Because of personal scheduling problems, I had to postpone
the final two productions of the 2014-15 season at the Signature Theatre
Company, originally booked for late May.
When I got back to New York City at the beginning of June, I immediately
reserved seats for A. R. Gurney’s What I
Did Last Summer (report posted on ROT
on 28 June) and Athol Fugard’s The
Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek because both plays were scheduled to close
soon after I arrived home. (Both
productions, in fact, have closed: Summer
on 7 June and Painted Rocks on 14
June after two extension.)
I went up to the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre
Row for the Saturday matinee of the world première of The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek in the Romulus Linney Courtyard
Theatre, the company’s variable-space theater that seats about 190 patrons, on
6 June. (For this staging, the Linney
was configured as a modified proscenium house.)
The play, directed by the author, had begun previews on 21 April and
opened to the press on 11 May; it had been scheduled to close on 31 May, but
was extended first to 7 June and then for a week more. Fugard, 83 on 11 June, was the Residency One
playwright at Signature in 2011-2012 (Blood Knot, My Children! My Africa!, The Train Driver); Painted
Rocks marks the South African dramatist’s return to STC as a Legacy
Playwright.
The Painted Rocks
at Revolver Creek was inspired by the work and life of outsider artist Nukain Mabusa (a
common alternative spelling is “Mabuza.”), making the play Fugard’s second
about an outsider or visionary artist.
The first was The Road to Mecca, which is about Helen Martins (1897-1976),
another South African outsider artist.
(For ROTters interested in outsider or visionary art, see my
article “Outsider Art,” posted on this blog on 9 January.) Between the 1960s and 1980, Nukain Mabusa, a
South African farm laborer who was born in Mozambique sometime soon after the
turn of the 20th century, painted the rocks that dotted a hill near his hut in
Revolver Creek in Mpumalanga, South Africa, in brilliantly-colored
patterns. He called them flowers” and the rocky, barren
hill was “the most beautiful garden in the whole world.”
Introduced to the stone garden of Mabusa (d. 1981) in 2010 or so, Fugard
looked him up on the ’Net and “the moment I saw what Mabusa had achieved, I
realized I was in the presence of a fellow artist.” He sketched out a draft of a play, called Visions,
which he put aside until Jim Houghton, STC’s founding artistic director,
invited the playwright to return to the theater under the auspices of the
Legacy Program.
“Strange as it may seem,” says Fugard, “I consider myself an outsider
artist,” which he defines “as someone who has created something
significant or beautiful with no formal training in any artistic discipline,”
and therefore conceived an identification with Mabusa to whom, he said, “I
naturally respond.” The writer’s first
efforts yielded a one-act play about “the living Mabusa,” but his “partner,
Paula Fourie, said, . . . ‘You’re not engaging our present reality. You’re stopping short of it.” So Fugard added a second act that continued
the play’s tale after the visionary artist’s suicide in 1981 and the dramatist
said that the story took on a life of its own.
“I would bring back two of the characters from Act I, and now they would
be in the new South Africa, dealing with those issues” concerning land
ownership and the place of the Afrikaner in a new society. (The program included a note making clear
that although Painted Rocks was “suggested by the life of” Mabusa, the
play “is a work of fiction and is not intended to” depict any actual history of
the outsider artist.)
The Painted Rocks
at Revolver Creek, a 90-minute, two-act play, is divided into two parts—almost two connected one-acts (though act two couldn’t stand alone, while act one
might). Set in 1981, the year of
Mabusa’s death, the first act shows Nukain on a Sunday afternoon arriving at
the top of the rocky hill where he’s been painting his flowers for 15 years. He’s accompanied by Bokkie, an 11-year-old
boy who’s become a sort of protégé of the farm worker-artist and pulls the small
cart that holds the painting materials. Nukain’s about to try once again to paint “The
Big One,” the largest rock on the hill which has been daunting him since he
finished painting all the smaller stones.
