'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.”   

'"Master Harold" . . . and the boys'

I’ve written a number of times that Athol Fugard taught the world more about conditions in apartheid South Africa with his plays than all the essayists, news reporters, and lecturers combined (see my posts “Degrading the Arts,” published on 13 August 2009; “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines,” 21 July 2011; “Culture War,” 6 February 2014).  A prime example of what I mean is Fugard’s fine 1982 composition “Master Harold” . . . and the boys, now in revival at the Signature Theatre under the playwright’s own direction.

The production is part of STC’s Legacy Program for the 2016-17 season, the first under Paige Evans’s artistic directorship.  (Evans took over this year from James Houghton, STC’s founder, when he retired in June.  Houghton died of stomach cancer in August at the age of 57.)  Fugard was the Residency One playwright at Signature for the 2011-12 season, the inaugural STC season at the Pershing Square Signature Center.  The Signature revival of Master Harold started performances on STC’s Irene Diamond Stage, the 294-seat proscenium house, on 18 October and opened on 7 November; it’s currently scheduled to close on 11 December, after two extensions.  (The show’s original closing was 27 November and it was extended once already through 4 December.)  My subscription partner. Diana, and I saw the 7:30 performance on the evening of Wednesday, 9 November.)

“Master Harold” . . . and the boys was first staged at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, on 9-27 March 1982 by Fugard with Željko Ivanek as Hally, Zakes Mokae as Sam, and Danny Glover as Willie.  When the production moved to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre, premièring on 4 May 1982 to 26 February 1983 (344 performances), Lonny Price replaced Ivanek as Hally.  The play was revived by the Excaliber Shakespeare Company in Chicago in 1997 and by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2005.  Master Harold returned to Broadway for 49 performances in 2003, staged by Lonny Price with Glover switching to the role of Sam.

Originally banned from production in South Africa, the play premièred at Fugard’s Market Theatre in Johannesburg on 22 March 1983, once again directed by the author.  The production, whose opening night audience included such luminaries as Nobel Prize-winning novelist  Nadine Gordimer and Bishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, left many in its audience in tears.  In 2012, Master Harold was revived in Fugard’s native land and again in 2013 in Afrikaans (translated by Idil Sheard as Master Harold en die Boys).  The Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, staged the play in the summer of 2016.

In 1985, Showtime, the cable TV network, and the Public Broadcasting System televised an adaptation of the play by Fugard, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg with Matthew Broderick as Hally, Zakes Mokae as Sam, and John Kani as Willie.  Lonny Price helmed a South African film production based on a screenplay by Nicky Rebello in  2010 starring Freddie Highmore as Hally and Ving Rhames as Sam; the film opened up the play considerably, adding many characters who never appear on stage, including Hally’s parents. 

Master Harold takes place in 1950, one year after the passage of the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act in the Union of South Africa (the Republic was declared in 1961), and the year the Population Registration Act, the Group Areas Act, and the Suppression of Communism Act were passed, the first legal mechanisms formalizing what Prime Minister D. F. Malan, elected in 1948 by the white minority who alone were allowed to vote, called apartheid, the policy of “separateness,” that prevailed until 1994.  (In my report on Fugard’s Blood Knot, 28 February 2012, I included a brief history of apartheid.)  The play is set in Port Elizabeth, a coastal city 550 miles south of Johannesburg where three-year-old Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard moved with his family from his birthplace in Middleburg, 215 miles north. The play is largely autobiographical, down to the characters’ names: young Fugard was, indeed, called Hally as a boy and his family’s employees in the St. George’s Park Tea Room were Sam Semela and Willie Malopo, who became his friends and his teachers.  At the age of 17, Hally is seeing the world around him change just as he’s growing from a boy into a man, and he reflects the changes in his country; “Master Harold” . . . and the boys is both the story of Athol Fugard’s coming of age, and of South Africa’s as well: Hally is both the young playwright and his native land, both on the cusp of destiny. 

