'Boesman and Lena'

I’ve nominated Athol Fugard as one of the most interesting playwrights of the second half of the 20th century.  I don’t think there is any such list, but there should be and Fugard should be high on it.  He may have only one subject—apartheid—but each of his plays has something significant to say and he’s said it in different ways throughout his career, different styles.  (When I said this to Diana, my frequent theater companion, she asked me what American playwright I’d say was Fugard’s counterpart.  I couldn’t think of one.  August Wilson might come close, but his dramaturgy doesn’t vary much play to play; Suzan-Lori Parks competes in the dramaturgy area, but I’d say she’s more a 21st-century writer, and Lynn Nottage is definitely a 21st-century dramatist.)

Exhibit One in support of my nomination: Boesman and Lena, Fugard’s 1969 Godotesque play, the last of his Port Elizabeth trilogy (with Blood Knot, 1961; Hello and Goodbye, 1965).  Read, or better yet, see it and then compare it with almost any other of the South African playwright’s plays, say, The Island (1972) or “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys (1982).  All powerful, moving, and meaningful plays—and all completely different.  Fugard’s written about 34 plays and I’ve now seen 10 of them—and none of them are really alike.  (And let’s not even go into the roles he creates for actors!  I seldom feel jealous at the theater anymore, but his characters make me yearn.)

On Saturday night, 2 March, I got to see Boesman and Lena at the Signature Theatre Company.  Fugard’s play is part of this season’s Legacy Program (along with Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class, scheduled for this spring, and Thom Pain (based on nothing) by Will Eno, staged last fall; see my report on Rick On Theater on 26 November 2018).  Before now, I’d only seen the 2000 film adaptation with Danny Glover and Angela Bassett as the title characters.  I’ll give a more detailed assessment shortly, but I’ll just say for now that I was just stunned—by the play and the performances.  I couldn’t have asked for a better, fuller theater experience.

It’s been a while since I stated my personal criteria for good theater, so I’ll say it again now:  A good play must do more than just tell a story and it must do it theatrically.  The first part’s probably self-explanatory, but all I mean there is that the play has to have a point of some kind, say something, profound or trivial.  Storytelling’s a noble art of its own, but in itself, it’s not theater—unless you want to accomplish something by telling me the story.  Good, basic theater is storytelling first.  But why are you telling the story?  To teach me something?  To persuade me about something?  To reveal something about life, the world, my town, my neighbors? 

As for theatricality, what I mean is the play must use the attributes of the live stage to accomplish its task.  I don’t want a play to try to replicate a movie, a TV show, or a concert, though it can use the techniques of those arts; I want a play to be a play, live and, when necessary, overcoming that limitation by imaginative means.  Playwright Annie Baker explains: “So many plays are trying to be like film, like the needy kid who keeps saying ‘Like me, like me!’ and falling flat on his face.”  What Baker wants is for plays “to marshal the ancient resources of the stage toward experiences only it can provide.”  Fugard’s play and Yaël Farber’s staging meet both of my criteria in spades.  I hope you’ll see why I feel this way.

Boesman and Lena is a three-character, two-act play that Fugard started working on with a journal entry dated August 1965.  He describes an encounter with an “old woman on the road” to whom he gave a ride just outside the town of Cradock, about 160 miles northeast of Port Elizabeth, the playwright’s hometown.  She’d been evicted from her home on a local Afrikaner farm when her husband died about three days before.  (In a July 1968 journal note, Fugard recalled that “the genesis of” Boesman and Lena was possibly “an image from over ten years ago . . . a coloured man and woman, burdened with their possessions, whom I passed somewhere on the road near Laingsberg.  It was sunset and they were miles from the nearest town.”)

