in emotional realism. I wanted more of a slow burn in both acts to really heighten the racial tension, rather than Jones’s lean into campy, humorous caricatures in the first half of each act. This choice costs the show a critical emotional component.

While Lula’s character is hyper-sensual, she’s based on realistic tropes. She’s Carolyn Bryant, who in 1955 allowed her husband and neighbors to beat and murder 14-year-old Emmett Till after claiming he whistled at her. She’s Amy Cooper, who in 2020 falsely told police that a Black male birdwatcher was threatening her in Central Park. In Baraka’s text, Lula is the original Karen who attacks her victims to feel empowered: “I lie a lot. It helps me control the world.”

But instead of a realistic cadence which would help us feel the impact of the words, we get an hour-long play with a one-note oversexed manic pixie character who performs odd sensual dance breaks. Microaggressions get swallowed by exaggerated onstage personae. The casual racism portrayed by Bradley Whitford in the 2017 film Get Out or the unapologetic classism of Rosamund Pike’s character in the 2023 film Saltburn struck deeper than this performance.

Camp over tension

This lack of grounding continues with The Slave, a tense and intimate standoff between a group of former lovers and friends who make worsening racial and sexual insults toward each other as the play progresses. While the setting is potentially an esoteric future, it surrounds an assumed eventual war between the racially oppressed and the racial elite. I imagine Black Lives Matter activists challenging January 6 insurrectionists; I would have loved to see the character of Walker in a BLM shirt, Bradford in a MAGA hat, and Grace wearing an “I voted for Obama” pin.

Instead, Jones sets the scene in an ambiguous future and amps the camp. Bradford rocks a Centurian helmet, Grace wears a Victorian steampunk crinoline, and Walker stalks around in parachute pants. During the first 15-20 minutes, Grace and Bradford become over-the-top white caricatures when I really wanted a slow build of realistic tension.

Other challenges

There were other issues regarding age, language, and structure. Perhaps age differences among the cast impacted the emotional resonance for me. In both plays, the original stage notes list the white female character as either older or the same age as the male leads. However, Rose appears decades younger than her male co-stars. Although I understand the impulse to pay tribute to the play’s era and male culture’s fetishization of blonde women, Grace’s super fake blonde bob feels unnecessary.

Some of the language is dated, even for its own time. Baraka clearly writes to the Black-Jewish tensions during the Civil Rights era (and possibly to concerns within his first marriage). He also frequently employs an anti-gay slur when questioning any white male’s masculinity. While I know Baraka deliberately used those terms to represent the real world, it feels like the text makes potshots at a sexual minority while trying to wound a racial majority. Since Jones drops Walker’s original slave attire and the grinning minstrel armband from earlier productions, I wonder if he could have swapped something else in for the homophobic slurs, to maintain the intended impact without punching down on other oppressed people.

It seems that Jones moves The Slave’s prologue into Dutchman to link the two one-acts together. Dutchman starts with two strangers, so it’s easy to follow. In contrast, The Slave is about three estranged humans who know each other all too well. Because it jumps into the relationships immediately, we needed that grounding prologue as a contextualizing agent.

Impressive choices

But there were numerous choices I loved throughout the two-hour and 15-minute runtime. These included a recording of Baraka set to Miles Davis, the first act’s jazz back track (sound by Larry Fowler working with Jones), Alyssandra Docherty’s lighting design, and Marie Laster’s clever turntable set. Jones brilliantly uses a dramatic stage pause to signify violence. In the original text, Clay strikes Lula multiple times. Pausing the act into a tableau—undergirding the stage with blue lighting and filling the air with erratic violins—maintains a tangible threat without brutalizing the actor or the audience.

Brown is my favorite regional actor after Frank X (he was astonishing in American Moor at the Lantern last year). He perfectly portrays Clay in the first act as the ingenue who snaps. In the second act’s Slave, he’s impressive as the charismatic yet on-edge revolutionary who despises his need for his ex-wife’s support while resenting her lack of racial comprehension. His monologues in both acts show he clearly understands the source material and the mentality. He embodies the jazz embedded in the text.

The performance I attended received a standing ovation. Afterwards, a majority white group congratulated the director and continued detailing their enjoyment as we walked out of the theater. If you’ve never seen Brown perform, or read Baraka or experienced his public cadence, see this show. You will enjoy hearing the recordings, experience the delicious shock of his blatant dialogue, and sadly note that things still have not changed.