New York Post

By FRANK SCHECK

January 25, 2007 -- FOR its revival of the 1964 play "Dutchman," the Cherry Lane Theatre's lobby has been converted into a facsimile of a vintage subway station, complete with an old-fashioned turnstile you step through as you enter the theater.

The play itself, written by poet and provocateur Amiri Baraka back when he was named LeRoi Jones - and being performed in the same space in which it premiered - is a powerful example of an era in which the theater was still a viable forum for social outrage.

Running scarcely an hour, this one-act drama depicts the fateful encounter on a subway car between a well-dressed young black man, Clay (Dule Hill, of TV's "The West Wing" and "Psych"), and a sexy blonde, Lula (Jennifer Mudge), who tries to seduce him both physically and intellectually.

It's easy to guess that it doesn't end well for the man, who's destroyed by a character that the playwright has posited as a symbol for America itself.

The play is more than a little dated in its politics, and such elements as Lula brandishing an apple and the sporadic appearances of a shuffling conductor (Paul Benjamin) are evidence of its heavy-handedness. But it nonetheless still packs a punch, thanks to Baraka's passionate and poetic language and director Bill Duke's powerful staging.

Performing on a set that, with Aaron Rhyne's video projections, cannily suggests a moving train, the actors deliver highly forceful performances. Hill persuasively moves from befuddlement to rage, while Mudge gives her malevolent seductress a provocative air of mystery.

Newsday

BY LINDA WINER

"Dutchman," revived in the West Village last night at the landmark Cherry Lane Theatre, belongs to a project with the comforting name Heritage Series. It would be very wrong, however, to expect inspirational samplers on the walls or the scent of homemade baked goods.

Rather, the heritage of "Dutchman" is racial fury and primal provocation - a warning against the deadly allure of the middle-class promise of white America.

First produced at the Cherry Lane in 1964, when Amiri Baraka still called himself LeRoi Jones, the hour-long drama reveals itself as both a seductive piece of theater and a vital chunk of civil rights history.

The theater has been handsomely transformed (by designer Troy Hourie and videographer Aaron Rhyne) into the bowels of the city, the D train on a hot summer day.

Director Bill Duke's production works against the play's schematic flaws with meticulously calibrated mood swings. Dulé Hill - late the presidential assistant in "West Wing" and current sidekick in "Psyche" - is impressive as Clay, a serious, young black professional who, despite the heat, appears not to break a sweat in his button-down suit.

Lula, played with breezy unpredictability and a wild heart by Jennifer Mudge, vamps her lily-white self into his space. Flashing enough cleavage to confuse her prey, she waves her behind under her little black dress (costumes by Rebecca Bernstein). Soon, she is tapping her fingertips on his thigh, first playing with him, then taunting him with the ambiguous menace of a child poking an animal with a stick.

It isn't hard to imagine the impact of this encounter on its turbulent times. The play, which won an Obie Award and was made into a film in 1967, was originally co-produced by Edward Albee. Malcolm X was murdered the following year. Jones abandoned the bohemian Village arts scene, moved to Harlem and then Newark, embraced Islam and black nationalism, and spent the '80s and '90s teaching African studies at Stony Brook. Lest anyone think he has mellowed, remember please that New Jersey dropped him as state poet laureate for his poem suggesting Israeli complicity in the World Trade Center attacks.

So here we are, back in the heat of more questioning times in the lovingly revitalized Cherry Lane playhouse where so many important voices were originally heard.

The playwright teases us with characters who are simultaneously archetypal and specific. Lula calls Clay an "Uncle Tom Big Lip" for aspiring to middle-class life, then seduces and destroys such men, one by one. Clay, finally provoked, makes brutal fun of Jones' downtown friends, the "Jewish poets from Yonkers who leave their mothers looking for other mothers" and the "old bald-headed four-eyed ofays, popping their fingers" to Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker - who loathe them all.