The old woman Fugard picked up was walking to another farm where a friend worked and was carrying all her possessions, a collection of discarded trash and rubbish in a huge bundle on her head.  The writer’s note said: “. . . in that cruel walk under the blazing sun, walking from all her life that she didn’t have on her head . . ., in this walk there was no defeat—there was pain, and great suffering, but no defeat.”  Then he asked: “How many put all of their life that they haven’t got in their hearts onto their heads and make that walk? . . .”

(Interviewed by Gitta Honegger, then a professor of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of  Drama in New Haven, Connecticut, Fugard described his experience while writing Boesman and Lena.  He developed, he said, “an incredible sensitivity to rubbish,” looking for every discarded piece of junk that could be used, much as Boesman, whose livelihood was collecting empty bottles to sell, did.  In notes to a published edition of the play, the author also states of South Africans like Boesman and Lena: “At one level, their predicament is an indictment of this society which makes people rubbish.”)

The woman became Lena and The Walk became the story of her life and the backstory of the play.

Fugard apparently worked on the play for a couple of years, inventing the characters of Boesman (whose name is the Afrikaans word for ‘Bushman’ and is a derogatory term for a “coloured” man) and Outa, then put the script aside until 1968.  While fishing in the Swartkops River, the dramatist saw the setting for his play and, after struggling through several versions of the first act, completed the first draft of Boesman and Lena in August 1968.

The play was completed and premièred on 10 July 1969 at the Rhodes University Little Theatre in Grahamstown, South Africa.  The cast included Fugard as Boesman, Yvonne Bryceland as Lena, and Glynn Day as Outa—all white actors; the production was directed by the author.  On opening night, the white actors appeared in what Fugard described as “light” blackface, which I take to mean that they didn’t blacken their faces completely (like, say, Laurence Olivier in the 1964 National Theatre production of William Shakespeare’s Othello) but used a pale indication of blackness to make clear what was going on.  Whatever he meant by this phrase, the cast quickly decided it was unnecessary and went on to perform without the additional make-up.  At that time in South Africa, it was customary for white actors in blackface to play black and “coloured” characters.

The reason for the blackface, I figure, has to do with the same apartheid laws that forced the old woman from Cradock to wander the country, homeless and rootless.  The Population Registration Act (1950) decreed that every South African must be classified by race: white, Bantu (later called black; ‘Bantu’ is considered a derogatory and dismissive term not unlike ‘nigger’ in the U.S.), “coloured” (mixed race), Asian (principally Indian).  The Group Areas Act (also 1950) established the complete segregation by race of all residential areas of the country and designated specific areas for each race to live in.  The territories designated for blacks to reside were called Bantustans, both an official and a derogatory term. Performances by black actors before white audiences were forbidden; performances of any kind before integrated audiences were also forbidden and so were performances by integrated casts or musical ensembles.  Black and “coloured” South Africans weren’t even allowed to be in territories designated for whites only (and vice versa), so a cast of black actors would have been arrested if it had tried to perform Fugard’s play at Rhodes University. 

Bryceland had a different explanation:

The black actors in South Africa at that stage were mostly making musicals or doing what amounted to concerts in the townships.  And even the actors that were working with Athol were far behind in, what can I say, in the craft, because they had never had the opportunities.  So we went into the play without even considering, “Why are we playing them?”  We just did them because they had to be done.

After the South African début, the U.S. première of Boesman and Lena was presented Off-Broadway in New York City, from 22 June 1970 to 24 January 1971, running for 205 performances.  Produced by Paul Libin and Theodore Mann in association with John Berry at the Circle in the Square Downtown in Greenwich Village, the cast included James Earl Jones as Boesman, Ruby Dee as Lena, and Zakes Mokae as the Old African (Outa), under the direction of Berry.  (Mokae, who would perform many of Fugard’s characters in New York—and around the world—in the coming years, was one of the black South African actors with whom the playwright was working to build a multi-racial acting troupe.)  The production won 1971 OBIE Awards for Best Foreign Play, Best Performance by an Actress (Dee), and Distinguished Direction (Berry). 

