Common ground

Fugard's Playland is serious business

by Bill Rodriguez

by Athol Fugard. Directed by Karl Aspelund. With Chris Hagar and James McLean. At the Actors Theater, through April 13.

South African playwright Athol Fugard is certainly a dramatic force to be reckoned with. Even the overwrought works among his emotionally charged plays can be captivating failures. They are like harangues by a morally earnest madman you disengage his hands from your lapels with respect and maybe even admiration. That's why the current staging of Playland by the Actors Theater is well worth seeing.

It's a confrontation between a South African white ex-soldier and a black caretaker at the traveling amusement park of the title's name. The time is New Year's Eve 1989, a date fraught with expectations and delusions about starting anew. (That's so in any year, never mind on the eve of ending the ban on the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela being released from prison.)

In a corner of the park, amidst rusting oil drums, sitting on stacks of wooden pallets, the two emblems of South Africa's troubled past have several troubled conversations. Gideon Le Roux (Chris Hagar) is neither Afrikaner nor British, the dominant white populations, so he can represent his race rather than any political faction. The same goes for Martinus Zoeloe (pronounced "zulu"), played by James McLean the Zulu tribes back the Inkatha party rather Mandela's ANC. Gideon is pestering Martinus, but not in a malicious way. As he talks he keeps his carefree mood topped off from a pint bottle, but we soon sense that more than whiskey is keeping him garrulous. Both men are haunted by an offense against what Martinus calls "the big one," the Sixth Commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Kill."

We come to find that Martinus is tormented about not being able to go to heaven unless he truly is sorry for his murder of an abusive white man. Gideon has even greater pangs about killing to survive during the South African Border War that ended that year up near Angola. When he was discharged 10 months before, he was grateful to still be alive, but his elation soon faded as he slipped back into his dreary life.

McLean is a good physical choice, big and brawny enough to represent the menace that the black majority posed to white South Africans. More importantly, he creates a Martinus who is thoughtful as well as intense -- when he declares, "I've only killed one man in my life, but I've killed him too many times," the effect is poignant as well as chilling. Gideon, leaping from mood to mood, is a more difficult role. In addition, the character is obnoxious and yet must gain our empathy. This Hagar accomplishes, not by making him pathetic, but by conveying a deep-down sense of decency under a veneer of boisterous self-delusion. Director Karl Aspelund and Hagar chose to let Gideon go on an emotional gallop right out of the gate, which unfortunately reduces the relative velocity of the final confrontation. But in exchanges throughout, moments here and there slow down enough to make for some satisfying connections.

If metaphors had market value, Playland would have made Fugard a wealthy man by now. Gideon is named after the Hebrew judge in the Bible. To Martinus the spectacular red sunset over the Karoo desert is "hell fires on the day of judgment" as the new year -- and the unmentioned new era -- is entered. As a watchman, the black man pointedly declares, "I know how to watch the night and wait for trouble." And, of course, there is the overarching reference to the amusement park itself, with Martinus hired to maintain this source of diversion and enjoyable delusion, as blacks have long done for the country as a whole.

Fugard, of Afrikaner descent himself, has served as the conscience of anti-Apartheid South Africans through some 20 plays. In Master Harold . . . and the Boys, his best received work, and such hard-hitting dramas as A Lesson from Aloe and The Road to Mecca, he has two or three characters argue about and justify lives that are metaphorical microcosms of his country's plight or of moral Truths at large. A tall order. When the lives on stage seem to unfold honestly and are more important than the playwright's grand design, Fugard's plays are powerful stuff. When his characters come across like hand puppets speaking his voice, they disappoint.

As a play, Playland's problems are with Martinus and Gideon eventually connecting because the playwright wants them to instead of because they feel compelled to. I can accept that a talkative, guilt-ridden former soldier might force a dialogue with a reluctant black listener, but their accord at the end seems to me rather contrived. Director Aspelund or actor James McLean might sense this, because in this production Martinus remains impassive, seems unconvinced, by Gideon's final show of brotherly love. However, this dampening of the conciliatory vibes not only reduces the catharsis that Fugard wants us to have, but it also makes their arm-in-arm last exit puzzling.

Nevertheless, Playland does offer rewards. Its essay points could be made in a fraction of its time, but to see this struggle come alive is well worthwhile.