Tag Archives: The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre

THE RED LETTER PLAYS: FUCKING A

Hester Smith (Christine Lahti) cries out at her continuing misfortune in Signature revival of Suzan-Lori Parks play (photo © 2017 Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 8, $30 ($85 after October 1)
212-244-7529
www. signaturetheatre.org

While canoeing about twenty years ago, Suzan-Lori Parks was randomly struck with the title of a play inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: She wanted to write a show called Fucking A. It’s a great name for an ambitious work that turned out to be neither a reimagining of nor a response to the 1850 literary classic about adultery and punishment in 1642 Puritanical Boston but instead something wholly its own, with just a few key references to Hawthorne’s book. A fresh, stirring revival of that 2000 play opened last night as part of Parks’s Signature Theatre residency, running in tandem for the first time with its Hawthorne-related companion, 1999’s In the Blood, which together are known as the Red Letter Plays. Fucking A takes place in “a small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere,” where Hester Smith (Christine Lahti) works as an abortionist, an always-visible “A” branded into her skin. She is saving money so she can have a picnic with her son, Boy Smith, who has been in jail for thirty years for having stolen some meat from the very wealthy family he and his mother cleaned for. The rich girl who told on him is now the First Lady (Elizabeth Stanley), wife of the Mayor (Marc Kudisch). Furious that his spouse has been unable to give birth to his heir, the Mayor is having an affair with Canary Mary (Joaquina Kalukango), Hester’s best friend, who wants to marry the Mayor but in the meantime is more than willing to accept his money as payment for services rendered. Commenting on Canary Mary’s sexy yellow dress and high heels, Hester says, “It makes you look like a whore.” Canary responds, “I am a whore.” Hester counters, “Yr a kept woman,” to which Canary replies, “Im a whore. Yr an abortionist Im a whore.” Everyone in this unnamed place, in an unnamed time that could be the past, the present, or a postapocalyptic future, is just as direct, knowing exactly who they are and what they want out of this world, as indicated by the appellations Parks gives them, most of which describe their position and/or their inner nature. Hester is being courted by the kindhearted Butcher (Raphael Nash Thompson), who is not bothered by what she does for a living. (In a crafty touch, they wear matching bloodstained aprons.) Everyone is on edge when a convict, Monster (Brandon Victor Dixon), breaks out of prison and is on the loose, being tracked by a trio of Hunters (J. Cameron Barnett, Ben Horner, and Ruibo Qian) who can’t wait to capture and torture him, setting up a brutal conclusion.

The First Lady (Elizabeth Stanley) slyly eyes her husband (Marc Kudisch) in Fucking A (photo © 2017 Joan Marcus)

In Fucking A, Parks, the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (in 2002 for Topdog / Underdog), has created an updated classical tragedy fraught with contemporary societal issues. Despite the characters’ descriptive names, they go beyond mere caricature as they deal with systemic misogyny, racism, class conflict, financial and education imbalance, fearmongering, legalized abortion, rape, and general injustice. Determined to get vengeance, Hester declares about the Mayor’s wife, “When she was a little Rich Girl she thought she owned the world. And anything she wanted she could buy. Sent my son away to prison with a flick of her little Rich Girl finger. She cant buy a son or a daughter now but I can buy mine. Im buying mine back.” Hester has been paying into the Freedom Fund for years in order to just visit her son, but the cost keeps going up as his sentence keeps getting longer; as the fund’s motto says, “Freedom Ain’t Free!” The actors, many of whom also play musical instruments in the balcony, occasionally turn to Brechtian song, both serious and funny, to further their characterization and the plot, something that Obie-winning director Jo Bonney (Lynn Nottage’s Meet Vera Stark, Parks’s When Father Comes Home from the Wars) works in seamlessly. The Hunters sing, “With jobs so scarce and times so hard / Some folks have turned to crime / The law locks all the bad ones up / They lock em up all the time / When law locks em up, they make a fuss / But when they escape, it’s good for us! / Cause we hunt.” Referring to his semen and the loyalty he so craves, the virile Mayor proudly belts out, “Marching and swimming / And marching and swimming / Saddle up! / Take aim! / Atten-tion! / At ease! / Charge! Charge! Charge! Charge!” And in a duet Hester and Canary explain, “Its not that we love / What we do / But we do it / We look at the day / We just gotta get through it. / We dig our ditch with no complaining / Work in hot sun, or even when its raining / And when the long day finally comes to an end / We’ll say: ‘Here is a woman / Who does all she can.’”