It’s a revealing side story that the author was unable to attend the performance of the New York première of his latest play because the South African government had confiscated his passport in 1967, holding it for five years so that Fugard couldn’t travel outside South Africa. This curtailed his ability to direct his own plays abroad or to appear in them on foreign stages.  That didn’t stop his plays from being performed, however, a fact that only angered the government in Pretoria and Cape Town more.  The writer had never broken any law or taken or called for any violent act against the apartheid regime; his offense was solely in his plays.  He was, however, a well-known and popular writer by this time; by 1971, for instance, Boesman and Lena has been seen by 70,000 theatergoers in his own country alone.

Revivals and regional premières ensued, such as the New Back Alley Theater in Washington, D.C., in 1974; Skokie, Illinois’s Northlight Theatre in 1986, directed by Woody King, Jr., with Trazana Beverley as Lena; another 1986 staging at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, directed by Bill Bushnell with Madge Sinclair as Lena and Moses Gunn as Boesman; Huntington Theatre Company’s 1989 Boston production, directed by Tazewell Thompson; and in 1992 at the American Showcase Theatre in Alexandria, Virginia, among many others in the U.S. and abroad.  (The combination of the challenging acting requirements, a powerful script, small cast, a single and simple set has made Boesman and Lena a magnet for theaters, especially small ones.)  1992 also saw another revival in New York City, presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club at the New York City Center.  Directed again by Fugard, the production starred Keith David as Boesman, Lynne Thigpen as Lena, and Tsepo Mokone as Outa; it ran for 80 performances and won the 1992 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Revival and the 1992 Obie Award for Performance for Thigpen; it was nominated for the 1992 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play.

Two film adaptations of Boesman and Lena were released: in 1973, directed by Ross Devenish with the original South African actors as Boesman and Lena and Sandy Tube as Outa; and in 2000, directed by John Berry (director of the New York stage première who died in 1999 while editing Boesman and Lena), with Glover as Boesman, Bassett as Lena, and Willie Jonah as the Old Man.  The playtext has been published a number of times; currently it’s available from Samuel French in an acting edition (1971) and in Blood Knot and Other Plays from the Theatre Communications Group (with Blood Knot and Hello and Goodbye, 1991).

The current Signature revival, which Farber mounted here as a two-hour one-act, began previews on 5 February 2019 and opened on 25 February.  The Saturday evening performance Diana and I attended in the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, a small proscenium house that seats 191 spectators, commenced at 8 p.m.  The STC revival of Boesman and Lena is scheduled to close on 24 March (after being extended from 17 March). 

Boesman and Lena depicts the common plight of homeless South Africans, displaced because of the Group Areas Act.  It was also common practice during the apartheid years in South Africa for farmers to evict a worker’s family when the worker dies, and this contributed to the wandering population of displaced black and “coloured” South Africans initiated by the Population Registration and the Group Areas Acts.

The two wanderers represent the non-white people of the country, not only without homes, but increasingly without a native culture or language.  The desolation of the setting is more than just a depiction of the non-white South Africans’ displacement; it’s also a representation of the hopelessness of the their very lives.  Outa, of course, is even more deracinated, as represented by the fact that he speaks neither English nor Afrikaans; he speaks and understands only Xhosa, his tribal tongue—which neither Boesman nor Lena can speak or comprehend.  The South African native peoples are being segregated not just from the privileged whites, but from one another. 

Upon entering the Griffin Theatre and taking our seats in the balcony, Diana and I looked down at a partially obscured stage.  The Boesman and Lena set is hidden behind a proscenium-wide expanse of white plastic, billowing slightly in the theater’s atmosphere.  This immediately raised our curiosities, wondering what director Forbes didn’t want us to see.  The theater is filled with an eerie sound of a droning chord, a cross between a baritone wind instrument of some kind and a continuously bowed string.  (The compelling sound design is by Matt Hubbs.)  Shortly, a man and a woman make their way from the back of the auditorium below us, meandering through the aisles to the front of the stage.  The man, Boesman (Sahr Ngaujah), is carrying all of his meager possessions on his back and the woman, Lena (Zainab Jah), carries her burden on her head.

