The murderous teen-ager who is the title character of Charles Fuller's "Zooman and the Sign" is, on his own harrowingly skewed terms, a thorough egalitarian. In the stunning monologue that begins the 1980 play, which has been revived at the Second Stage Theater, this inner-city Philadelphia youth seems to cast an eye of combustible contempt over anyone who crosses his line of vision. He knifed an "ole jive West Indian" at a subway stop, he tells us, because the man was swinging his arms as if he owned the platform. He is glad, he says, that his aged aunt's Social Security check was stolen by junkies. Old people in general, "all bent over and twisted up, skin hanging off their faces," make him sick.
As for the girl he accidentally killed that day in a shooting that is the mainspring of the play's plot, it was entirely her fault. The "little bitch," as he puts it, had no business sitting on her front steps in the middle of what everyone knows is "a war zone."
As portrayed by Larry Gilliard Jr., in a smart, bravura performance that makes no apologies for his character, Zooman is a marvel of disaffection. He punctuates his frightening pronouncements with a mechanical, joyless whinny of a laugh, and his eyes rove the audience with a dead, ever-defensive gaze. He's a morally anesthetized punk, a spiritual cousin of the futurist hoodlums of "A Clockwork Orange" who nonetheless belongs, all too familiarly, to the America of today.
Mr. Fuller's take on the phenomenon this character represents still seems remarkable in its nonjudgmental clearsightedness and intelligence. "Zooman" remains a play with problems, and Seret Scott's straightforward production, while admirable in its nonsensationalist restraint, doesn't succeed in disguising them. The drama lacks the taut narrative drive and full-bodied characterizations of "A Soldier's Story," the 1981 work for which the author won a Pulitzer Prize.
But its searing presentation of the logic of a world in which people on both sides of the law become dehumanizingly interchangeable continues to demand attention. "Zooman" animates a moral argument in rich and uncompromisingly complex ways that avoid reductionist explanations and consoling solutions.
The play shifts between Zooman's self-justifying monologues and scenes that show the family of Jinny Tate, the 12-year-old girl the youth killed, dealing with the effects of the crime. There is grief, of course, but also righteous indignation when they realize that while many of their neighbors must have witnessed the killing, none will admit it.
The Tates deal with this realization in resonantly different ways. Jinny's mother, Rachel (Oni Faida Lampley), numbed by pain and disgust, wants only to leave the neighborhood. Her 14-year-old son, Victor (Alex Bess in an affectingly understated performance), gets a gun from a friend. Jinny's father, Reuben (Tony Todd), a bus driver and former prize fighter, puts up a sign that says, "The killers of our daughter Jinny are free on the streets because our neighbors will not identify them." This in turn sets off a chain of events, including nasty harassment of the family, that becomes a study in social pathology.
The play's most remarkable achievement is that Zooman makes a certain warped sense. His undiscriminating hostility reflects an environment that perceives him as faceless, a ready-made scapegoat. "Every time somebody black did something and the cops didn't have a name, they busted me!" he says. The arbitrarily brutal life he knows is for him part of a given system with its own set of rules. Even more disturbing is the fact that most of the Tates' neighbors seem to accept those rules as well.
As Rachel observes: "No one buried in the graveyard can read their own inscription. And this neighborhood is dead." And throughout the drama, there is a sense of people acting blindly with misbegotten results. Zooman, aiming at a gangland enemy, shoots a girl he has never met. The Tates accuse the wrong neighbor of withholding evidence. And Zooman's final undoing involves his being mistaken for someone else.
Mr. Fuller charts this futile pattern compellingly and persuasively. The domestic drama of the Tates is less convincing. A subplot about tension in the marriage and its effect on the children seems perfunctory and patly sentimental. And Ms. Scott, while keeping themes in sturdy focus, is less sure in building the play emotionally, and its climax is curiously flat.
The actors, who include Stephen M. Henderson and Saundra McClain in deftly shaped turns as visiting relatives, are all solid. Mr. Todd, a towering man who wears his size with appealing awkwardness, is considerably more. His Reuben is a giant of confused sorrow, loaded with the potential for violence, and his suppressed explosiveness is the perfect foil for Mr. Gilliard's casually worn destructiveness.
The current theater season, with its revivals of such recent works as Wendy Wasserstein's "Uncommon Women and Others" (also at the Second Stage) and Michael Cristofer's "Shadow Box," has demonstrated that topical plays can date quickly. "Zooman," however, remains a bracing and unfortunately relevant piece of theater.
ZOOMAN AND THE SIG By Charles Fuller; directed by Seret Scott; sets by Marjorie Bradley Kellogg; costumes by Karen Perry; lighting by Michael Gilliam; sound by Janet Kalas; production stage manager, Elise-Ann Konstantin; stage manager, Elaine Bayless; associate producer, Carol Fishman. Presented by the Second Stage Theater, Carole Rothman, artistic director; Suzanne Schwartz Davidson, producing director. At 2162 Broadway, at 76th Street, Manhattan.
Larry Gilliard Jr. (Zooman), Oni Faida Lampley (Rachel Tate), Tony Todd (Reuben Tate), Stephen M. Henderson (Emmett Tate), Alex Bess (Victor Tate), Willie Stiggers Jr. (Russell Adams), Ed Wheeler (Donald Jackson), Saundra McClain (Ash Boswell) and Kim Bey (Grace Georges).
