It has been 21 years since Master Harold...and the Boys, by masterly South-African playwright Athold Fugard, premiered on Broadway. Since then apartheid, for all intensive purposes, has officially been ended. However, the tragedy of South Africa's embrace of that insidious system, and its effect on the people, remains a key theme of Fugard, despite his more recent preference for less incendiary plots. Master Harold... remains, along with A Lesson from Aloes, The Road to Mecca, Blood Knot, and practically his entire canon that spans 50 years, one of the plays that sublimely makes an appeal for a raised consciousness to bridge those ridiculous man-made boundaries. This production, as revived by the Roundabout Theater Company, and superbly directed by Lonnie Price (who played Hally in the 1982 production) succeeds in not only raising our consciousness but our awareness of the extent that Fugard courageously attempted to uncover and expose the causes of hate among men.
Although the play's setting is South Africa in 1950, the time and place are insignificant to the universal truths that Fugard fearlessly and even funnily brings out through his three characters. Through them we see how seeds planted in childhood bear fruit in maturity. The sensitivities and emotions of three human beings are entwined in a relationship that becomes not only a stage to expose the weeds of bigotry and shallowness but for the enlightenment and blossoming of understanding and tolerance through love and self-esteem.
Don't be misled into thinking this is a lecture play filled with pompous platitudes. Rather, it is a powerful and compassionate story of Hally (Christopher Denham), a young man who finds himself at the crossroads of childhood and manhood unable cope with his bigoted, alcoholic father or to make a comfortable adjustment in his relationship with two black waiters he has grown up with in his parent's business, a modest tea room in Port Elizabeth. John Lee Beatty's setting, the aged green-tinged walls, the basic tables and chairs, the corner juke box and soda counter, is as basic in its evocation as is the constant downpour that can be seen from the window.
Sam (Danny Glover) and Willie (Michael Boatman) have been Hally's second family since he was an infant. The delicately balanced relationship between master and slave has been kept more-or-less subliminal until a crisis occurs during the play that details the crumbling of Hally's character. Unable to cope with knowledge that "the boys" have mentored him through the years and developed a kinship that their society is not able to tolerate, Hally stupidly and irrationally regresses back to the structured prison of blissful ignorance.
Hally is complex mixture of immaturity and ugliness that Denham conveys most compellingly. His emotional outbursts and humiliating attacks on Sam provide the kind of silent and stunned reaction from the audience that is rarely felt so deeply. Denham, a recent graduate of the University of Illinois, where he studied literature -- not acting, makes a stunning Broadway debut delivering a highly-strung, distressed, and eminently truthful performance that would have easily qualified for award nominations had the play opened earlier.
Glover, who played Willie in the 1982 production, brings an awesome stature and a transcendent sense of humanity to Sam, who, understandably recoils from Hally's reckless and heartless taunts. It is that rarest kind of intense restraint that drives Glover's riveting portrayal. It is both heartening and heartbreaking to see Sam, almost devastated, suddenly, as if strengthened by some inner self-awareness, rally and become a man in possession of his soul.
Boatman, also making his Broadway debut, is touching as Willie (the role played by Glover in the original production), a man whose sweetness and vulnerability becomes painful to witness as he sees the ones he loves most sever the ties that have bound them much too delicately. This profound play of hope, written with extraordinary power and insight by one of the great playwrights of our time, brings distinction to the beginning of the new season.
