The Fountain Theater has done well with South African playwright Athol Fugard's previous plays, but it stumbles badly with his latest, Coming Home, which is now in a West-Coast premiere run. The problem, though, is with the play, not the production.
Coming Home is a sequel to Fugard's 1995 play, Valley Song, which told the story of Veronica Jonkers, a young woman who rips up her rural roots to try and make it as a singer in Cape Town. Now, a decade later, Fugard picks up Veronica's story when she returns to her beloved grandfather's farm. Played by the redoubtable Deidre Henry, Veronica is a strong but sorrowing woman, one whose dreams of showbiz success were shattered when her husband was killed in a brawl, leaving her to fight for survival with a young son to further complicate the picture.
Timothy Taylor plays Mannetjie, the five-year-old; Thomas Silcott is Alfred, her oldest and best friend who is called upon to play father to the boy when it is revealed that Veronica has AIDS and will soon die of the disease. Oupa, the grandfather (Adolphus Ward), died while Veronica was in Cape Town and thus can provide Veronica only with a ghostly presence, not material support.
The government won't do anything either, having decided not to make AIDS drugs available to its poorest citizens.
Coming Home has powerful and moving scenes, but its story is so topheavy with exposition and sentimentality that it ultimately wobbles and crashes under its own weight. Director Stephen Sachs and the actors (including Matthew Elam as Mannetjie at 10) valiantly struggle to salvage this wreck of a play, but the odds are unfortunately against them.