It’s scared him and he doesn’t know why or what to do about it. Talking and singing with Bokkie, who cleans
his brushes and mixes his paints, Nukain recounts his life, a meandering search
for work that eventually brought him to this Afrikaner farm in Revolver
Creek. He talks about the many roads he
walked; the rainbows he’s seen overhead despite the horrors he’s witnessed; the
places from which he’d been turned away—all the burdens of apartheid,
the racist policies of white, Afrikaner-ruled South Africa. The white South Africans, Nukain tells
Bokkie, “got eyes but they do not see us.” Suddenly, the tired, old man
comes to vibrant life: he knows what to paint on The Big One. He instructs Bokkie to start painting: “Give
him eyes!” he tells Bokkie. “We are
going to give the big one eyes,” Nukain explains, “so that he can see me now
when I stand here.” And the boulder soon becomes not one of Mabusa’s
flowers, but an abstract representation of the farm laborer’s life—his
“story.” Boy and man are both excited,
thrilled not just with the impulse of creativity but of finding a voice for
themselves.
Throughout the play, even among themselves, the black South Africans are
known by impersonal names—sometimes paternalistic ones like Tata, as Bokkie
calls Nukain (whose actual name isn’t ever used in act one), which means “father
“ and is a way of referring to old men, to kaffer, a pejorative Afikaans
term for blacks. Even Bokkie is a
nickname that means “little buck.”
Either they’re skollies, or hooligans and troublemakers, or
they’re just invisible. They have no
identity. When Mabusa was buried, his
grave marker bore no name, just his registration number from his dompas,
or identity document. (For all the
renown Mabusa has acquired since his death, his life and background are still
obscure.) So when Elmarie Kleynhans, the
wife of the Afrikaner farm baas (boss) who’s Nukain’s employer, brings
the two laborers some leftovers for their lunch, she’s dismayed to find that
Nukain’s not painting another of his beautiful, but non-personal flowers but
instead has told a story she doesn’t even understand and whose significance she
doesn’t perceive. Elmarie orders Nukain
to wipe the painting off by the following Sunday and replace it with another flower. (The artist was found dead in
his pondok, his hut, the next Sunday, having committed suicide.)
The second act jumps the story ahead to 2003, after the end of apartheid
and the election of Nelson Mandela as the first black President of the Republic
of South Africa (1994). (In my report on Fugard’s Blood Knot, 28 February 2012, I included a brief
history of apartheid.) A young black man in his thirties wearing a
suit climbs up the hill and looks around at the faded and weathered painted
rocks, including The Big One which bears the mere shadow of Nukain’s last
painting. Suddenly, an older Elmarie
appears with a pistol, talking into a walkie-talkie. She’s obviously patrolling the farm in
coordination of others off elsewhere in Revolver Creek doing the same. She takes the young man for an
intruder—marauding trespassers have been committing brutal murders of Afrikaner
farmers in the region, including the neighboring farm—and is shocked to learn
that he’s the former Bokkie, now known by his real name, Jonathan Sejake,
a teacher and school principle. He’s
come to restore Nukain’s—he informs Elmarie of Mabusa’s actual name,
too—painting on The Big One, to memorialize the artist’s story for prosperity. Because the land belongs to
Elmarie and her husband (whom we never meet, but who’s suffered a stroke in the
ensuing 22 years), she has to give Jonathan permission to repaint the boulder,
just as she had given Nukain permission to paint the flowers decades earlier. Nukain hadn’t even owned his own creations;
they belonged to the Afrikaner boer
(farmer) for whom he worked. In the end,
Elmarie, who still doesn’t understand what Nukain—and now Jonathan—is all
about, grants the permission. Jonathan
will now be able to honor his friend’s work—and they’ll both have names and a
story. (In real life, the painted rocks,
well over 100 in Mabusa’s garden, are open to visitors, though not preserved or
restored, near the town of Barberton, South Africa, where Mabusa’s unmarked
grave is located. He had wanted to be
buried on the hilltop, among his flowers—but even that was denied him.)
In Fugard’s hands, Mabusa’s painted rocks become a symbol of South
Africa. They are a stark glimpse of
beauty and color in the arid and otherwise unusable landscape of the little
hill in Revolver Creek. For Mabusa, they
are the one thing that is his—even though he doesn’t own them—because he
created them out of his imagination, his soul.
