Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman remains one of the most incisive allegories in American drama—a modern tale in which seduction, power, and racial history collide in the confined space of a subway car. Trap Door Theatre’s production, directed with precision and calculated risk by Keith Surney, resurrects the play’s mythic and political undercurrents, deepening its resonance as both ritual and warning.
Baraka titled his 1964 play after the legend of the Flying Dutchman, the ghost ship doomed to sail the seas forever, unable to find port. In Baraka’s interpretation, a subway car becomes that ship—an eternal vessel circling the underworld of American consciousness. The passengers are ghosts of history; the cycle of desire and destruction never ends. Surney underscores the play’s endless cycle of seduction and destruction by dividing Lula among three actresses—Carolyn Benjamin (white dress), Genevieve Corkery (red dress), and Ali Foley (blue dress)—each embodying a different facet of America’s recurring racial performance. Together, they form a chorus of seduction and menace, representing the shifting faces of white America—erotic, violent, and self-possessed. Their presence before the play begins, prowling the stage like sirens holding apples, transforms the theatre into a space of temptation and foreboding.
Surney himself plays Clay, the young Black intellectual aboard this spectral train unaware of his fate. His Clay is both composed and vulnerable—buttoned suit, tie, but no shirt—an image that literalizes the illusion of assimilation stripped of safety. Lula, one at a time, approaches him with the ferocity of predators, their sexuality exaggerated to the edge of discomfort. Surney embraces that discomfort deliberately, making it clear that the erotic tension in Baraka’s play is not merely physical—it is historical, rooted in the dangerous seductions of American liberalism and white desire.
The production’s design reinforces the tension between abstraction and reality. Viscaya Wilson’s bare stage of metal poles offers a skeletal suggestion of a subway car, though it lacks the oppressive grit that defines the New York underground. For a native New Yorker, the environment may not fully convince, yet its sparseness allows the actors’ physical and emotional choreography to dominate the space. Gary Damico’s lighting cuts through the minimalism - isolating bodies in sharp contrast. The uncredited sound design fills in what the set omits. The deep metallic rumbles immerse the audience in a world both real and hallucinatory, the jazz soundscape itself becoming the heartbeat of Baraka’s infernal train.
At moments, Surney allows erotic interplay to linger past its breaking point, delaying the eruption of Clay’s righteous fury. Yet when that fury finally arrives, the scene ignites with the same volatility that scandalized audiences in 1964. The words still wound; the violence still feels inevitable.
One critic described Baraka’s original Dutchman as “an explosion of hatred,” a reflection of a truth white America could barely confront. Trap Door Theatre’s version does not soften that explosion—it contextualizes it. Baraka’s play is a parable of historical repetition. The subway, like the ghost ship, circles endlessly, carrying the same sins and the same souls. In this staging, Dutchman becomes a ritual exorcism—a reminder that America’s voyage through its own darkness is far from over.
Baraka would soon transform from LeRoi Jones, the bohemian poet of downtown New York, into Amiri Baraka, the militant architect of the Black Arts Movement. Dutchman marks that turning point—a theatrical bridge between personal identity and collective consciousness. Surney’s production captures this moment of awakening, reminding us that Baraka’s rage was never chaos but clarity: a demand that America look into its mirror and recognize the ghost at its shoulder. Trap Door Theatre’s Dutchman sails that ghost ship again, not to escape the curse, but to make us hear, once more, the hum of its unending voyage beneath our feet.
That clarity also defines Keith Surney’s directorial debut, a bold and fearless entry that takes genuine risks—some raw, some revelatory— announcing a director unafraid to challenge both text and audience. If Dutchman is a voyage into the heart of America’s contradictions, Surney steers it with both daring and intellect. I’ll be looking to see more of him in the future.
Highly Recommended
Where: Trapdoor Theatre, 1655 W Cortland St, Chicago
Running time: 50 minutes
Tickets: $22