The characters and events of this play reflect the people and events of South Africa—but the play’s characters are also actual people from Fugard’s past dealing with circumstances that actually happened to them in their lives.  I’ll be addressing this more in a bit, but one of the things that I think makes Fugard such a marvelous playwright and makes his depictions of social and political themes (that is, apartheid and its repercussions) so engaging is that he makes them universal topics that speak to people far beyond South Africa, and he makes them personal—or personalized—issues rather than socio-political theses. As Nathaniel French, Signature Theatre Company literary associate, put it in an interview with the dramatist, “For more than 50 years, . . . Athol Fugard has challenged the world’s conscience with his incisive portraits of individuals grappling with the intimate repercussions of systemic injustice.”  This quality was first evident in 1961’s Blood Knot (revived at Signature in 2012) and continued throughout Fugard’s long career.  As with the characters in his other plays, Hally, Sam, and Willie aren’t metaphors or allegories, they’re real people—not least because they, in fact, are real people—who address real problems on a human and personal scale.  That’s why I say Fugard’s plays are more powerful as consciousness-raisers and instructors than reports and essays: he makes them touch us with his humanity.

“Master Harold” . . . and the boys shows how the institutionalized racism, bigotry, and hatred of apartheid (and, by extension, Jim Crow and its echoes) can become absorbed by those on both sides of the divide who live under it.  As “Hally” Fugard grew into a young man, the Union of South Africa began building its brutal racist regime of apartheid, the Afrikaans word for “apartness.”  Fugard absorbed the entitlement afforded him by his white skin.  His father, who was disabled by a childhood injury and needed crutches to get around, was also a drunk and it frequently fell to his young son, with Sam’s help, to retrieve him from the local saloon.  Though Fugard learned a love of music and stories from his father, the man was also a typical South African racist, the playwright has said; it was his mother who taught him a sense of justice.  Fugard also developed lifelong friendships with two of the black men who worked for his mother in the Jubilee Boarding House and later the St. George’s Park Tea Room, Sam Semela and Willie Malopo.  Sam, in fact, “was the father I wanted, a decent, good man, generous, full of laughter, caring . . .,” recalled the playwright.  “But how can a white boy in the apartheid years have a black man as a surrogate father?” he wondered.  On rainy days, when no one came to use the park, Sam and Fugard discussed literature, science, history, culture, philosophy, and the passage from childhood into manhood.  Once when Fugard was embarrassed by his father’s frequent public drunkenness, it was Sam who cheered him up by putting together a homemade kite and teaching the boy to fly it to provide him with an accomplishment of which he could be proud.  “I ended up sitting holding the string and admiring my kite, but Sam couldn’t sit down because, by a very brutal irony of South Africa, there was a sign: ‘Whites Only.’”  One afternoon, after the two argued, Fugard spat in Sam’s face.  In a moment, everything changed between them and that act haunted Fugard for decades. 

Thirty years later, the dramatist wrote “Master Harold” . . . and the boys out of that experience, incorporating in the drama all the confusion, helplessness, and misplaced anger Hally feels.  “That little schoolboy in the tearoom on that rainy afternoon when his company is the two black servants who work in the tearoom,” explained Fugard, “that whole setting comes directly from my youth.”  He’d been trying to compose a play about Sam and Willie, “two men [who] were so important in my life that I just felt a need to somehow celebrate them in a play.”  But the playwright “couldn’t find the element that created the drama, the tension and the demand for resolution that theatre usually involves.”  He started to think about writing Master Harold because it gave him “a chance to publicly reckon with one of the most disgraceful moments in my private life, which is when I spat in Sam’s face.”  “‘My God, you’ve got a lot to answer for, Master Harold,’” Fugard thought. “And suddenly I put Master Harold into the equation with Sam and Willie, and like Einstein I ended with E=MC².”  But he “feels as if somebody else wrote that play, not myself,” and when literary associate French suggested he wrote Master Harold with Sam Semela, the dramatist responded enthusiastically, “That’s correct, that’s correct.  That’s really not a bad way of putting it!”