"If I'm a middle-class fake white man ... let me be," says Clay, suggesting that the pose restrains him from "cutting all your throats." Finally, a black conductor (the haunting Paul Benjamin) obscures the real crime - shuffling and grinning until the next one.

Financial Times

By Brendan Lemon

Published: January 22 2007 18:44 | Last updated: January 22 2007 18:44

The question posed by the off-Broadway revival of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman is not whether the play deserves a place in the canon (it does) but whether it retains its ability to detonate thought about American racism. Judging from Bill Duke’s unexceptional production at the Cherry Lane, the recently refurbished site of the drama’s premiere in 1964, when Baraka was known as LeRoi Jones, the answer tends towards the negative.

In this one-act confrontation between a besuited black man, Clay, and a temptation-wielding white woman, Lula, on a New York subway train, there is still power in the text. Clay’s culminating speech, with its deconstruction of white people’s views of Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker and its statement that “murder would make us all sane”, still crawls under your skin.

Yet as interpreted by Dule Hill, Clay has been drained of danger. Without menace – I once saw a production of this play where Clay’s transformation from bookish to violent had a few women in the front row squirming – there is no need to think of Dutchman as anything but diverting – a pastime not a provocation.

As for Lula, whether she represents a woman projecting on to Clay the memory of a fractured relationship or symbolises white America itself, sensually seductive but ultimately destructive, this version sheds little light. At least Jennifer Mudge conveys Lula’s unhinged come-hitherness. She winds her way around the train’s metal shafts like a stripper slithering round a pole.

The production’s chief pleasure is the designer Troy Hourie’s transformation of the theatre into a subway car. A conductor pulls back the doors to reveal the inside of the carriage, and rear video projections convey the whoosh of the train through its stops. The stations appear with unrealistic infrequency, making Clay’s comment on the subway’s slowness absurd, or at best ironic. Baraka’s text deserves more careful treatment.

newthreatre.com

Michael Criscuolo · January 18, 2007

Cherry Lane Theatre presents a new revival of Amiri Baraka's controversial 1964 play, Dutchman. When the author first wrote this play, he went by the name LeRoi Jones. The following description is from the show's press release: A white woman seduces a naïve bourgeois black man on the train with terrifying results. The themes and issues of this play are just as relevant today as the day it premiered, if not more." The production stars Dulé Hill (from the television series The West Wing), and is directed by veteran film actor and director Bill Duke (who has directed Sister Act 2 and The Cemetery Club, and appeared in Commando and Predator).

Amiri Baraka's Dutchman has endured for more than 40 years now. I'm guessing the reason for that lies not only with the play's Civil Rights Era subject matter, but also in Baraka's impassioned rhetoric. The playwright's Black Nationalist leanings show through in Dutchman's incendiary take on 1960s race relations. This is a subject that never gets old, as evidenced by the audience's vocal reactions to the play's denouement on the night I attended.

But, for me, the play—currently being revived at Cherry Lane Theatre—is a disappointment that does not live up to its storied hype. Baraka's anger eventually gets the better of him, as his writing veers away from dramatic storytelling and more toward overheated sermonizing. The author's point—that white America is out to destroy black America, and black America must strike back in order to survive—is clear, but he makes it early on and repeats it until the end, leaving Dutchman nowhere to go. The play feels more like a rallying cry than a thought-provoking drama. And, in today's age, Baraka's message has lost a little resonance. The timbre and complexion of racism has changed since 1964, and Dutchman's militant but simplistic tone now renders it more of a museum piece than anything else.

The story involves an encounter between Clay, a polished young black man, and Lula, a mercurial and alluring white woman. The moment she lays her femme fatale eyes on him, the audience knows a seduction will soon be under way. Within moments, the two are locked in an erotic cat-and-mouse game that escalates into a fatal racial confrontation.

