Corrections or additions?
This review by Nicole Plett was prepared for the
May 9, 2001 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Review: `Sorrows and Rejoicings’
In the years since South Africa emerged from the
tyranny
of white minority rule, people of good will around the globe have
watched in almost painful anticipation to see how the "New South
Africa" would fare. In "Sorrows and Rejoicings," Athol
Fugard’s latest political post-mortem, which is receiving its world
premiere at McCarter Theater, the South African playwright and
director
brings this painful state of suspension out of the news and into the
theater.
The play is set in 1999, on the day of the funeral of the household’s
white master, Dawid Olivier, who has recently returned from 17 years’
exile to die at home. Four characters, three living and one dead,
come together in the big room of the Afrikaner’s family home in South
Africa’s rural Karoo. Ever the storyteller, Fugard tells this tale
in real time, through a series of narrative monologues. More extreme
in its narrative path than even his autobiographical memory play,
"The Captain’s Tiger," "Sorrows and Rejoicings" is
a bold and risky experiment. The 90-minute one-act drama is more
reminiscent
of Greek tragedy, declaimed in a public amphitheater, than it is of
modern, whiz-bang stagecraft.
The tale the three women have to tell — one is black, one white,
and one bi-racial — at this moment in time in this room is
augmented
at times by the figure of the dead Dawid who enacts various scenes
that are being re-told. Ultimately, however, the cluster of characters
are not sufficiently interesting in word or deed to persuade us that
we care. Unlike his other recent plays, not one character here —
not even the dead poet, Dawid — has much poetry in speech or
thought.
Rather, the tales of meetings, romances, hopes, and disappointment
are told in the most mundane terms. In a story surely colored by his
own experience living in Southern California, Fugard seems undecided
about what exactly a political exile can hope to accomplish in the
modern day. Must his or her position in the world necessarily be one
of failure and remorse? Dawid’s proved to be so.
L. Scott Caldwell gives graceful play to the character
of Marta Barends, the black servant who has spent her entire life
as a member of the Olivier household. Infatuated and eventually
seduced
by "the master," she has patiently endured a 17-year vigil
awaiting his return. Her affection for this lost love seems to exceed
her affection for her own fatherless daughter, now an angry young
adult who lashes out and calls her a "stinkwood servant."
As we listen to Marta’s story, we watch her compulsively polish the
grand, stinkwood table that stands at the center of the room.
Blair Brown plays Dawid’s other lover, and white widowed wife, Allison
Olivier, a fairly conventional English speaking South African woman
who falls in love with and marries the fiery Dawid, accompanies him
into exile in London, and, after he has sunk into drunkenness and
despair, moves out. Although disappointed in Dawid, she doesn’t
despise
him. She plans a posthumous volume of his poetry.
John Glover plays Dawid Olivier, a hyperactive sort whose
"passionate
conviction" often verges on desperation and sarcastic lunacy.
His presence on stage is invaluable for he is the only character who,
rather than standing rooted to the spot, is allowed to jump, and
kneel,
and dance about. A high point of his antics is the moment when, as
a young man, he recites names out of the local phone book, creating
a poem which he then calls "A Karoo Directory."
As Rebecca, the mixed-race daughter of Marta and Dawid, Marcy Harriell
— "a White man’s bastard in the New South Africa" as Dawid
eventually calls her, Marcy Harriell does a superb job. Her presence
is magnetic even as she spends most of the play simply eavesdropping
on the other women’s stories; until the moment she joins the tale
of woe.
"This world is going to change and when it does, I’ll come back
and you will be proud of me because I will have worked for that
change,"
Dawid had promised his baby daughter. It’s a promise that haunts his
remaining years. The play’s silent partner is the Roman poet Ovid,
whose volume written in exile is titled "Sorrows." Whereas
Dawid had hoped to complement Ovid’s with his own book of poems, which
he would title "Rejoicings," exile hits him hard. The
Afrikaner
in gray, wet London becomes a listless drunk. "Your soul speaks
with your mother’s tongue," says this lost soul.
Once again, set designer Susan Hilferty, Fugard’s long-time
collaborator,
has vividly evoked the colors, textures, and spaces of South Africa’s
semi-arid Karoo region. The mottled earth tones of the room’s interior
walls, lit by Dennis Parichy, mutate from brown and beige to amber,
red, and violet, providing a natural and emotional landscape that
lives, breathes, and changes over the course of the play.
— Nicole Plett
University
Place, 609-258-2787. $29 to $43. Continues to May 20.
Corrections or additions?
This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com
— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
Facebook Comments