At the start of the play, it is, indeed, raining, and Willie is practicing ballroom steps for a major competition.  (The choreography is by Peter Pucci.)  In between chores to close up the tea room for the day, Sam, the more sophisticated of the men, is coaching him.  Uneducated, Sam is wise in the ways of the human soul—and smart enough to understand—and remember—just about anything Hally explains to him from his schoolbooks.  When 17-year-old Hally arrives after school, he sets about doing his homework and the bantering among the three begins.  Hally’s intelligent enough to see that something serious is about to happen to his world and he’s innately good enough to be concerned.  The young man learns that his mother has gone to the hospital where his sick father is interned and soon she calls to say she’ll be bringing him home that afternoon.  Hally has always had a conflicted and chilly relationship with his father.  Bitter and distraught, Hally, misdirecting his anger at his father, lashes out at Sam, who’s tried to help the young man accept his father even with his failings.  Hally tells a crude, racist joke and demands that Sam no longer call him “Hally” but “Master Harold.”  (Willie has always called the young man “Master Hally.”)  Sam warns the young man that this will be a step he can’t take back once made—it will alter everything.  Then Hally spits in Sam’s face and leaves the tea room.  As the play ends, Sam and Willie dance together to the music of the tea room’s juke box, hoping things are “going to be okay tomorrow.” 

(A word about that ballroom dancing which frames the play:  It became a popular and important outlet for creativity and pleasure for black South Africans even before apartheid was formalized.  Having caught on in the country among the European settlers as early as the 17th century, it began to be opened up to even working-class white South Africans by the 20th century, greatly inspired by U.S. culture, especially the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  Blacks, though, were still excluded, by both laws and by economics.  So black South Africans started their own dance events, including competitions, in the segregated townships in which they were required to live.  Dance parties and clubs were oases of pleasure and a kind of freedom of spirit that was denied them in their everyday lives, particularly once the racial laws establishing apartheid as the governing principle of the land were enacted.  As Fugard, a ballroom champion himself when he was a boy, explains the attraction: “It was just the music, the fact that you moved your body through space while beautiful music was filling your ears.“  In the play, when Hally asks, “For God’s sake, Sam, you’re not asking me to take ballroom dancing serious, are you?” Sam responds, “There’s no collisions out there, Hally.  Nobody trips or stumbles or bumps into anybody else.  That’s what that moment is all about.”  Soon, ballroom dancing became a distinctive part of the black culture of South Africa in a similar sense to township music, introduced to the U.S. with the success of Paul Simon’s 1986 fusion album, Graceland.)

Diana found “Master Harold” . . . and the boys talky, but I find it less a talk play than, say, Oslo or New Jerusalem (see my reports on 13 August 2016 and 20 April 2014, respectively).  There isn’t a lot of “action” in Master Harold, but there’s considerable “activity” (including the ballroom dancing).  The talk is largely conversation, not all lecture and point-making (though there’s some of that, too).  Further, Oslo and New Jerusalem are dissertations, one on Middle East politics and the other on philosophy (Spinozan) and theology; Master Harold disguises the political and social themes Fugard’s presenting as a relationship between Hally (who, beside being Fugard, is also the embodiment of the emerging South African nation) and Sam and Willie (the black South African people).  It’s actually quite interesting and even clever, from a dramaturgical point of view.  It must have been really startling in the 1980s, when apartheid was in full swing—especially in its South African première in ‘83.  (Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times: “Mr. Fugard’s drama—lyrical in design, shattering in impact—is likely to be an enduring part of the theater long after most of this Broadway season has turned to dust.”)

I think some of the appeal of Master Harold despite the lack of action—at least to me—is that apartheid, especially as Fugard presents it, in the guise of three ordinary people, is a more visceral topic than the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza in New Jerusalem or the development of the Oslo Accords (which ultimately failed).  As Newsday’s Linda Winer put it, “Fugard has taken people from very far away and made their lives so real that they resound beyond the impersonal facts of distant news stories.”  It’s a little like Arthur Miller presenting the McCarthy commie witch-hunts in the guise of the Salem witch trials in The Crucible by presenting real, ordinary people instead of historical bold-face names.  And just as the implications of McCarthyism and the threat of a HUAC continue to be relevant long after the 1950s, the effects of institutionalized racism and the essence of apartheid still impact us today, even here in the Unites States and even after the official policy has been dismantled in South Africa. 