The impetus for Dutchman's subway setting is a mystery. As far as I'm concerned, the story Baraka is interested in telling cannot play out convincingly in that environment. At first, Lula's seduction of Clay is so shameless that one would be justified in telling them to get a room. But, as she begins to taunt him with her liberal use of the word "nigger," the vibe grows more uncomfortable until violence erupts. Understandable, of course, but on a train full of people? Is the audience expected to believe that, during all of this, not one passenger tries to say or do something? Or, at least, move to another car? In New York?! I don't buy it.

Director Bill Duke's uneven production never clarifies what time period the play occurs in, either. The ads in Troy Hourie's D train set are clearly those of the 1960s (one passenger even reads a Life magazine with the Beatles on the cover), but Rebecca Bernstein's costumes are contemporary. Whether this disparity is intentional, and intended to make a thematic point, is never made clear. As it stands right now, it's just distracting.

Also, Duke's direction of the action between Clay and Lula, while lively, is dubious. At first, it's understandable that they stand on their seats, twirl around on poles, and generally make spectacles of themselves, since they're the only people on the train. But, when they don't alter their uninhibited behavior as the subway car fills up, Dutchman, to borrow a phrase from TV parlance, jumps the shark, and dissolves whatever credibility it's established up to that point.

As Clay, Dule Hill is dignified and reserved until he reaches Dutchman's climactic speech and unleashes the full enmity that his encounter with Lula has triggered. Jennifer Mudge, however, turns on the heat from the start and steals the show. Her force-of-nature performance is the most vibrant, unpredictable, and fascinating thing in Dutchman. She makes one long to see what she could do with another script.

While I acknowledge Dutchman's place in theatre history, it's clear that the blueprint Baraka laid out here has been modified (and bettered) since then by those who followed after him. If nothing else, theatergoers owe him a debt of gratitude for that.

ohio.com

PETER SANTILLI Associated Press

NEW YORK - More than four decades have passed since Amiri Baraka's controversial play "Dutchman" premiered at the Cherry Lane Theatre, causing a stir and garnering instant acclaim. Now the explosive subway-car drama returns, roaring and screeching, to the place where it first pulled out of the station.

The revival, which opened Monday at the Cherry Lane, is elevated by a versatile, combustible performance by its lead actor, Dule Hill, as well as a sleek, eye-pleasing set that imaginatively simulates the inside of a train as it rumbles underground from station to station.

Hill is best known for his work on the TV series "The West Wing" (for which he received an Emmy Award nomination) and more recently, USA Network's "Psych." But it was his dancing that first thrust him into the spotlight in the Broadway production of "Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk."

In "Dutchman," he plays, Clay, a young black man seduced on a train by Lula, a beautiful and antagonistic white woman, played with sinful charm by Jennifer Mudge.

Clay and Lula verbally dance and spar with each other, stirring a volatile mix of sexual and racial tension.

The original 1964 production won an Obie Award for best off-Broadway play and its racially charged commentary made it something of a hot button. It was the last play Baraka wrote under his former name, LeRoi Jones, and was later adapted for the screen.

Baraka has been a prominent figure in both literary and political circles, with a rise to notoriety that roughly coincided with the latter stages of the Beat Generation and the early part of the civil rights movement.

As a poet and playwright, much of his work is marked by a combativeness and unrelenting conviction that seems to trigger strong reactions from his audience - either for him or against him. In 2003, New Jersey lawmakers eliminated Amiri Baraka's position as poet laureate after he wrote a poem suggesting that Israel had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The polarizing effect of Baraka's politics aside, "Dutchman" reveals the poetic sensibility and unique style that made him a potent playwright.

The play, which runs just over an hour and is performed in one act, is directed by Bill Duke. Troy Hourie's set - a single train car - provides a dark but elegant, almost dreamlike, environment for the action to unfold. Video projected on the back wall of the stage, visible through the train's windows, effectively gives the illusion of the train in movement.

The aesthetic extends beyond the stage to envelop the audience, with simple tile mosaics lining sections of the theater's walls and video installations elsewhere that show people walking and waiting on subway platforms.