Boesman gathers up the plastic sheeting, saving it for potential use, and the two sojourners cross the to the  left side of the house and exit through a door, reappearing at the back of the set.  The play begins, like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, on an empty landscape.  (To reinforce the similarity to Beckett’s masterpiece, director Yaël Farber, who’s a native of South Africa herself, has placed a barren tree, no more than a large twig, really, up stage left.  The set was designed by Susan Hilferty—who also did the costumes—and lit by Amith Chandrashaker.)  It’s a cold afternoon—the time of the play isn’t specified—and Boesman trudges down the stage, depicting the mudflats along the River Swartkops (about seven miles north of Port Elizabeth).  Shortly after his entrance, Lena enters.  The two “coloured” people, who’ve been walking all day since the white man’s bulldozers razed their shantytown home, could be any age, but the implication is that they are not young, probably middle-aged. 

The bleak mudflats are just one of many similar sites—they list a litany of their past dwellings places—which Boesman and Lena have tried to make into a home, but this latest place will be just another temporary shelter until the white man comes with his bulldozer and forces them to move on again.  Lena begins to set up their camp and starts the cooking fire in a large cauldron while Boesman scavenges for more discards to use to build their pondok, the  lean-to that will be their cover for the night.  The plastic sheeting will serve as a waterproof roof.  To confirm the playwright’s point that black and “coloured” South Africans are trash, throw-aways, Boesman says: “We’re whiteman’s rubbish.”  They are the kind of refuse that can’t be discarded permanently and Boesman explains to his companion why the white man is so “beneukt [fed up] with us.  He can’t get rid of his rubbish.”  

The rest of the play takes place on the desolate spot where the two stop for the night.  Again like Godot, there’s little action.  Over the course of the evening and through the night, the wanderer’s relationship is revealed by their talk as each one remembers earlier events, happy and tragic, and what they do to one another.  Boesman beats Lena, as he has done throughout their relationship, and she berates him.  Until now, however, they’ve never separated.  Over Boesman’s objections, Lena takes into their camp an elderly Xhosa tribesman (Thomas Silcott), whom she calls Outa.  (‘Outa’ is a term for an older “coloured” or black man, often used by children as a mark of respect.)  While Lena is kind to the old man Boesman is cruel to him.  He repeatedly calls the Old African kaffer, another derogatory Afrikaans word for a black man, lower in the South African hierarchy even than the “coloureds” like Lena and Boesman.  Outa’s an intruder in the only part of the world that Boesman can control, where he can rule.  When Boesman retires to the pondok, Lena sits all night with Outa on a crate by the cooking fire.  In the morning, she finds that the Old African has died in his sleep and Boesman, fearing he will be blamed for the death, begins packing up the camp in a panic.  For the first time, Lena seems to defy Boesman and refuses to flee with him. 

Though Lena has slowly been discovering her own independence, in the end, she goes with him, continuing The Walk, as Fugard called it, just as her non-white countrymen and -women have always done despite differences, and even cruelties, among the different factions.  After all, what else can they do?

The performances under Forbes’s direction were astounding.  Despite the play’s title, it’s Lena’s stage to command—she’s there for almost the entire two hours and talks through most of it.  Zainab Jah is amazing; I still recall her chameleonic performance as the Venus Hotentot in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus, also at the Signature Theatre Company, in May 2017 (see my report on Rick On Theater on 7 June 2017), and though the roles are very different, the same command of both the character and the stage is in evidence.  In both plays, there’s an undercurrent of tragedy that Jah conveys in her very demeanor and speech (she has a lot of monologues)—but as a subtext, not the salient character note.  (She accomplishes what one of my acting teachers explained as the desirable outcome of one technique he taught: it makes the audience sense that the actor is “up to something” without the spectator ever determining exactly what that is.) 