Unlike any of these other plays, though, Master Harold at base is about the most supreme human characteristic.  As Fugard puts it: “You know, I spat in Sam’s face and Sam forgave me.”  Then he expands that point: “But I think, in essence, what Sam demonstrates—what Sam gives us hope for—is love.  How big love can be.”  That makes “Master Harold” . . . and the boys redemptive—and I think that’s what makes the play irresistibly compelling.  Hally has committed a repulsive act; he seems to be taking on the racist characteristics of the South African nation as inexorably as the characters of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros turn into beasts.  But we know that in the real world, young Hally Fugard becomes adult Athol Fugard, a fighter for justice and equality—and that racist South Africa ultimately throws off its apartheid mantle and, its continuing hardships notwithstanding, constitutes a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to ease the transition with, if not exactly universal love, then at least tolerance and less bitterness and recrimination.  Sam’s “act of forgiveness,” which Fugard sees as “a lesson of which this world is still so in need,” may have made its impact at least a little.

The production of Master Harold, which runs an hour and 40 minutes without intermission, is excellent, and I found it a compelling play.  Diana and I both had some trouble with the very thick (though authentic-sounding) South African accents, however.  I think Fugard and dialect coach Barbara Rubin overdid it for an American audience.  Nonetheless, the performances are stellar.  The easy camaraderie between  Leon Addison Brown’s Sam  and Sahr Ngaujah’s Willie  set the tone of the production and its depiction of the three-character relationship.  Fugard has worked as director-playwright with both actors before, Brown in The Train Driver (2012 at Signature) and The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek (2015 world première at STC), and Ngaujah in Painted Rocks.  (I saw both these productions—reports are on 20 September 2012 and 3 July 2015, respectively—though Ngaujah had left Painted Rocks due to injury by the time I saw it.  I did see Ngaujah in María Irene Fornés’s Drowning, part of the Signature Plays this past spring, reported in ROT on 3 June  2016, and he’s best known for his performance in the title role in Fela! on Broadway in 2009-11 for which he received a Theatre World Award as well as Drama Desk and Tony nominations.  Among Brown’s other credits are August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, 2006, and Horton Foote’s Orphans’ Home Cycle, 2010, both at STC; the report on OHC was posted on 25 and 28 February 2010, but there is no report on Two Trains because it predates ROT.)

Fugard says that he’s worked with some of the same actors multiple times because “we begin to understand each other more and I begin to understand how to challenge them. . . .  If I’ve got the actors that can rise to the challenge, I use them again and again.”  He spoke specifically of Brown, but the comfort these artists have developed from working together so many times is evident in the performances of Sam and Willie here.  (It certainly helps, of course, how lovingly the author portrayed the men in the script and no doubt he added to that background during the rehearsals.)  Sam is the more worldly of the men, and Brown demonstrates that in the older-brotherliness with which he treats Willie as he guides his coworker through his dance steps.  At the same time, Sam can be almost pupil-like with Hally when it comes to academic subjects even as he takes the part of surrogate father in matters of behavior and character.  When Hally becomes enraged with him for what ought to seem like a triviality—it isn’t to Hally, of course—Brown is downright gentle, almost zen-like (though neither he not Hally would have been likely to know that philosophy in 1950 South Africa, I wouldn’t imagine), seeing what’s coming.  Even after Hally spits in his face, Brown’s Sam holds firm but dignified, sympathetic but worried what Hally’s act might portend.

Willie, for all his callow boyishness, is still a complex man.  His insouciant manner at work and his preoccupation with dancing, which add some humor to the play, make him seem feckless, but we know that he has a violent streak, especially against women.  Ngaujah wisely doesn’t play this dark aspect of the character—it’s just there: we know it, Sam knows it, but Hally probably doesn’t.  If Sam and Willie are reflections of black South Africans under apartheid, this is the roiling dangerous element that’s building up.  Ngaujah threads this needle very neatly; though his Willie is the one who consistently plays the subordinate to Hally’s young master, he’s also the one who presents the potential, if unseen, threat. 