Nukain’s story as depicted on The Big One is even more significant. But the flowers and Nukain’s story fade, the
rain washes away their colors and the sun bleaches them. After Nukain’s death, they are neglected and
all but forgotten (as they are in reality), left to languish without committed
caretakers, like Mandela’s South African dream.
To preserve them, particularly The Big One and its story of the
invisible man who created it, a black South African and white Afrikaner have to
talk to one another, understand something of one another, agree to accomplish
the same end. I think that’s what Fugard
wants us to understand from The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek: the
only way to preserve South Africa and see it into a happy, productive future
that resembles Mandela’s dream of harmony and equality is for black and white
South Africans to meet somewhere between them.
To do that, of course, they have to start to see one another.
The Painted Rocks at
Revolver Creek is also about identity—having one, losing one, regaining
one—and what that means for a person and a people. It’s a subject Fugard has written about a lot
over his long career. You might even
say, it’s his only topic—he just used different stories to revisit it. Outsider art may be the perfect vehicle for
such an examination since the very nature of outsider art is that the creators
are virtually unknown, societal cyphers, who create not for fame or
reward—financial or otherwise—but, as Fugard puts it, because they are
“motivated by a very specific vision.” You
might also say that that’s why Fugard writes—and he does consider himself “an
Outsider Artist in a sense.” As if he
were standing in for the playwright, Jonathan compares himself to Nukain: “I
love language the way he loved color.”
Painted Rocks isn’t
a perfect play. It has many small
deficiencies, not the least of which is its structure, the very aspect Fugard
developed in order to tell this story when he revised the original Visions.
It splits too neatly and deliberately into two stories: Nukain’s
creative efforts to overcome his erased identity and his ultimate humiliation
at the hands of an Afrikaner, and then the redemption of Bokkie through
Mabusa’s influence and his achievement in recovering his personhood in the face
of the same boer’s inability to see
him as a person, much less an equal. The
link between the two parts is almost accidental—that Jonathan in act two is
also Bokkie in act one and that Mabusa’s presence is carried over from act one
to act two; only the continued existence of Nukain’s final painting on the face
of The Big One, vibrant and alive in the first act and faded and dim in the
second, truly united the two halves.
Both sets of circumstances are a bit pat, almost contrived—almost too
convenient for Fugard’s storytelling and point-making. And this is territory the South African
playwright has traveled before, so he’s retelling a familiar and predictable
tale. But none of these weaknesses
fatally damage the play, since Fugard is a master storyteller first of all,
with his poetic use of language (in this case, many languages, as he
incorporates bits of Afrikaans, Xtosa, and Zulu, among others, with his lyrical
use of English). Second, the evils of apartheid, which have lived on 20 years
after the system was dismantled, is a topic worth revisiting as long as its
influence continues to plague us, like bigotry and invidiousness of all
kinds. As the playwright observes: “South
Africa is a very complex situation . . . which prompts me at times to describe
what is happening in the country as a betrayal of Nelson Mandela’s vision of
racial harmony and equality.”
The STC production was, as usual, excellent. Set designer Christopher H. Barreca realistically
recreated Mabusa’s hilltop stone garden so evocatively, it stood almost as a
homage to the real site (of which there are many photos, both in the theater
and on line). The change from the
bright, vivid geometric patterns of act one, when the rock are relatively newly
painted, and the same scene 22 years later when the colors (like Mandela’s
dream?) have faded and paled almost arouses the same kind of sadness that a
dying pet might. The costumes (Susan
Hilferty) and lights (Stephen Strawbridge) were both unobtrusive but helped
create the environment of the arid, barren little koppie (a small hill in an otherwise flat terrain) in the middle of
nowhere—the territory Nukain inhabited most of his life and where Bokkie was
destined to live as well had it not been for Mabusa’s inspiration. (Hilferty designed costumes for Fugard’s A Lesson from Aloes in 1980 and has
worked with the playwright-director ever since; this is their 40th
collaboration. At about that time, she,
Barreca, and Strawbridge formed a design collective, The Studio, with other
artists and they began working together with Fugard when the playwright came to
STC for his Residency One season; the three designers collaborated on Blood Knot, My Children! My Africa!, and The
Train Driver in 2012.)