I last saw Sahr Ngaujah (again at Signature) as Willie in Fugard’s “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys in November 2016 and before that in María Irene Fornés’s Drowning and Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy, parts of the Signature Plays the previous May 2016 (see my reports on 21 November 2016 and 3 June  2016).  (Ngaujah appeared in Fugard’s The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek at STC in 2015, but he left the show due to injury before I saw it in June.)  His Boesman is emotionally mercurial and flashes of brutality.  When he takes his anger at being powerless out on Lena, Ngaujah doesn’t even take time to change gears.  It’s the societal counterpart of the abused becoming the abuser: Ngaujah’s Boesman beats Lena the same way his white masters beat him—and white society abuses South Africa’s non-white citizens.  While Jah’s Lena continues to feel a need for human connections, as she demonstrates with Outa, Ngaujah’s Boesman as totally antisocial and has pretty much adopted the same worldview as the white perpetrators of apartheid.  Ngaujah’s roles in “Master Harold” and Painted Rocks were sympathetic, even tender, but his Boesman is violent, self-centered, angry, and dismissive—hardly an admirable person.  The actor doesn’t shirk his dramatic responsibility, making his character as reprehensible as he is understandable.

Thomas Silcott’s role is the hardest to read as Outa speaks very little and when he does, it’s in Xhosa.  It’s also perhaps the hardest role to play because his chief purpose is to be an enigma.  Have you ever tried to play an enigma?  It’s to acting what proving a negative is to logic.  Yet Silcott embodies Outa so that he’s a looming presence—a focus for sympathy and concern—and his silent death has the impact of a small bombshell (even if you guess it’s going to happen—not that Fugard telegraphs it).

I must make a note of praise here for Barbara Rubin, the dialect coach—who I assume also taught Silcott the Xhosa language for his lines—for what sounded to me like an authentic South African dialect.  As “coloureds,” Lena and Boesman speak English infused with Afrikaans expressions and speech patterns.  The roles in Boesman and Lena are hard enough for actors to manage credibly, but to do it with the dialect requirements Fugard gives them, is a major accomplishment which this cast handled with agility—and I say that’s thanks in large part to Rubin.

It’s also thanks to Forbes, whose direction of Signature’s Boesman and Lena was spot-on.  I’m not sure how wise it was to combine the two acts into one two-hour sitting—but it turned out not to be as onerous as I feared.  I imagine she didn’t want the power of the play to be dissipated by allowing the audience to take a 15-minute break halfway through, interrupting the build Forbes and the cast had been creating.  I guess she was right in the end, since both Diana and I came out with a very high opinion of the production.  Forbes kept the pressure on, inching upwards toward Outa’s death and Boesman’s panic, the emotional high point of the play.  The actors, especially Jah, build with it.  It’s an extremely tight performance.

It’s also bleak and Forbes follows through on the set’s desolation—an ugly, brown expanse of mud that stretched seemingly forever—we don’t see an actual river—with an equally bleak performance.  The characters display no humor, no lightness, no glimmer of pleasure once, now, or to come.  Despite this, they are mesmerizing and enthralling.  (Even in the curtain call, the actors don’t drop their characters, still carrying their belongings that they’d begun to gather up for the continuation of their journey.  Outa doesn’t rise from his death pose.)

(A personal note: when I book seats for a play, I always prefer to go after the official opening.  This is a clear example of why: I want to see the show the creators want the audience to see, the finished product.  Previews are dress rehearsals with an audience.  The company’s still at work.  I want to go when they’re done.  QED.)

The press coverage for Signature’s Boesman and Lena was skimpy in my opinion.  As of 10 March, Show-Score scored only 17 notices for an average of 77 with 94% of the reviews being positive, 6% mixed, and none negative.  The highest score was a single 93 (Front Row Center) followed by one 90 (Off Script with Dan Dwyer); the lowest score was 60 for New York Theater, backed by three 70’s, including Theatre’s Leiter Side.  My survey will cover 12 reviews.