The newcomer to this ensemble is Noah Robbins, the 26-year-old actor from Potomac, Maryland, who made such an impression on reviewers and audiences alike for his portrayal of Eugene Jerome in the Broadway revival of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs in 2009.  A youthful-looking 19 then (the character is 15 in the play), just out of a Washington, D.C., prep school, Robbins has clearly deepened and broadened his capabilities.  (Coincidentally, his role in Brighton Beach was originally played by Matthew Broderick—who also played Hally in the TV movie version of Master Harold.)  His Hally is the epitome of a boy about to become a man, a little too smart for his britches but at the same time slightly awed by the maturity and wisdom of the older Sam.  I could feel the conflict between his innate character, the boy who loves and respects Sam and Willie and relies on Sam for life’s guidance he can’t get from his father, and the new-born young man of a new South Africa where he’s the designated master by virtue not of any superior accomplishments, but of his birth.  All gangly and willowy, Robbins can shift from adolescent braggadocio to mean-spirited haughtiness and back again without seeming to shift gears.  The balance is delicate, but the actor pulls it off cleanly.  (Hally is in danger of being perceived as a supremacist bully in the making, but the presence of Brown’s Sam helped me greatly to keep in perspective what I discerned was happening within the boy.  Knowing the developments beyond the confines of the tea room, though they’re not part of the play’s text, also informed my judgment.)  Robbins makes Hally’s sense guilt over the spitting incident, mixed with his remaining anger and confusion, palpable,

As director, Fugard fosters the interrelationships among the three characters and he clearly knows not only what he wants—he should, of course—but how to get it from the actors.  (This is where it becomes an advantage for a playwright to stage his own works, though I have often complained about this decision.  Fugard seems to be an exception—Horton Foote was another—to my caveat against playwright-directors.  There’s also a demonstration here of a director who’s worked with certain actors before gaining a benefit from that familiarity as well.)  Fugard is also able, because he understands this material—both the crafted play and the socio-historical grounding—so intimately, to avoid the blatant exposure of the action’s underpinnings and stage only the core truth.  He knows what to trust and what needs showing so that the performance becomes more natural and real and, as a consequence, more touching and revealing. 

Christopher H. Barreca’s tea room set is not quite cozy but also not cold or forbidding—like, perhaps, South Africa on the verge of a new regime which hasn’t quite taken permanent hold yet.  The torrential rain outside the big picture window, portentous as it is in its power to drive everyone away from the tea room, also adds an element of gloom inside the restaurant, isolating it from the rest of the world, a little like Edward Hopper’s 1942 Nighthawks, except with the dark street viewed from inside the lighted diner instead of the other way ’round.  Stephen Strawbridge’s lighting, of course, shares the credit for creating this image (along with whoever was responsible for the rain effects).  John Gromada’s sound design, principally the jukebox music to which Willie practices his ballroom dancing, and Susan Hilferty’s costumes add to the complete authenticity of the little tea room’s increasingly fraught atmosphere.

Show-Score tallied 23 notices (as of 20 November) for the Signature Theatre Company’s revival of Master Harold and reported that 100% were positive.  The average score was 86; the survey’s highest rating was 95 (there were 2, the websites The Clyde Fitch Report and Front Row Center; there was also nine 90’s); Show-Score’s lowest rating was a single 70 (WNBC-TV), with two 75’s.  (My round-up will cover 14 notices.) 