An escaped convict rattles a close-knit community in one of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Red Letter Plays (photo © 2017 Joan Marcus)

Rachel Hauck’s ramshackle set usually serves as the room where Hester cleans up after performing abortions but is swiftly turned into a local pub, Butcher’s shop, a bench by the ocean, and the Mayor’s house, with a dark open doorway and stairs in the back that harken to something more outside. When talking about abortions, sex, and their vaginas, the women often speak in a different language called Talk, which is translated in surtitles; the only male who can understand even a few words and sentences of the women’s Talk is the sensitive and caring Butcher. Emilio Sosa’s costumes further define the characters while maintaining the mystery of time and place; Hester’s blood-soaked apron and the Scribe’s (Kudisch) outfit seem to fit in the Middle Ages, while the Mayor’s suit and the First Lady’s and Canary Mary’s clothing is decidedly modern. Oscar, Obie, and Emmy winner Lahti (Chicago Hope, Swing Shift) is transcendent as Hester, her every gesture signaling the utter desperation she feels, trapped by her “stinking weeping” brand. Thompson (Black Codes from the Underground, Pericles) is sweetly touching as Butcher, who delivers an extensive monologue on all of the crimes his daughter has committed, listing just about everything under the sun, including at least several sins that every member of the audience knows only too well, tacitly implicating each one of us in the proceedings. Three-time Tony nominee Kudisch (Hand to God, Assassins) deliciously chews up whatever is in his path as the Mayor and the drunken Scribe while also playing the bass guitar, and Stanley (On the Town, Company), in her daringly red dress, and Kalukango (The Color Purple, Our Lady of Kibeho), in her bold yellow attire, are excellent as two very different women who are essentially after the same thing. Parks, whose Signature residency began with The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World AKA the Negro Book of the Dead and Venus and continues with In the Blood, which opens September 17, is fierce in her writing, which sparkles with overt and subtle dichotomies that bring it all together beautifully. Lastly, in a time when color-blind casting is all the rage, the ethnicity of the actor playing Hester has a critical impact on the play. In the 2003 production at the Public Theater, S. Epatha Merkerson was Hester (with Bobby Cannavale as the Mayor, Daphne Rubin-Vega as Canary Mary, and Peter Gerety as Butcher); the entire power dynamic shifts depending on Hester’s color (as well as that of other characters), a thought that can send even more shivers down your spine than you’re already experiencing watching this superb revival. We can think all we want that we don’t see color, but it’s another key part of what makes Fucking A fucking awesome.

SWEET CHARITY

Fandango dancers Charity Hope Valentine (Sutton Foster), Helene (Emily Padgett) and Nickie (Asmeret Ghebremichael) hope there’s something better than this in SWEET CHARITY (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 8, $30-$115
www.thenewgroup.org

Sutton Foster is dazzling in the title role of the New Group’s intimate and fun fiftieth-anniversary streamlined production of Sweet Charity, which has been extended at the Pershing Square Signature Center through January 8. Foster, who has been nominated for six Tonys, winning two (Thoroughly Modern Millie and Anything Goes), is reunited with fellow Tony winner Shuler Hensley (Oklahoma!); the two previously worked together in Young Frankenstein, in which Foster played Inga and Hensley was the Monster. Here they play another iteration of Beauty and the Beast, with Foster as the adorable Charity Hope Valentine and Hensley as the schlubby but likable Oscar Lindquist. The show is set in 1960s New York City, where Charity works as a dance-hall hostess at the Fandango, sometimes doing more than just the foxtrot with strangers while always dreaming that someday her prince will come. Joining her at the Fandango are Nickie (Asmeret Ghebremichael), Helene (Emily Padgett), Elaine (Sasha Hutchings), and new girl Rosie (Hutchings), who all have dreams of their own.

Early on, all the dancers sing, “The minute you walked in the joint / I could see you were a man of distinction / A real big spender,” with Nickie and Helene later adding, “I can show you . . . a good time.” After giving all her money to a panhandler, Charity somehow ends up in the arms of Italian movie star Vittorio Vidal (Joel Perez), who is in the midst of a terrible fight with his girlfriend, the high-maintenance Nikka Graff Lanzarone (Ursula), leading to one very unusual night. But Charity’s life changes when she gets stuck in an elevator at the 92nd St. Y with the meek Oscar. “Hey! You don’t have claustrophobia, do you?” Charity asks. Oscar replies, “Oh, no. No. No, nothing like that. Claustrophobia? No . . . I just don’t like to be in small, tight places that I can’t get out of.” Soon a charming romance blossoms, but Charity’s past lingers close behind.