The only daily paper—in fact, the only newspaper—that ran a review was the New York Times.  In a Times “Critic's Pick,” Jesse Green characterized Boesman and Lena as “a classic of world drama, evolving over time to incorporate new shades of meaning in response to new realities” in a “fine revival.”  (All the more reason for better press coverage of this revival—ahem, ahem.)  The STC mounting, asserted Green, “may even mark the play’s emergence as a different work entirely, one that leaves its specifics behind.”  When the play débuted in 1969, said Green, “it was clearly a document of apartheid”; when the Timesman first encountered it in college, he felt “it read almost as reportage or agitprop, with an implied call to action.”  Now the passage of time and history has rendered Boesman and Lena part of “the tradition of existential rather than political drama.”  

The STC revival is also “a beautiful production, especially as lit by Amith Chandrashaker,” felt Green.  The actors provide “admirable, uncompromising performances” in Farber’s “unrelentingly bleak staging.”  Said Green, “[T]ime disappears.”  The characters, the Times reviewer found, have morphed into “solo archetypes of the broader human condition, regardless of race or poverty; not South Africa’s peculiar (and remediable) problem but the world’s eternal one.”

In Time Out New York (the only other print review I found), Raven Snook labeled STC’s Boesman and Lena revival “unrelenting” in a “powerful” production.  Director Farber “emphasizes its timelessness,” reported the TONY reviewer.  Nonetheless, asserted Snook, “it can be emotionally numbing.”  She found that the “repetitiveness of their overwhelming hopelessness . . . triggers a self-protective detachment in the audience.  Only when Boesman and Lena’s routine is disrupted do they start to tear at your soul.”    Her final analysis was: “Boesman and Lena may leave you impressed at the resilience of the spirit or depressed by the revolting way people continue to treat each other.  Either way, it is a challenge to endure.”

In the second-highest-scoring review on Show-Score (90), Dan Dwyer of Off Script with Dan Dwyer called Boesman and Lena a “timeless existential statement” and Signature’s staging a “profound, searing revival . . . under the incisive direction of Yael Farber.”  Dwyer reported that Farber’s “production is punctuated with primitive texture and sound—dried mud crunches underfoot, a ratty blanket shaken out erupts in a cloud of dirt, pitiful household pots and pans that Lena carries strapped to her waist clank in the barren silence.”

On Front Row Center, which was rated 93 on Show-Score, Donna Herman (who also posted on New York Theatre Guide) labeled Boesman and Lena “a brilliant play” and an “unflinching look at the results of [apartheid’s] racist policies.”  Despite the play’s apartheid-era setting, Herman noted, the play has inherited a “far-reaching and wider resonance” over time.  The FRC reviewer found that in this time of #MeToo, the play “that was written 50 years ago but feels so contemporary it could have been written yesterday, . . . is startling.”  Herman thought that “Yaël Farber has created a stunning production” and added, “The talent that conspires to bring this world into being is prodigious.”  She declared that “Jah and Ngaujah give tour-de-force performances, holding back nothing.” 

Calling the play a “masterpiece” on TheaterMania, Pete Hempstead reported, “There's a sense of dread in the air when you enter the Griffin Theatre for a performance of Boesman and Lena.”  Hempstead’s referring to the plastic sheet that obscures the set.  “It’s one of director Yaël Farber’s haunting theatrical images in this angry, mournful examination of institutionalized racism.”  The TM review-writer observed, “It’s a tough play to watch, and at times, Farber takes things a bit too far.”  He added, however, “But with its three virtuosic performances and brilliant staging, this two-hour journey is unquestionably worth taking.”  Hempstead concluded by noting, “The play is now 50 years old and takes place in a country that officially abolished its racist system of government in the early ‘90s.  Now, in America, it is all the more startling how familiar these characters seem.”