Declaring the revival of Master Harold at Signature a “sterling new production,” the New York Times’ Christopher Isherwood affirmed that “this quiet drama remains a powerful indictment of the apartheid system and the terrible human cost of the racism it codified and legalized.”  The play, one of Fugard’s “most celebrated and popular,” is “directed with care by” the author and “remains a powerful indictment of the apartheid system and the terrible human cost of the racism it codified and legalized.”  Matt Windman of am New York described Master Harold as “no doubt the finest play written by” Fugard and pronounced the Signature revival “excellent.”  “Intimate and tightly constructed, sharply political and emotionally bruising, autobiographical yet universal, despairing but with a glimmer of hope,” Windman characterized the play, and like several other reviewers found relevance in our current politics: “Following an election season where personal frustrations inspired disturbing manifestations of racial and ethnic prejudice, the play is quite pertinent today.  But even if that were not the case, it would still pack a strong punch simply because it is a masterful and accessible piece of writing.”  In Long Island’s Newsday, Linda Winer’s “Bottom Line” on Master Harold was: “Beautiful and upsetting Fugard revival,” which she described full of “youthful power.”  With “a magnificent cast,” the play unfolds through “leisurely storytelling, deceptively complex humanity and grounded simplicity.”

The “Goings On About Town” column of the New Yorker called Master Harold “a classic slow burn” in which the “atmosphere remains so light and casual for so long that considerable tension accrues around the question of how the interaction will inevitably explode.”  The New Yorker reviewer added, “It is depressing to recognize, in this moment of emboldened white nationalism, that the play is not as much a museum piece from the other side of the world as we might have fooled ourselves into believing it was exactly eight years ago.”  Jesse Green, while calling the Signature revival “powerful,” observed in New York magazine that the play “may seem like small potatoes compared with the repression, poverty, and denial of liberty that the apartheid system enforced on millions.”  He continued that one problem with the play is “that its first two-thirds are taken up with the slow, careful setting of what seems to be a purely domestic trap.”  Fugard “springs the trap” in the last third of the play when Hally gets the news of his father’s return and “what has sometimes seemed a bit desultory and kitchen-sinkish, with a lacy overlay of pretty imagery involving kites and quicksteps, becomes gripping and then devastating.”  But Green complained that the author’s work contains “a stolid resistance to theatricality in favor of moral seriousness” and that sometimes “you might wish for more imaginative direction.”  Nonetheless, concluded the man from New York, Master Harold’s “representation of a world in a tearoom is at least as astonishing an achievement as the inscribing of a bible on the head of a pin.  And more piercing, probably.”  (Like some others, Green appended a remark reminding us of Master Harold’s contemporary relevance, lamenting that “South Africa in 1950 . . . was not the only place or time on Earth when black lives didn’t seem to matter.”)

In the Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck reported in his “Bottom Line”: “This superbly staged and acted revival reveals that the apartheid-set drama has lost none of its power.”  Calling Master Harold Fugard’s “masterwork,” Scheck affirmed that it “may take place in South Africa during the early years of apartheid, but its depiction of the ways in which people are capable of hurting even those they love transcends the political landscape of bigotry and oppression that inspired it.”  A “deeply moving and powerful . . . play,” reported the HR reviewer, Master Harold “is now receiving an emotionally pitch-perfect revival.”  He noted, “Very little of dramatic importance occurs during much of the play's running time,” requiring “patience during its lengthy, meandering build-up, before reaching its emotionally devastating conclusion.”  Scheck concluded that “it's worth the time,” however, and seeing it under Fugard’s direction “represents a privilege not to be missed.”  David Cote of Time Out New York made a rather unusual comparison to demonstrate his assessment of the play:

Athol Fugard’s 1982 apartheid drama is a little like Mass for lazy Catholics:  Technically speaking, you only have to show up for Eucharist (the blessing of bread and wine) to stay saved.  In “Master Harold” . . . and the boys, that means perking up when teen Afrikaner Harold . . . turns on his friends (and de facto employees) Sam . . . and Willie . . ., lashing out at them with privileged contempt.  

The rest of the play, asserted the man from TONY, “is exposition, backstory and windup” despite “[r]ichly detailed acting and Fugard’s solid direction” which “make the journey . . . fairly engaging.”   

