‘Why am I a hero if I die, and a nuisance if I live?” It’s a question that haunts many veterans. In Charles Fuller’s heavy-handed new drama, “One Night . . . ,” it’s asked by a former Army sergeant named Alicia (Rutina Wesley, best known as Tara on “True Blood”).
Alicia has it especially bad. When the show starts, she and fellow vet Horace (Grantham Coleman) are checking into a shabby motel room after a fire forces them from a homeless shelter.
Alicia’s acting particularly skittish, and through a series of flashbacks, we learn why: She was gang-raped by fellow soldiers when she was in Iraq, and her attempts at seeking justice have been rebuffed.
“You can’t ask a man to stop being a man just because he wears a uniform” is one of the excuses she’s given. Another is that making accusations would rock the boat and endanger morale.
The experience has left her shattered. “They stripped my meaning from me,” she says, “who I thought I am.”
Over the course of that one night, in that one motel room, we go down the rabbit hole of memory and trauma with Alicia and Horace — who’s doing only marginally better, though the reasons for his problems are more mysterious. The pair are a living textbook illustration of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Army culture is something Fuller knows firsthand. He served three years, starting in 1959, and won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize with “A Soldier’s Play” — which he adapted into the movie “A Soldier’s Story.”
But “One Night . . .” is both over- written and underwritten.
Every scene lays on the melodrama super-thick. The motel’s bathroom has such thin walls, for instance, that you can hear everything next door — and, wouldn’t you know it, a prostitute’s hard at work there.
At the same time, the characters are blanks and it’s hard to care about them. The problem is made worse by Clinton Turner Davis’ ham-fisted direction and the uneven acting.
Wesley was excellent in her previous theater outing, “The Submission,” and she does her best to look shellshocked and haggard here. But fragility isn’t this vital actress’s forte.
At least she fares better than Coleman, who’s telegraphing his character’s instability, and Cortez Nance Jr., sounding false as the gun-slinging motel manager: Their scenes together are numbingly dull.
It’s been too long since we heard from Fuller. With any luck, he’ll follow this misfire with something better.