The Legend of Buster Neal: Exploring the Meaning of Manhood

Becoming a man is a hard road to travel.

In the play, “The Legend of Buster Neal,” now playing at the Billie Holiday Theatre, the concept of manhood for African-American males is explored with blunt accuracy, matching the bumpy roads traveled 50 years ago against how it feels to be a black man today.

The play is written and directed by Jackie Alexander, who – similar to his previous production, “Brothers from the Bottom,” – artfully addresses today’s societal ills. What makes his work artful can be found in the subtle details, which are natural, accessible and feel unimposing.

The play opens in the Jim Crow-era South. A black man, Buster Neal (played by Nathan Purdee) appears sitting on his front porch, shotgun in lap. It was a standoff between him and a group of white men who were looking for his wife, surrounding a false accusation of her stealing. Finally, shooting ensues between Neal and the group of men (fade to black), leaving the audience to presume the worst.

In the next scene, the audience is transported to modern times, in which two young black teens are joking around, happy, playfully trading hip hop verses. The older teen, Marcus (played by Dennis Johnson) is breaking down to 14-year-old Hubcap (played by Sidiki Fofana) how his life of drug dealing is putting money in his pocket and earning him street cred. Sixteen-year-old Marcus is the great-grandson of Buster Neal, now long deceased.

Legend is, Buster Neal fought a gang of hostile white men with one shot gun, oh yes he did— all to protect his wife. He was unafraid to die, because he was a soldier, oh yes that Buster Neal was— and he met his death by defending his family’s honor.

The play centers around the reappearance of Buster Neal into Marcus’s life, just as his great-grandson – scared and clueless – begins to come of age and make choices he believes define manhood, adopting his drugs supplier, Tank (played by Charles Anthony Burks) as his de facto male mentor.

Buster Neal’s ghost returns in the flesh, posing as his great-grandfather’s friend. The only person who would recognize him from back then is his son, Papa Melvin (played by Patrick Mitchell), who is also Marcus’s grandfather and who is now blind from injuries fighting in the Vietnam War.

And so the family accepts him into their home without question, opening the way for very layered conversations about dealing with hardships and becoming a man through perspectives that span four generations.

By design, women are absent from the play (apart from a phone call from Marcus’s mother). But the urgency of the topics explored in these male-only conversations clearly answers for this absence.

What does it really mean to be a man?

Again and again, this question is asked, while never expressly stated. Instead, it is played out through such pressing themes as permissive parenting; the growing difficulty for black men to relate to the struggles of each passing generation; responsibility for self and family; the fear within fathers to step up to the plate; the use of the word “nigga;” and the tendency we all have of finding fault in others in order to not see our own.

“It’s a rare man that can see his own faults and take responsibility for his actions,” said Buster Neal to Marcus’s father (played by Stephen Hill). “Kids can spot a hypocrite a mile away. And chances are, they’re not going to listen to a word we got to say.”

The play’s biggest challenge with its audience may be in the writer’s attempt to bridge the huge chasm between the realities of each generation. The gap is so stark and so wide from one generation to the next, at times the conversations between the characters don’t always bind, leaving the audience in a state of near vertigo.

The attempt to bridge this massive gap, however, further underscores the work needed for reconciliation and meaningful relationships between black men.

As distinct as son is from father is from grandfather (in how they view manhood), there is one role upon which they all seem to agree, and that is as a soldier – because for them, life as a black man in America is a battlefield with no promise of survival.

For the legendary Buster Neal and his shotgun, he is a soldier and protector of his family. Papa Melvin served as a real-life soldier who survived Vietnam and went on to raise a family.

And for the young Marcus, his battle was with the streets, where he used drug dealing to achieve what he felt he deserved as a man: Dignity, respect and a chance at the American Dream.

“I’m a soldier, like my great-grandfather,” he says with pride, vacantly comparing his gun-toting, drug-dealing lifestyle to his shotgun-strung great-grandfather.

Although The Legend of Buster Neal, at times, can get a little visceral – depending upon how deeply you're prepared to think about the subject matter – thankfully, it still offers enough drama, humor and triumph to entertain.

And as long as the question of what defines a man remains unclear within African-American circles, The Legend of Buster Neal rises as one of the most valiant and relevant dramatic discourses in Black Theatre today.

The Legend of Buster Neal opened March 4th and runs through March 27th at the 200-seat Billie Holiday Theatre, Restoration Plaza, 1368 Fulton Street, Brooklyn; Thursdays – Saturdays at 8:00pm, Saturdays at 3:00pm, and Sundays at 4:00pm. Tickets are $15 - $25, available at zerve.com/BHolidayInc/Buster.