Stage:

...The longer he talks the more we learn about Zooman-the absence of family, the tincertainty of friendship (his buddy tells the police that he fired the gun), the empty triumphs of his marginal life...

...If I understand the play correctly, however, Fuller is attempting more with them than with the troubled teenager...

...An old man wearing thick glasses, moving noisily along a subway platform violates Zooman's perverted sense of propriety (he can't hear his radio) and deserves the knife cut he gets...

...Although Ash's speeches got applause from the largely black audience with which I saw the play (Frances Foster is an accomplished and very popular actress), Fuller must want us to remember that the world she recalls-before welfare, before riots, before community self-destruction-was one of deprivation and humiliation that generations of blacks struggled to change...

...Ginny Tate, playing jacks on her own steps, is old enough to know better (too old for that' 'kid shit'' jacks) than to risk her life by imagining that there is a safe place in the jungle...

...Fuller has more difficulty with the Tates than with Zooman...

...He has given Ginny Tate her own personality, recreated in what her family say about her, and her own pointless death, which has occurred before the play begins...

...Reuben's attitude toward Ash's speeches suggests that he, at least, would not want to go back to a time when, as Ash says, blacks were poorer but more helpful to one another...

...Although he wishes to convey the personal sense of loss of the family, they also function within the social play as elements of the decaying environment...

...The neighborhood is certainly not a community in the best sense...

...In Zooman, he simply uses a real event as a place to begin...

...The play ends without ever carrying Reuben's confrontation with his neighbors to a dramatic or an ideational climax...

...At least, I assume (what was I saying about one's attention span for actual violence...

...Emmett and Rachel's older relative-particularly the latter-keep harping back to old patterns of community life, sustaining gestures that surely are not intended as simply beneficial...

...Zooman is the killer, a teenage hood with a real name of his own-it is projected on the curtain when he dies-who is played with such electricity by Giancarlo Esposito that he becomes at once attractive and repellent...

...A little girl, playing on her own front steps, was killed when two teenagers tried to gun down members of a rival gang...

...He hopes to shame them into civic responsibility, but instead he arouses their anger...

...Leaning over the boy's body at the end of the play, Reuben Tate may regret the loss implicit in any wasted life, early death, but the explanation of Zooman never becomes an excuse for his violent behavior...

...Yet it is far more interesting than many a neatly made play, ambitious enough to deserve the attention and the respect of theatergoers in search of substance...

...GERALD WEALESERALD WEALES...

...Stage WAR AGAINST THE TATES 'ZOOMAN AND THE SIGN' A YEAR OR SO ago an incident occurred in Philadelphia, so gratuitously ugly that it caught-at least momentarily-the attention and the sympathy of a city which, like most cities these days, is so full of casual violence that it can hardly focus on a specific crime for longer than the first television bulletin...

...Too often, on stage, in fiction, in sentimental popular sociology, that platitude is transformed into a vision which understands the criminal so thoroughly that the real victim is forgotten, turned into a detail in a psychological profile...

...It looks in the second act as though Fuller is going to make Reuben into Dr...

...In The Brownsville Raid, the 1976 play which did most to identify Fuller as a serious new dramatist, he examined one of the nastier episodes in the history of blacks in America...

...Fuller's play is finally disappointing because it does not achieve the form that will let it deal with its own complexities and because the characters never quite escape their representative quality...

...The sign of the play's title is one that Reuben hangs on his front porch when none of his neighbors comes forward to identify Ginny's killers...

...For Zooman, there was never the kind of community, the loss of which is one of the main subjects of Fuller's play...

...Fuller is concerned with the environment that has produced Zooman, but not at the expense of Ginny Tate and her family...

...that, aside from setting his play in Philadelphia, he is not concerned with the details of the original occurrence...

...Another teenager, a friend of Ginny's brother, describes Zooman as a little bit crazy-arid so perhaps he is-but he has assessed the world around him, marked off his own emotional territory, and he acts with a kind of hysterical rationality within that area...

...That death becomes the occasion for a consideration of the killer, the victim's family, the neighborhood, and, by implication, the society as a whole...

...Charles Fuller has taken that incident as a starting point for his new play, Zooman and the Sign...

...A woman carrying a purse invites robbery and, when she hangs on, screaming, earns the attack on her...

...Rachel, having buried the child and felt the neighborhood's unwillingness to be involved, wants to move away- another separation...

...They lack his theatrical flamboyance and, despite the details of their lives, have less validity on stage...

...There were never any stores on the boulevard, he insists of a once flourishing shopping street destroyed in a riot, never rebuilt...

...The environmental approach to crime assumes that the criminal is also a victim-the creation of poverty and societal indifference...

...Rachel and Reuben Tate, brought together by Ginny's death, have been living apart, a fragmented family in a fragmenting .society...

...Ash, like too many new conservatives, longs for the old virtues but sees them as necessary products of old indignities...

...Zooman, confused by Reuben's action (niggers don't act like that) comes to face the sign, to tear it down, and meets his death...

...Stockmann, to do his own version of The Enemy of the People, but the play only suggests that possibility...

...Except at the end of the play, he appears alone, talking boastingly to the audience, strutting, preening-and justifying, endlessly justifying his every violent act...

...The child-killer is not so dangerous to this street, lined with families looking after themselves first, as the troublemaker who proclaims their shortcomings to the world out there (television cameras come)-the official, the white world which they hope to avoid by shutting up, not noticing, turning away...

...The son gets a pistol, an impulse toward vengeance that can be heard in almost every speech of his great-uncle Emmett, who finally kills Zooman although he does not know at whom he is shooting...