On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart reported that Fugard’s revival of Master Harold “pulls out all the technical stops . . . while employing some top-notch actors to perform his drama of soft bigotry and the lost promise of change.”  He labeled the production “a beautifully rendered yet somewhat sleepy revival . . . which feels unfortunately diminished amid its own grandiosity.”  The author’s “steady direction” brings the play to an “emotional climax at a slow boil . .  but the necessarily nuanced performances occasionally drown in the cavernous Diamond Theater.”  The TM review-writer concluded, “Still, those looking for a traditional and well-acted production of Fugard’s masterpiece won’t be disappointed.”  Ann Firestone Ungar of New York Theatre Guide pronounced the Signature revival of Master Harold “a mighty play given a mighty production.”  The playwright “has directed with perfect attention to detail” so that the “attention to realism . . . is gripping because of its truth.”  The NYTG reviewer recommended “without reservation” the “moving work of art,” which she dubbed “flawless.” 

“Master Harold” . . . and the boys “pulses with a terrible beauty,” declared Deirdre Donovan on CurtainUp.  Directing “impeccably,” Fugard lets “the Beckett-like simplicity of his play be its strong suit.”  The CU reviewer explained, “She trusts to its spare language, vividly-limned characters, and the tableaus of the racial hate.”  (Though Donovan had high praise for all three actors, she, too, had some problems with the South African dialects.)  Broadway World’s Michael Dale labeled the Signature revival of Fugard’s play “excellent” and reported, “There is little action in the play, but a lot of thought.”  Dale asserted, “In a sense, ‘MASTER HAROLD’ . . . AND THE BOYS becomes a sad twist on the typical coming-of-age story.” 

Matthew Murray warned on Talkin’ Broadway, “You might experience a bit of an initial shock at how shocking the Signature Theatre revival of ‘Master Harold’ . . . and the boys . . . is not.”  He explained:

After all, Athol Fugard’s play is known for eliciting gasps, recoils, and even jumps when it hits its climax.  And though this production, which the playwright has directed, is good at generating horrified silences gaping enough to swallow Manhattan whole, those more stunned and stunning reactions are not to be found. 

Murray contended, though, that “even if it’s lost some of its ability to surprise” due to changes in the world since its début, Fugard’s play “has not lost any of its power.”  Of his themes, Murray asserted, “Fugard attacks the topic so thoroughly and so bracingly that it remains astonishing that he does so with such sensitivity and beauty.“  On Theater Pizzazz, Martha Wade Steketee affirmed that Master Harold “feels devastatingly current and resonant in today’s America” even as Fugard “directs and conducts the breathtaking hairpin turns in the dialogue rhythms that lull us into revelations of internalized socialized roles, routines, and expectations in apartheid South Africa.”

Robert Kahn of WNBC-TV, the NBC network outlet in New York City, called Master Harold “still-resonant” and reported that Fugard directed “an elegant revival” at Signature.  With praise for the cast, especially Brown and Ngaujah, Kahn had some reservations about Robbins’s portrayal: “Hally is never very likable, coming off as a young Napoleon from the start. Because his Hally is such a brat, the play is denied a larger sense of any escalating ferocity within the boy.”  In sum, however, the WNBC reviewer said, “Fugard’s drama is slow to unreel, but builds to a confrontation audiences will find absorbing.”

[Athol Fugard’s Legacy production of “Master Harold” . . . and the boys at the Signature Theatre Company was one of the last decisions made by STC’s founding artistic director, James Houghton, who stepped down in June and died in August.  He had offered Fugard a “New York theatre home” at Signature where many of the South African’s plays have been presented over the seasons.  The dramatist confessed that “it is incredibly sad for me that Jim will not be in the audience in person to see [Master Harold] come alive on his stage.”  In the program for Master Harold, Fugard wrote:

When Jim Houghton approached me a year ago about including “Master Harold” . . . and the boys in the last season that he would program as Founding Artistic Diector of Signature Theatre, I immediately knew I wanted to do it.  Not only because I wanted to make his every wish come true, insofar as it was in my power, but also because it was yet another instance of Jim’s uncanny  ability to match the needs of his theatre with the needs of his playwrights.  I could not think of a better way to celebrate 50-odd years of playwriting.  Jim, this one’s for you.]

'The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek'

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.