As director, Fugard had “some vague idea” where he was
headed, of course. But he also says, “I
don’t know very much about the play I’ve written, until I’ve worked with actors
and designers. And then I discover the
play I wrote.” (The playwright-director
insists that theater is “a collaborative art.
It starts with somebody who sits down and tells a story . . ., but
that’s just the first step in a process.”) I’ve complained from time to time about
playwrights who direct their own work because they’re so often devoted to the
words they wrote to the exclusion of any in-put from actors or designers. Fugard, who’s admitted that he’s “learned not
to be protective of the script” as he originally wrote it, leaving room for
changes and new discoveries, hasn’t been guilty of that. When I saw Edward Albee’s self-directed
Broadway production of Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? in 1976, I was constantly aware that the playwright had
directed it; I often forgot that Fugard had directed not just Painted Rocks but the other Signature shows he staged
himself (Blood Knot and Train Driver). His hand was sure but not intrusive—and it
focused on the acting/character creation—and the overall storytelling—and not
on the words, as I felt Albee had.
Fugard asserts that he looks for actors who’ll contribute to
the creative process as part of a team of artists. “It’s a case of midwifery. Of being a midwife to a potential that is
there. You assemble a team, you’ve got the designers you wanted, you’ve got the
actors you wanted, and there’s a potential in that that must be born.” If that’s the case, then the writer-director
enticed some excellent performances from his acting team, giving them something
of a free hand to create and develop characters of vibrancy and truth. The acting, in other words, was superb. (I’ve rarely witnessed anything else at
STC.) Especially impressive was Leon
Addison Brown (with whom Fugard had worked as both playwright and director in Signature’s
Train Driver) who portrayed Nukain
with such delicate and thoroughly honest dignity that I sometimes thought I was
watching the rock-painter himself (a feeling I’ve only had once before, seeing
Pat Carroll inhabit the title character in Gertrude
Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein in 1979); the rest of the time, I
settled for feeling that Brown was somehow channeling Mabusa. (I have no doubt, intellectually, that the
actor had created an imaginary person whom he and the author-director felt
embodied the idea of Nukain Mabusa, but emotionally and psychologically, Brown
convinced me that he was this unique and sensitive person.) His movements (even when the character was
“still”), his poetic speech (contributed, of course, by Fugard with a few
quotations from Mabusa), his thoughts on art and life—all were so completely
integrated and solidly grounded in a persona of extraordinary sensitivity and
wisdom that I never once didn’t believe Brown.
Tired and stooped as he trudged up to the hilltop, when Nukain discovered
his subject for The Big One and began to tell his story in paint, Brown stood
tall and strong; when Elmarie appeared and questioned Nukain’s very purpose,
Brown shrunk into subservience once
again. This was an astonishing man; this
was a remarkable performance. (Brown now
goes on my list of actors to keep track of.
I want to see him do other roles in other productions. I have a feeling, as I’ve said of Michael
Countryman several times, Brown’s a chameleon on stage.)
Brown’s partner, the vivacious and enthusiastic Bokkie, was
played by 13-year-old Caleb McLaughlin (a former Young Simba in The Lion King in 2012-2014). At first I thought that McLaughlin was
overacting, perhaps because he’s so young and relatively inexperienced or
perhaps because he’s . . . well, 13. He
seemed to be jumping around the stage, speaking too fast, over-emoting. But I got to see I was most likely
wrong. Maybe McLaughlin needed a beat to
slip into the performance, but I saw that this was his character—he was just
thrilled to be with Nukain, whom he not only admired, but clearly adored. He was delighted to be helping the older man
paint his flowers—and when Nukain asks Bokkie to start the painting on The Big
One, McLaughlin’s Bokkie was just incredulous.
Never before had he actually painted with his friend—clean his brushes,
stir the cans of bright colored paint, hand the artist the right brush with the
right color, but never actually paint!