Melissa Rose Bernardo informed us that “a formidable sense of doom hovers over Yaël Farber’s demanding production of Boesman and Lena” on New York Stage Review.  She praised Ngaujah for his “frighteningly good performance” and pronounced Jah as “every inch his match and more.”  On Broadway World, Michael Dale dubbed Farber’s rendition of Boesman and Lena as an “exquisitely somber production” in which the title roles are “played with stark sensitivity” by Jah and Ngaujah and for which the designers “do a superb job of creating a bleak, lifeless landscape.” 

Boesman and Lena is now “recognized as one of the classics” of Fugard’s works, Simon Saltzman reminded us on CurtainUp; however, he added, “That doesn’t make its emotional demands upon its actors or even the physical demands upon its audience any less of a challenge.”  Nonetheless, Saltzman praised the production as “impressively directed” and reported that Jah and Ngaujah “have done their work superbly.”  Still, “Boesman and Lena tested my endurance,” revealed Saltzman, but allowed that that “is not necessarily a complaint as the drama itself is purposefully calculated to do just that.”  The CU reviewer, however, did complain, “Fugard’s characters in general are known for lengthy speeches that tend toward the extraordinarily lyrical and colorful. Some of this becomes wearying even as we marvel at their stamina.”

On Talkin’ Broadway, James Wilson dubbed the production of STC’s Boesman and Lena “a lacerating revival” of a “[b]leak, angry, and violent” play.  It’s “a difficult play to watch, and director Yaël Farber does not make it any easier in her production choices.”  Wilson complained about the intermissionless performance which makes the play “an emotionally draining two hours.”  The TB review-writer proclaimed, “Jah is utterly and scarily convincing” and that Ngaujah “is a seething, dangerous presence”; Silcott’s “Old African is a tragic, pathetic figure.” 

In the review that got the second-lowest score (70), Samuel L. Leiter wrote on his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side, labeled the play “powerful” and the STC production as “a fine” revival.  Leiter, however, did complain about the opening “sequence that goes on too long” because Farber “has her actors enter at a snail’s pace.”  Altogether, asserted Leiter, “Boesman and Lena is a heavy dose of bleak, nearly humorless drama requiring considerable patience.”  The blogger acknowledged, the play’s “language, spoken in the heavy accents of poor South Africans, is abundantly rich and provocative, and the performances of all three actors are excellent,” but nonetheless found that “the material is relentlessly depressing.”  Leiter had other objections as well:

There are verbose monologues, especially by Lena, and lots of angry shouting by the volatile Boesman.  Much of the play moves slowly, repetitiousness is evident, and dramatic developments are rare.  Its two uninterrupted hours, regardless of how well done, can wear out even the most sympathetic listener.

Jonathan Mandell of New York Theater, in the lowest-rated review on Show-Score (60), called the play “relentlessly bleak” and lamented that it now “comes off largely as allegorical,” as it’s “largely removed from its political context”—the apartheid world of 1969 South Africa.  Mandell acknowledged, “It’s a stunning production visually” in the revival at STC, and “[t]he first-rate actors deliver committed performances.”  He found, however, “At two hours long without an intermission, this abstracted and depressing ‘Boesman and Lena’ is easier to respect than to sit through.”  The play’s original productions were “clearly rooted” in the world of apartheid, contended Mandell, but in the current production, “This feels less understood.” 

On Theater Pizzazz, Carol Rocamora called the STC’s Boesman and Lena a “stunning revival,” observing that “its themes and deep meanings seem to have expanded with time to encompass human suffering everywhere in the world today.”  Rocamora declared that Jah “is magnificent in the role of Lena,” Ngaujah is “powerful,” and Silcott plays Outa “exquisitely”; Farber “directs with authority and a profound understanding of Fugard’s themes.”