Something unusual is happening onstage at Black Ensemble Theater: No one is singing. If you’ve always viewed the House That Jackie Taylor Built as the place to go for roof-raising musical bio-dramas — well, you’re not wrong. But with Ervin Gardner’s “The Trial of Moses Fleetwood Walker,” now in its world premiere under Taylor’s direction, Black Ensemble takes a steadfast turn around the bases with a (nearly) nonmusical drama for the first time in many years.
Based on the real — and fascinating — story of Walker, who by many standards deserves pride of place over Jackie Robinson as the first black man to play major league baseball, Gardner’s courtroom drama resonates with our current open wounds around race and criminal justice.
The trial structure in the script makes for some unnecessarily schematic moments, and we don’t get enough time with the title character (played with stoic intensity by Andre Teamer). But Gardner, a first-time playwright, has hit on a story that deserves amplification, if not musicalization. (It still gets some of that — a live string band under Robert Reddrick’s musical direction provides evocative underscoring that sounds like country blues with an urbane twist.)
Walker, born to a black physician father and a white mother in Ohio, was a catcher in 1884 for the Toledo Blue Stockings, then part of the major league American Association. His short-lived time in the majors was behind him in April 1891, when he was charged with second-degree murder for killing a white man in a brawl outside a saloon in Syracuse, N.Y. (The saloon, according to news accounts, was called The Crouse, but Gardner goes a bit heavy-handed by renaming it “the Plantation.”)
It’s not clear how much the events and dialogue in Gardner’s script were drawn from actual court documents. What is clear, however, is that Walker’s trial, in which he claimed self-defense, was a flash point for a nation still reeling from the Civil War.
Could a black man accused of killing a white man get actual justice in a time when hundreds of black men were lynched on trumped-up charges before they ever got to the courthouse? Gardner sets up the public viewpoint by having sidebar conversations among two different public galleries. The trio in the whites section includes two enlightened Northern liberals squaring off against an Alabama redneck bent on seeing Walker hang, while the choral trio of black onlookers hope, despite all they know about segregated justice in America, that Walker’s attorney, the legendary Harrison Hoyt (Nick Ferrin), will prevail against the racial attitudes of the time.
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The parade of white witnesses becomes a bit repetitive in their craven ineptitude, as neatly demolished by Ferrin’s Hoyt. (Not that craven and inept witnesses have ever been a barrier to convictions.) But when Teamer’s Walker takes the stand in his own defense and squares off against a prosecutor who probes him about his “tribal” affiliations as a means of proving that violence is in his “blood,” and describes him as a “liquor-induced, primitive beast,” there are clear echoes with how black victims even today are described (whether openly or by insinuation) as “thugs” deserving of their fates. That point is driven home by a video collage juxtaposing headlines from Walker’s time with Emmett Till’s murder, on through Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice.
Gardner’s script could use some tightening — as a new playwright, he still has a tendency to tell, rather than show. Tamarus Harvell’s Weldy Walker, brother of the accused, gets the most stirring polemical speech, but we still long to hear “Fleet” talk more off the stand about his life.
But as it is, this is a sharp and heartfelt account of an important footnote in American history. Gardner and Black Ensemble deserve credit for giving Moses Fleetwood Walker a theatrical turn at bat.
3 STARS
When: Through March 15
Where: Black Ensemble Theater, 4450 N. Clark St.
Running time: 2 hours
Tickets: $55-$65 at 773-769-4451 or blackensemble.org