And when Nukain submits abjectly to Elmarie’s demand that he remove the
painting of his story from the face of the boulder and replace it with a
flower, the look of loss and incomprehension on McLaughlin’s face was the clue
to what little Bokkie would become when he turned into Jonathan Sejake, the
grown man, the teacher. It also told why,
22 years later, the grown-up Bokkie would come back to Revolver Creek to
restore the painting—to restore his friend’s honor, his humanity. The contrast between McLaughlin’s high energy
and brightness and Brown’s softness and, even when Nukain is excited about the
work, emotional self-control is, in a way, the manifestation of the gap between
the old South Africa and the new.
Yaegel T. Welch as Jonathan was new enough to the role that
the theater’s announcer explained that there was a prompter on book in the
theater in case Welch needed the assist.
(Welch replaced Sahr Ngaujah, who was injured in a “car-related incident.” Welch took over the role on 2 June following
temporary replacement Kevin Mambo who performed the part from 20 to 31
May.) Welch not only never did, his
character portrayal was as fully realized as any of his longer-serving
castmates’. To Welch’s detriment, the
character of Jonathan is written with less personal warmth than either Nukain
or Bokkie—he’s a vehicle for the author to have his say about the changes in
the new South Africa since 1994—except when he speaks of Mabusa’s painting;
then he gets humanized. But Welch came
across, nonetheless, as forthright and strong and in no way artificial. He was given a difficult task by both the
playwright and the director, but he pulled it off admirably. His passion for the topic was never in
question.
The lone woman and lone white character, Elmarie, was
portrayed by Bianca Amato (who’s performed previously in South Africa in a
number of plays, though none by Fugard) in another difficult part. Elmarie stands in for all Afrikaners, boers, and white South Africans. She’s a symbol, almost more than a real
person. Nonetheless, Amato acquitted
herself well, supercilious and haughty in act one, patronizing and condescending—she
brings lunch for the painters, but it’s leftovers from her own table, scraps,
as it were. She won’t comprehend the
significance of Nukain’s “story” as painted on The Big One—and if she did
understand it, it might actually frighten her.
In act two, after her husband has been disabled by a stroke, her
neighbor boers have been horribly
murdered in their home, and marauders are stalking the region seeking revenge
on the Afrikaners, she still feels that she’s done nothing wrong all those
years of dominating and suppressing the native majority, depersonalizing them,
denying them identity. All this was
communicated in Amato’s oblivious and blind depiction of Elmarie. Amato managed to show us a woman who appeared
cold and unfeeling on the outside while intimating that there was a seething
mix of fear and even anger somewhere inside—but which she never let out to be
seen by others. In act two, Amato added
a measure of resentment to that inner turmoil, none of it visible except in an
occasional wince or grimace that passed quickly across her face or around her
mouth until she could regain control and suppress it. Amato also had a sadness to her speech and
voice that revealed more than her words.
A word must be said here about the South African dialects
and accents these (American) actors adopted for The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek. Nukain, Bokkie, and Jonathan all affect
native African accents, Zulu or Xtosa, the languages spoken in that part of
South Africa, while Elmarie speaks with an Afrikaans accent. (There are also lots of words, mostly slang, from
several indigenous languages that Fugard uses in his dialogue and Signature
thoughtfully provided a short glossary.)
Barbara Rubin served as dialect coach for the production and, to my ear,
she and the cast did a marvelous job of absorbing the speech patterns
appropriate to each character. It’s not
an easy task with accents we Americans aren’t very familiar (though Bianca
Amato lists several shows presented in South Africa in her bio), but it was
very effective in establishing the milieu of the whole production and, in the
cases of Afrikaner Elmarie and native Africans Nukain, Bokkie, and Jonathan,
the contrast between their cultural heritages and, therefore, social and political
positions in South Africa.
Now it’s time to see where the press stood on The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek. In the New
York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote, “The show can be repetitive,”
particularly when Jonathan tells us over and over that Nukain’s painting on The
Big One was his story, but she added that the play “tackles the two sides’ fear
and anger in a surprisingly gentle way.”