Charity (Sutton Foster) can’t believe she’s hanging out with Italian move star Vittorio Vidal (Joel Perez) in SWEET CHARITY (photo by Monique Carboni)

The musical’s past lingers as well. Sweet Charity was based on the screenplay of Federico Fellini’s Oscar-winning 1957 film, Nights of Cabiria, written by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, and Ennio Plaiano; the Italian classic starred Fellini’s wife, Giuletta Masina, as an unforgettable luckless prostitute. The musical debuted on Broadway in 1966, directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse and featuring his wife, Gwen Verdon, as Charity and John McMartin as Oscar, with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields, and book by Neil Simon. Fosse directed and choreographed the 1969 film, which cast Shirley MacLaine as Charity, McMartin again as Oscar, Ricardo Montalban as Vittorio, and Chita Rivera as Nickie. (Other onstage Charitys have included Debbie Allen, Molly Ringwald, Ann Reinking, and Christina Applegate.) Foster, looking like a cross between Judy Carne and Twiggy in Clint Ramos’s powder-blue minidress, is a memorable Charity, making endlessly adorable faces reminiscent of Masina’s smiles and pouts with those puppy-dog eyes, no matter how much life throws at her, and it throws a whole lot. The supporting cast is solid, especially Perez, who plays Vittorio in addition to Fandango manager Herman, Charity’s boyfriend Charlie, and Daddy Brubeck of the Rhythm of Life Church.

Derek McLane’s spare set is often nearly empty, with chairs and tables occasionally wheeled on and a brick wall in back that opens on dressing rooms and closets. The audience sits up close on three sides, with the cast entering and exiting through the crowd. The outstanding all-woman band — music director and keyboardist Georgia Stitt, bassist Lizzie Hagstedt, drummer Janna Graham, reed player Alexa Tarantino, guitarist Elana Arian, and cellist Nioka Workman — perform Mary-Mitchell Campbell’s contemporary orchestrations on the balcony behind the stage. Several set pieces fall flat — “The Rhythm of Life” feels completely out of place and time, and “I’m a Brass Band” is not the showstopper it is meant to be — and Joshua Bergasse’s (On the Town, Cagney) choreography is limited and repetitive, at least partly because of the small stage. But director Leigh Silverman (Chinglish, The Madrid), who worked with Foster on Violet, otherwise embraces the space with this warm and cozy production, in which the audience can nearly reach out and touch the performers. Other highlights are Foster’s “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” Padgett, Ghebremichael, and Foster’s “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This,” and the company’s “Where Am I Going?,” which has been moved to the finale. It’s a mostly golden production for its golden anniversary, centered by a glorious performance by one of the theater’s brightest, most engaging stars.

DAPHNE’S DIVE

Quiara Alegría Hudes’s DAPHNE’S DIVE is set in a North Philly bar (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 12, $25 through June 5, $30-85 after
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Despite Donyale Werle’s wonderfully close, intimate set, Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Daphne’s Dive turns out to be a surprisingly cold and distant play. The story takes place in a North Philly bar over the course of seventeen years, beginning in 1994, when eleven-year-old Ruby (Orange Is the New Black’s Samira Wiley) literally falls into the lives of bar owner Daphne (Vanessa Aspillaga) and her small group of regulars: her fashionable older sister, Inez (Daphne Rubin-Vega); Inez’s husband, local businessman and emerging politician Acosta (Carlos Gomez); painter Pablo (Matt Saldivar); motorcycle wanderer Rey (Gordon Joseph Weiss); and bikini-clad activist Jenn (K. K. Moggie), inspired by real-life radical performance artist Kathy Change. The set is open on two sides, where the audience sits right on the edges, as if hanging out on the fringes of the small tavern. Each scene of the hundred-minute play begins with a spotlight on Ruby, who announces her age in order to identify how much time has passed; some things change, and some things don’t, but not enough of the story feels natural or authentic. Hudes, who won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Water by the Spoonful, the second play in her Iraq war trilogy (which began with Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue and concluded with The Happiest Song Plays Last), and was nominated for a Tony for her book for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, can’t quite decide where Daphne’s Dive belongs in the canon of works set in bars, the characters hovering indeterminably somewhere between the lovable oddballs of Cheers and the luckless losers of The Iceman Cometh. You desperately want to become more involved in these characters’ lives, but they are never fully fleshed out by Hudes and director Thomas Kail, who has previously directed such wide-ranging productions as In the Heights, Lombardi, Dry Powder, and this little show called Hamilton. The music, however, by Grammy-winning pianist and composer Michel Camilo, is exceptional, nearly worth the price of admission all by itself. Daphne’s Dive is the first of three world premieres Hudes will write for the Signature Theatre in the next five years as part of the Residency Five program.

