Read and see the cast's improvisational rehearsal on Actual Mass Trasit

Baraka on Revolutionary Theater
Baraka and the Black Arts Movement.
Social Change and Black Art
How to Teach Baraka's Work
Baraka Books available at Amazon.com
A Biography of Baraka
Baraka's Own Homepage

Discussion of Dutchman
The Fringe Festival Website

Tickets $16
Read reviews of the production

REVIEWS:
Iron Age Theatre, based in Norristown's Centre Theater, travels to the African American Museum in Philadelphia for the Fringe Festival with Dutchman, an explosive drama penned in 1964 by Amiri Baraka.
Director John Doyle's production features Garrett Lee Hendricks as a middle-class Black man who encounters a provocative white woman, played by Kate McLenigan, on a New York subway train. Baraka explores the fabric of American race relations in a play that, while one of the landmark works of the early '60s avant garde, still feels contemporary after 38 years.
Doyle, a Villanova University grad, sculpts the world around the action with projected collages by Philadelphia artist Theodore A. Harris and visceral music choices.
The seductive encounter between Lula and Clay evokes ideas of corporate American (read "white") culture seducing, confusing and ultimately crushing the back man's identity.
It's an unsettling, emotionally violent play, made specific and personal by Hendricks and McLenigan's vivid performances.
Clay's a clean-cut, understandably timid man coaxed boldness by Lula's seductiveness. Their relationship evolves circuitously through the unrelenting 75-minute drama. McLenigan and Hendricks find humor and humanity in Baraka's words, but the growing sense of danger builds suspensefully to a surprising conclusion.
Mark Cofta
Main Line Ticket

Both Kate McLeningan (Lula) and Garrett Lee Hendricks (Clay) are impressive in their roles as the combatants, but the play's finale leaves us stumped. For while we can certainly understand and perhaps even laud any aggressive action on Clay's part, Baraka throws us a curve, making us unsure whether Dutchman is a call to arms, an act of contrition, or both.
Dutchman is effective as a wake-up call to those who are simply content to be forever pushed to and fro by the never-ending tide of subjugation.
Cooper Robb
Philadelphia Weekly

It comes from a 2002 production of Amiri Baraka's incendiary work Dutchman (1964), set against the backdrop of Theodore A. Harris's projected collages and staged by the Iron Age Theatre at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Through this image, the play as an important historic artifact, mounted in a museum that houses history, resonates with and reflects upon displaced racial, gendered and sexual "realities" from an earlier decade. At the same time, the juxtaposition of the actual contemporary performers with the evocative collage project of Harris that tells its own history promotes new articulations and interrogations of what constitutes the real. Part of what is so powerful about this image and why it was selected as the cover is that in viewing it we see not just the bodies on stage, but the projected images behind them as well. Each may be evocative on their own, but it is through their intertexuality, through reading the projected backdrop juxtaposed with the actors, through rubbing them against each other, that we understand a larger meaning. In this instance, then, the real is mediated through the visual intersections of bodies and projections.
Harry Elam
Theatre Journal

The play was an emotional roller coaster of theatrical genius. Both Kate McLeningan (Lula) and Garrett Lee Hendricks (Clay) are impressive in their roles as adversaries.
The reality of their performance pulls the audience into their seductive encounter and their violent emotions.
Hendricks gives a convincing performance as the clean-cut, apprehensive Clay, while McLeningan is sultry in her seductiveness, taking the audience completely by surprise when she maliciously and intentionally stabs Clay to death.
Her actions cause the audience to questions her motives, especially her initial interactions with Clay.
The production was enhanced by the beautiful, large, and colorful murals created by Philadelphia artist Theodore A. Harris.
Dutchman exposes the political issues of racial injustice, bigotry, ignorance, and society’s intolerance towards diversity.
The dramatic ending leaves the audience unsure whether this play is a wake-up call to the human spirit or a cry for forgiveness and remorse. In the words of Amiri Baraka, "All men live in the world, and the world ought to be a place for them to live."
Amanda Nelson
The Wingspan

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