Elysa Gardner of USA Today complained that the second act
“feels longer than the clock suggests” and that the pacing of the first act is
too slow. Nonetheless, Fugard, Gardner
reported, approached the “difficult, balanced conversation” of Elmarie and
Jonathan in the second act “with predictable intelligence and compassion.” She praised the “passionate and compelling
performances” Fugard elicited from the cast.
Newsday’s Linda Winer,
exulting that “[s]tories seem to topple from the imagination and memory of
Athol Fugard,” concluded that Painted
Rocks is little more than one of the writer’s “simple stories that, before
we know it, swell to become the rich, uneasy historical and personal journey of
his country.” “That's pretty much it,”
Winer summed up, “except for the beautiful acting, tales of horrible violence
and contrasting emotions.” She
concluded: “And from such simplicity, Fugard, once again, stamps indelible
human faces on faraway reports of the world's news.”
In the Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz quipped, “Being
stuck between a rock and a hard place takes on new meaning in writer/director
Athol Fugard’s stirring new drama,” which “makes a universal point about racial
and class conflict.” The first half of Painted Rocks “grabs as tight as a
Vise-Grip,” reported Dziemianowicz, but the second act “slackens slightly as
conversations get mired in the past and in exposition.” The Newsman
continued, “His play isn’t ground-breaking, but his script has plainspoken
eloquence and the cast is first-rate” and declared in the final assessment: “You’d
have to have a heart of granite not to be moved watching empathy tentatively
bloom in a garden of rocks.” The New York Times’ Charles Isherwood called
Painted Rocks a “tender, ruminative new play” which suffers a
few “staid patches” that are “animated” by the “impassioned ”
performances. Brendan Lemon in the Financial Times called the Signature
première a “clear, touching, occasionally blunt two-act evening” whose conflict
“is a bit too large and looming to make for easily contained drama,” though
Fugard “has directed assuredly.”
In New York magazine, Jesse Green complained
of the “old tropes” Fugard employs and his “creaky dramaturgy” by which “actions
are recalled, then reenacted, then recalled again later, and re-reenacted.” The play’s dialogue, the man from New York lamented, “sounds like notes
toward an ideology rather then expressions of it.” Painted Rocks, Green asserted, “meant no doubt to be as timeless
as Mabusa’s flowers, seems timebound instead,” more like Fugard’s work at the
start of his career than later ones. The
New York review-writer suggested that
the power of such plays is “not always sufficiently theatrical, especially when
they approach his great subject—the distortion of human relations on both sides
by the apartheid state—as head-on as this one does.” The Village
Voice’s Miriam Felton-Dansky, describing Painted Rocks as “a new play about old wounds,” reported, “Though
its inspiration is abstract art, Painted Rocks is surprisingly
literal, missing the striking poetry of Fugard's early work.” Nonetheless, Felton-Dansky concluded that “the
force of Fugard's subject is so strong, the devastation of racism still so
keen, that even this less-developed drama carries emotional weight.” In the New Yorker, “Goings On About Town” called Painted Rocks a “beautiful play” whose “effect is
heartbreaking.” Although the “stunningly
acted” first act is “moving,” act two, also “gorgeously played . . ., is a bit
talky.”
Marilyn Stasio of Variety dubbed Painted
Rocks a “carefully built play” which is “thoughtful and poignant.” While the first act alone “would . . . leave
the audience shaken,” wrote Stasio, with act two, “Fugard broadens the meaning
of Nukain’s masterpiece by placing that powerful symbol of a man’s human
dignity in a modern-day context.” In
the Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck labeled
Painted Rocks “an intimate theatrical
gem,” though the play “becomes a bit stilted and didactic” in the second half. Scheck lamented that “it loses some of its
elegantly simple power” by “[l]urching into unconvincing melodrama.” He added that “the staging is too leisurely,
and not all of the dialogue rings true.” The HR reviewer
concluded, however, that the play is “deeply moving nonetheless,” with Fugard
drawing praiseworthy performances from his cast. Adam
Feldman of Time Out New York,
asserting that Fugard’s play “derives much of its initial power from simplicity,”
found that “although Fugard’s portrait of Mabusa is not deeply detailed, it
evokes the suffering of generations of South Africans.” The man from TONY, however, felt that “the play should have ended” after act one
because the second act “consists of rehashing and explaining what was clear
enough in the play’s first half.” Entertainment Weekly’s Maya Stanton determined
that Painted Rocks’ “ themes of
racial tension and a desire for rapprochement are all too timely, echoing
conversations that are sadly still ongoing today.” While Fugard drew on “powerful source
material,” Stanton felt, however, that “some of Fugard’s writing choices leave
a bit to be desired,” despite “impeccable performances.” The EW
reviewer summed up by averring, “Unfortunately, it’s a place where backward
attitudes toward race and humanity were the norm, and one that serves as a
sharp reminder that we haven’t learned much from recent history. Still, with pieces like Fugard’s contributing
to the cultural dialogue, perhaps those lessons will finally take.”