STEVE

Close friends gather for a birthday party that goes awry in STEVE (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 3, $25-$95
www.thenewgroup.org
www.signaturetheatre.org

Be sure to arrive early for the world premiere of the New Group’s Steve, which has been extended at the Pershing Square Signature Center through January 3. As you enter the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, the cast is already onstage, singing American standards and show tunes. (The music coordinator is Emmy-nominated writer, actor, musician, and radio host Seth Rudetsky.) It sets up a warm camaraderie that is about to be torn apart once the play itself begins. It’s Steven’s (Matt McGrath) birthday, and he and his friends are gathering at a Manhattan restaurant to celebrate. He’s there first with Carrie (Ashlie Atkinson), a large, gregarious lesbian with terminal cancer, something Steven refuses to acknowledge. “Dying sucks,” Carrie says. “You’re not dying,” Steven instantly responds. They are soon joined by Steven’s longtime partner, Stephen (Malcolm Gets), with whom he is raising a son, and another couple, their friends Matt (Mario Cantone) and Brian (Jerry Dixon). As the waiter, a flirty Argentine dancer named Esteban (Francisco Pryor Garat), quotes Twyla Tharp, the snark flies as the group trashes Broadway shows, movies, and celebrities, saving particularly choice bits for Mame, the Spanish version of West Side Story, Kristin Chenoweth, Audra McDonald, and Evita. “Esteban, you’ll have to forgive Stephen,” Steven says, “as he comes from a generation that fetishizes the lesser musicals of the early eighties.” The party takes a tense, nasty turn when birthday boy Steven reveals to everyone that Stephen and Brian have been secretly sexting each other. The narrative gets more interesting when debut full-length playwright Mark Gerrard and director Cynthia Nixon then present a different version of the same scene; initially, Steven had publicly admonished the electronic affair between Stephen and Brian, whereas in the alternate take, Steven proceeds with similar anger and frustration but without explicitly explaining why he is so upset. Yet another Steve becomes part of the fray when it is later learned that Brian and Matt are involved in a special relationship with trainer Steve, whom every man froths over at the gym. Despite the various issues, the friends and lovers try to make it through some tough times, all the while delivering a fast-paced patter of snide, exquisitely cynical comments. It’s hard not to enjoy the barbed banter even as you’re aware that the play depicts a nearly endless array of stereotypical images of modern gay life in New York City.

Matt (Mario Cantone) and Steven (Matt McGrath) discuss life, love, and loss in New Group world premiere STEVE (photo by Monique Carboni)

Matt (Mario Cantone) and Steven (Matt McGrath) discuss life, love, and loss in New Group world premiere (photo by Monique Carboni)

At one point, Carrie remembers how Stephen and Steven met, when the former would come to watch the latter perform as a singing waiter. “It was genius,” she says. “A love letter written in slow motion with the Broadway Song Book.” That thought can also be applied to Steve itself, although it moves at a swift, rhythmic clip and might be more deliciously decadent than outright genius. The excellent cast clearly is having a blast together, and that mood is infectious, although most of the characters end up being not very likable, doing not very likable things. But Carrie’s zest for life and her acceptance of her fate are energizing, wonderfully portrayed by a defiantly positive and upbeat Atkinson (Fat Pig), while Matt’s adorably childlike joie de vivre infuses the proceedings with sheer glee, as the cute and cuddly Cantone (Sex and the City, Laugh Whore) revels in being the comic relief. Most important, Gerrard (Andy Cohen Has a Big D***) and Nixon (Rasheeda Speaking, MotherStruck) succeed in making the audience feel like a part of this extended twenty-first-century family, from the bouncy singing at the beginning through all the bittersweet trials and tribulations to the heartfelt finale on Fire Island.

