The first time David Alan Grier was in “A Soldier’s Play” was in 1982. In off-Broadway’s small Theater Four, he shared a dressing room with a couple of other unknowns — Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson.
“There was a 12-inch television stuck up near the ceiling,” Grier recalls. “We watched ‘Family Feud’ every day like it was ‘Game of Thrones.’ We had fun!”
Norman Jewison saw “A Soldier’s Play” many times before adapting it into a film in which he cast several of the play’s stars. But Jackson wasn’t one of them.
“Poor Sam,” Grier remembers thinking. “Our careers have taken off, but what’s gonna happen to him?”
As any moviegoer can tell you, Jackson turned out just fine — and so has Grier. Best known for that ’90s TV sketch show “In Living Color,” the 63-year-old has done it all: stand-up, movies and theater.
Now he’s back in “A Soldier’s Play,” opening Jan. 21 on Broadway. In Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer-winning drama, set at a segregated Army base in 1944 Louisiana, Grier plays volatile, vicious Sgt. Waters, who terrorizes his own men.
So fearsome is Grier onstage that it’s a relief when he shows up for brunch at Midtown’s Bond 45 soft-spoken, smiling and wearing a cowboy hat.
“I’m on a cleanse,” Grier says, over chamomile tea. Stirring in some honey, he says Kenny Leon, the director of this go-round of “A Soldier’s Play,” made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“I’d literally been sitting home, thinking I’d love to go back to Broadway, but it would have to be a limited run, because I have a young daughter,” says Grier, who lives in Los Angeles. “I came to this production with open ears, open arms and an open mind.”
As it happens, Grier’s own father was in the military, albeit during the Korean War. A psychiatrist and writer, William Henry Grier was made an Army captain. Growing up in Detroit, David and his siblings would play with their dad’s old uniforms.
Fresh out of the Yale School of Drama, Grier landed the lead in “The First,” a 1981 musical about Jackie Robinson. It folded a month after it opened, but Grier got a Tony nomination for it. Soon after, the “Soldier’s Play” actor playing Pvt. C.J. Memphis, the guitar-strumming country boy who becomes the object of Waters’ wrath, left the show.
Grier, who sings beautifully, got the part.
He expected to play C.J. in Jewison’s movie, too: “I brought my guitar and said, ‘I want to play this song for you,’ and Norman goes, ‘Please, put the guitar down. I want you to read for Cobb,’ ” another soldier. So Grier played Cobb.
They shot the film in Arkansas. Then-Gov. Bill Clinton and wife Hillary stopped by, Grier says, and made them all “honorary Arkansas-ians.” Jewison had the cast train as soldiers, and didn’t want Adolph Caesar — the film’s Sgt. Waters — to socialize with them.
“But Adolph thought it was horses - - t,” says Grier, who became a good friend of Caesar’s. “He did what he wanted.”
‘I tell young actors, ‘Just walk your path — do your work, and hope for the best.’’
There’s no Method acting in the Broadway production, either. “It’s not part of my process,” Grier says. Before he goes onstage, he listens to Count Basie and the blues; afterward, he decompresses by cooking — preferably “something slow, something low,” like the big pot of short ribs he made last weekend.
And, as you may have guessed from his work in “In Living Color” and a slew of other comedies, Grier likes to goof around — lodging a protest with Leon, his director, demanding equal shirtless time as his buff, chest-baring co-star, Blair Underwood.
“I felt that Waters should have his shirt off for body positivity,” jokes the stocky Grier, “and I was shut down! We’ll be bringing the case to arbitration!” It’s true, Leon tells The Post, laughing. “I told David, ‘You should get paid twice — for performing, and for entertaining us throughout the day.’ He’s an American treasure, and I love him to death.”
Back in 1982, none of the cast of “A Soldier’s Play” knew what the future held, Grier says. “I tell young actors, ‘Just walk your path — do your work, and hope for the best.’ ”
Then, picking up his cowboy hat, he heads off to rehearsal.