REVIEWS ...
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
A moving drama with shocking exchanges
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Plays that delve into the pain of racial prejudice come in many turbulent varieties and illuminating styles.
Look around South Florida stages this week and you'll find Thomas Gibbons' intellectually impassioned Permanent Collection at Florida Stage, Pearl Cleage's provocative Flyin' West at M Ensemble, J.T. Rogers' searing White People at New Theatre.
Athol Fugard's great Master Harold ...and the boys, an intimate and personal play forged from the nightmare years of apartheid in South Africa, joins the list in a powerful production at GableStage in the Biltmore Hotel. Director Joseph Adler is offering the play to both the company's regular audiences and groups of high school students, who arrive by bus weekday mornings for eloquent lessons in respect and ingrained prejudice. But the grown-ups who get Master Harold on the weekends will also profit from -- and be immensely moved by -- Fugard's dramatic tutorial on conflict and compassion.
Set on a rainy, dreary day in 1950 in the South African town of Port Elizabeth, Master Harold personalizes apartheid through the story of Hally (John Bixler), a moody white teenager, and two black men who work in his family's restaurant. Sam (Paul Bodie) and Willie (Rodney Gardiner) are longtime employees of Hally's industrious Mum and his alcoholic father. But Sam's relationship with Hally runs much deeper.
As the rain pours down outside and Hally talks to the "boys" within the cozy warmth of the restaurant, it becomes clear that Sam has been his surrogate father. Just as Hally has shared lessons from his weighty textbooks with Sam, Sam has been an exemplar of caring and dignity for Hally, sometimes in ways the boy -- on the white side of the apartheid divide -- couldn't possibly fathom.
On this particular day, though, a relationship forged outside racial boundaries is explosively tested. Hally grows increasingly agitated as a personal nightmare -- his father's disruptive return home after an extended hospital stay -- appears to be coming true. So Hally turns his anger toward his other "father," Sam, in exchanges that are both painful and shocking.
The GableStage production, with its gorgeous design (the tea room set is by Tim Connelly, who sends rain tumbling into the foliage outside the window; the warmly tender lighting is by Jeff Quinn), is powerfully acted.
Gardiner seems at first to be nothing more than a slightly goofy, likeable guy who's focused on winning a big dance competition -- until we learn that Willie's partner Hilda has gone missing because he has given her yet another horrific beating.
Bixler's Hally, speaking in a kid-like rush, is as tight as his Afrikaner accent. He finds the boy's immaturity and wildly surging emotions, and his confrontations with Sam are truly heart-breaking.
Yet it is Bodie, who also played Sam in a 1985 production at the long-gone South End Alternative Theatre, who commands this Master Harold. The actor is quietly authoritative, wisely mature, yet fierce and shocking when the moment comes. His is a richly memorable performance.
After Master Harold made its first splash on Broadway in 1982, establishing the white Fugard as a voice for all South Africans, apartheid finally came to its turbulent end. But prejudice lives on, here, there and everywhere. So Fugard's lessons -- that a caring heart has no color, that individuals must be judged by actions rather than appearance -- are still sorely needed.
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
Monday, May 3, 2004
GableStage's Master Harold ...and the Boys
By Tony Guzman, Critic at Large
In his autobiographical play Master Harold ...and the Boys, now playing at GableStage, the brilliant and courageous South African playwright/actor Athol Fugard revisited his youth growing up in and around Port Elizabeth - and a shameful memory from his young manhood. Set in a restaurant (realized with astonishing realism down to the scuff marks on the tile floor and the rain plashing on the windows by set designer Tim Connelly, lighting designer Jeff Quinn and music/sound man Michael J. Hoffman), Master Harold concerns the deeply rooted but apartheid-blighted relationship between Hally, the son of the proprietors, and Sam and Willie, the blacks who work there, whom Hally has known virtually his whole life as surrogate uncles of sort. Hally, now an alternately cynical and idealistic 17-year-old student, has had his life blighted by his crippled, alcoholic father and is tortured by the prospect of his return from hospital.
Over the course of an ambling, rainy day discussion (primarily with Sam, who despite his lack of schooling is obviously a man of penetrating intelligence and moral acumen) ranging over books, knowledge, social progress and what constitutes "a man of magnitude," it becomes apparent that "the boys" have been Hally's source of emotional sustenance, despite his socially-conditioned condescension as "a master."
There's rich poetry in Fugard's handling of a remembered kite-flying adventure from Hally's early boyhood and an upcoming social dance championship for blacks, as emblematic of the wonder and promise of youthful dreams and of redemption through art and beauty, respectively - both in contradistinction to a socially-conditioned reality wherein "the Principle of Perpetual Disappointment" holds sway.
When Sam forcefully, and wisely, remonstrates against Hally's unwillingness to accept his sick father's wish to come home, the triggering of Hally's pent-up rage at life unleashes a withering stream of racist vitriol culminating in a searing outburst of contempt that's truly gut-wrenching - the audience having come to know and respect Sam by this time. For Fugard, this unblinking honesty about a shameful betrayal of love in his own past is cathartic, an exorcism if you will. For us, it's a forceful confrontation with the human consequences of our own inner cesspools of bigotry, whatever they may be.
As Sam, Paul Bodie gives one of those rare performances one actually feels honored to have witnessed. A great on-stage listener, exuding inner dignity as well as an effortless, easy-going charm, Bodie embodies Sam's innate intelligence, compassion and, at the end, anger and pain with power, subtlety and conviction. John Bixler gives us a polished, sure-handed Hally who's suitably bright and articulate but rather opaque, as if distancing himself, and us, beforehand in the face of the boy's later cruelty. Even more external in approach is Rodney Gardiner's Willie, but he's funny and engaging in a part that's comic relief for much of the going, and dead-on as an anguished witness to the emotional carnage towards the end.
Again, this GableStage Master Harold is superbly mounted in terms of production values, and Joseph Adler directs the action with cogent lucidity. In terms of both message and as an introduction to the power of theater, it's a marvelous choice as this year's GableStage production for special presentation to Miami-Dade School students. They can't help but fall under the spell of this Master Harold, and we hope - in this time of war and the carnage of innocents - that they absorb its message as well: that oppression and inhumanity are always a lose-lose proposition. As Sam tells Hally (and oppressors of every sort and stripe): "You hurt yourself."
