Stephen McKinley Henderson and Liza Colón-Zayas in 'Between Riverside and Crazy.' Kevin Thomas Garcia

Between Riverside and Crazy

Atlantic Theater Company, Linda Gross Theater,


866-811-4111, extended through Aug. 23

New York

Stephen McKinley Henderson is an actor's actor, universally admired in the business but mostly unknown outside it. Why? Because he's a character actor, not a leading-man type. He plays supporting roles, some of them quite small, though you never fail to notice him. A case in point was the recent Broadway revival of "A Raisin in the Sun," in which he was onstage for no more than five minutes yet still managed, as the saying goes, to eat everybody else's lunch. That makes it all the more delightful to watch him strut his formidable stuff in Stephen Adly Guirgis's "Between Riverside and Crazy," of which he is, at long last, the undisputed star. Mr. Henderson, who spends most of the play sitting in a wheelchair, acts with such seeming effortlessness that you'll have to look twice—maybe even three times—to catch him stealing every scene.

They're worth stealing, too. Like "The Motherf**ker With the Hat," Mr. Guirgis's previous play, "Between Riverside and Crazy" is a hard-headed kitchen-sink comedy, one that has serious things to say about lower-middle-class urban life, race relations and the corrosive effects of resentment on the human soul. Yet the playwright makes his points in an unfailingly unpredictable way, embedding them in the twisty tale of a retired, newly widowed cop (Mr. Henderson) who got shot off duty and is well on the way to wasting the rest of his life fuming about it. You can probably guess some of what happens next, but not most of it, for Mr. Guirgis has a firm grasp of the endless complexity of human motivation, and he always knows when to pull another rabbit out of his hat, just as he knows how to write dialogue that sounds as if he'd heard it in the street. If August Wilson had tried his hand at comedy, I bet it would have played a lot like this.

Everyone else in the Atlantic Theater Company's seven-person ensemble cast is as terrific as you'd expect, and Austin Pendleton's staging, which makes creative use of Walt Spangler's turntable set, allows Mr. Henderson to work his minimalist magic as unobtrusively as possible. "I thought you were a serious man," one of the other characters asks him, to which he replies "I am" in a way that tells you everything about the angry man he's playing. The last actor I heard get that much out of two syllables was Randolph Scott.

"Between Riverside and Crazy" isn't as tightly wrought as "The Motherf**ker With the Hat," which contained not a single wasted 12-letter word. The first act is slightly top-heavy with exposition, though the dialogue is so well written (and played) that you'll let it slide. But it's still a grand play that merits a long life, and if the world were just, it would transfer to Broadway—with Mr. Henderson's name in lights at the top of the marquee.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, is the winner of one of this year's Bradley Prizes. Write to him at