In the on-line press, Tulis
McCall lamented on New York Theatre Guide that though Fugard’s story
bears a “tone of . . . sincerity,” the writer’s “ bite has lost some teeth.” The playwright “spends much of his stage time
on exposition,” McCall reported, and therefore “loses the impact that Fugard
intends.” On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart noted that after
turning to more personal subjects after the fall of apartheid, Fugard’s Painted
Rocks “represents a return to politics,” resulting in a play “as insightful
as [his] earlier works, with an added layer of nuance.” The play is “potent” and “subtly poignant,” wrote
TM’s Stewart. CurtainUp’s Elyse Sommer saw that the painting of The Big
One in act one becomes a “story about how a new democracy brings its own
challenges” while in act two, “[t]he big rock now poses a new challenge” in
that it represents “the future of South Africa [that] will lose its promise
without the old and new generation listening to each other.” “Fugard makes no attempt to tone down the polemical
flavor of the dialogue,” noted Sommer, “and the tenor of that dialogue deserves
attention.” She concluded, “There are no
surprises in this second act confrontation or its only slightly hopeful ending.” Characterizing Painted Rocks as “Athol
Fugard’s beautiful new play” in Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray found
it inevitable that “the playwright would see in Mabusa’s outsider art creations
a powerful statement about legacy.” Fugard,
said Murray, followed his habitual technique “of making the political personal”
and has crafted a play that illuminates “an epic puzzle that depicts a country,
community, and one small group of individuals in the path of a momentous
transformation that may flatten them all.”
As I observed in my
report on A. R. Gurney’s What I Did Last
Summer, by coincidence I saw The
Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek the afternoon right after seeing Summer and the two plays share some
superficial aspects. Both plays depict a
young boy—14-year-old Charlie in Summer
and 11-year-old Bokkie in Painted Rocks—who’s fundamentally changed
by a relationship with an artist-mentor who’s a kind of outsider. The two
boys grow up to be men who affect others: in Summer, Charlie becomes a playwright like Gurney; in Painted Rocks, Bokkie becomes a teacher. Gurney’s change and the upheaval that follows is less powerful than Fugard’s
partly because of Painted Rocks’ connection
to the end of apartheid, and partly because we see the man the boy grows
into because of the influence of the artist.
For me, this makes Painted Rocks the better play. Gurney’s dramatic circumstances are brittle
and artificial and his characters are only sketched in, leaving the play with
little emotional (or intellectual) impact on me. Fugard has used two momentous periods in
South African and world events to propel his tale of growing up and coming of
age—which in Painted Rocks is also the portrayal of a society and a
culture growing up—and he uses it to illuminate a continuing repercussion of
the regime of apartheid. Gurney’s
story is of little moment for anyone other than the participants and the
outcome of the encounter of Charlie and the artist-manquée Anna
is nearly a cliché. Gurney’s backdrop is
World War II, potentially as powerful a milieu as apartheid South Africa, but that’s all it is in Summer—a backdrop. Minority-ruled South Africa is the
environment of Painted Rocks, the
atmosphere hanging over everyone’s lives and permeating the whole society. In Summer,
Charlie says he changed because of what Anna taught him; in Painted Rocks, we see the impact on
Bokkie wielded by Nukain.
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