Dutchman

The title Dutchman is an allusion to The Dutch East India Company, the most renowned slave ship company of the 17th century, whose flagship for the voyages between West Africa and America, tradition says, was named Flying Dutchman. The literary legend is The Flying Dutchman in which the central character is ever in pursuit of prey that can never be caught. This production will include the music of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Experimental, allegorical and angry, Dutchman is set on a New York City subway train, where Lula, a young white woman, strikes up a conversation with Clay, a young middle-class black man. As the play unspools, she goads him, with liberal righteousness, into releasing the anger that, as a black man, he must surely be harboring.