Christopher G. Roberts wrote and directed the powerful SteppingStone ensemble production, which is based on a real-life incident. Roberts also gives a complex performance as Isaac Woodard Jr., a decorated U.S. Army sergeant who was blinded in a vicious assault by a white sheriff in Batesburg, S.C.

We first see Woodard in 1951, in the Bronx, N.Y., where he ekes out a living playing his guitar on the street, drinking too much, trying to support his two young children and his loyal but disillusioned wife, Rosie (a charming performance by Chanel Carroll).

When the Woodards are visited by two menacing police detectives, who seem determined to convict Isaac of a petty crime he says he didn’t commit, he begins to have flashbacks to the terrible incident in 1946 that ruined his young life.

In disturbing scenes that do not shy away from raw, ugly language and behavior, Woodard is shown with friends in military uniform at a segregated rest stop where he is falsely accused of causing a disturbance, detained without cause, then remorselessly beaten, more than once, by the racist sheriff.

Deliberately left in a jail cell for several days without medical treatment, he becomes permanently blind, and is eventually shipped off to a veterans’ hospital.