Charles Fuller, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982 for “A Soldier’s Play,” which finally made it to Broadway 38 years later in a production that earned two Tony Awards, died Monday in Toronto. He was 83.

His wife, Claire Prieto-Fuller, confirmed the death.

Fuller was only the second Black playwright to win the Pulitzer for drama. (Charles Edward Gordone won in 1970 for “No Place to Be Somebody.”) His plays often examined racism and sometimes drew on his background as an Army veteran. Both of those elements were evident in “A Soldier’s Play,” which was Fuller’s reimagining of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and centered on the murder of a Black Army sergeant and the search for the culprit.

The play was first staged in 1981 by the Negro Ensemble Company in New York with a cast that included Denzel Washington. Frank Rich, in his review in The New York Times, called it “a relentless investigation into the complex, sometimes cryptic pathology of hate” and praised Fuller’s delineation of both the Black and the White characters.

“Mr. Fuller demands that his Black characters find the courage to break out of their suicidal, fratricidal cycle,” Rich wrote, “just as he demands that Whites end the injustices that have locked his Black characters into the nightmare.”

Hollywood came calling. A 1984 film version, retitled “A Soldier’s Story” and directed by Norman Jewison, had a cast that included Washington, Howard E. Rollins Jr., David Alan Grier, Wings Hauser, Adolph Caesar and Patti LaBelle. It received three Oscar nominations, including one for Fuller’s screenplay.

In “A Soldier’s Play” and his other works, Fuller strove to serve up not idealized Black characters but ones who reflected reality.

“In the ’60s and early ’70s, Black plays were directed at Whites,” Fuller told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, when the Negro Ensemble Company’s production of “A Soldier’s Play” was staged in San Diego. “They were primarily confrontational pieces, whose major concern was to address racism and White-Black relationships in this country. Now we are much more concerned with examining ourselves, with looking at our own situations — historically in many instances. We are seeing characters who are more complex, ones who have bad qualities as well as good ones.”

“A Soldier’s Play,” he told the Times in 2020, drew in part on his upbringing in a tough neighborhood of north Philadelphia.

“I grew up in a project in a neighborhood where people shot each other, where gangs fought each other,” he said. “Not White people — Black people, where the idea of who was the best, toughest, was part of life. We have a history that’s different than a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t cheat on each other, kill each other, love each other, marry each other, do all that, things that, really, people anywhere in the world do.”

Charles H. Fuller Jr. was born March 5, 1939, in Philadelphia. His father was a printer, and his mother, Lillian Teresa Fuller, was a homemaker and foster mother. He was a student at Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia when he attended his first play, a production performed in Yiddish at the Walnut Street Theater.

“I didn’t understand a word,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1977, but somehow it sparked his interest in becoming a playwright.