Written when Amiri Baraka was still going by LeRoi Jones, 1964’s Dutchman is a deliberately discomfiting blend of absurdism and political allegory. Set on a subway train in New York and unfolding in real time, the story involves a young Black man named Clay (representative of his seemingly malleable nature and identity) and a white temptress named Lula, who makes her entrance munching on an apple like Eve. She teases and seduces while tormenting and insulting (a suitable embodiment of how the American dream has long been dangled just out of reach for non-white people). Clay largely avoids rising to the bait—until she mocks him as “Uncle Thomas Woolly-Head.”

Keith Surney’s spare but sharp staging for Trap Door, in which he plays Clay, divides Lula’s role between three actors—Carolyn Benj

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