MERCURY FUR

Brothers Darren (Jack DiFalco) and Elliot (Zane Pais) are caught up in some shady dealings in Philip Ridley’s MERCURY FUR (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 27, $25-$75
www.thenewgroup.org
www.signaturetheatre.org

British playwright Philip Ridley — who also writes children’s books, pens screenplays, song lyrics, and poetry, directs films, is an experienced photographer, and has staged multimedia installations and performance art projects — has a special relationship with his audience. In Tender Napalm, which enjoyed a limited run at 59E59 in 2012, the audience sat in two rows across a narrow, horizontal space between which two actors shared their dreams and fantasies in abstract soliloquies. If a patron had to use the rest room (there was no intermission), he or she would have to walk right through the action, and would not be allowed back in. There’s a similar conceit in Mercury Fur, Ridley’s confrontational 2005 work being revived by the New Group at the Signature’s Linney theater, which has been transformed by Derek McLane into a dilapidated room in an abandoned New York City housing project, strewn with debris, the windows boarded up. On two facing sides, the audience sits in folding chairs, ratty couches, or decaying love seats; on the other two sides, people sit high atop walls that offer occasionally limited views of what is happening below. Once again, there is no intermission, so getting up to use the facilities would be rather noticeable, and reentry is only at the discretion of management. Then again, Mercury Fur has been known to cause audience members to leave and not want to come back; in fact, Ridley’s publisher rejected it, refusing to release a printed edition. (Ridley defiantly took the play, and his backlist, to a different company.) Which is all rather beside the point, as the two-hour Mercury Fur is a bold, engrossing work that is not afraid to challenge audiences as it digs deeply into the dark part of the soul, revealing the lengths to which humans will go when faced with imminent disaster. As the David Leavitt epigraph in the published play states, “Sometimes brutality is the only antidote to sorrow.”

Things don’t go so well at a bizarre party in the New Group revival of MERCURY FUR (photo by Monique Carboni)

As the play opens, nineteen-year-old Elliot (Zane Pais) and his younger brother, sixteen-year-old Darren (Jack DiFalco), are cleaning up a ramshackle apartment, preparing it for a special party. Elliot is by far the stronger of the two, telling his not-too-swift sibling, “You know what you’re like? A fucking anvil round my neck. The lifeboat’s sinking and I’m bailing it out like a good egg but I’ve got this fucking anvil getting heavier and heavier dragging the whole thing down.” The brothers, who soon touch each other’s hearts in a sweetly innocent moment, are working for Spinx (Sea McHale), a dangerous tough guy who throws parties for wealthy people in which they can do any degraded thing they want, for a price. Afterward, the entire building will be burned down, leaving no evidence of the depravity that occurred there. In this case, with WWIII on the horizon, a Wall Streeter called Party Guest (Peter Mark Kendall) has very specific, and deviant, plans for the ten-year-old Party Piece (Bradley Fong), involving gold lamé, Elvis Presley style. Also on hand for the festivities are Lola (Paul Iacono), a scantily clad transgender makeup artist; Spinx’s date, the Duchess (Emily Cass McDonnell), who is brought along unexpectedly, complicating things for Elliot, who sells hallucinogenic butterflies, and Darren, who likes to eat those colorful treats; and Naz (Tony Revolori), a fifteen-year-old who is squatting in the building and wants to join in the fun, thinking it’s going to be a regular party. Oh, how wrong he is.

New Group artistic director Scott Elliott (Sticks and Bones, Hurlyburly) directs this Off-Broadway premiere with pre/post-apocalyptic punk flair, keeping the aggression level high while maintaining an intoxicating yet uncomfortable intimacy. You can’t look away, even when you know what’s going to happen, even though most of the ultraviolence takes place offstage. The play includes elements of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, J. G. Ballard and Tennessee Williams, so you never know which direction it will turn. The brave, talented cast — which features several actors with little or no professional stage experience, including Revolori, who recently won accolades for his portrayal of Zero the lobby boy in Wes Anderson’s Oscar-nominated The Grand Budapest Hotel — holds nothing back as events spin out of control and an overwhelming sense of doom dominates the proceedings. The characters live in a frightening world, one that is even more terrifying because it doesn’t feel that much removed from our current situation, as if all of this is waiting for us, just around the corner. With Mercury Fur, the New Group, which staged Ridley’s The Fastest Clock in the Universe in 1998, takes a good look at the future, and it is not a happy prospect.

THE PAINTED ROCKS AT REVOLVER CREEK

Leon Addison Brown and Caleb McLaughlin star in what might be Athol Fugard’s final play (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 7, $25-$65
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

In 2011, South African writer-director Athol Fugard won a Tony Award for lifetime achievement the day after his seventy-ninth birthday, but that hasn’t slowed down the now-eighty-three-year-old man responsible for such important plays as Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys. The next year he was the Signature Theatre’s playwright-in-residence, presenting stirring revivals of Blood Knot and My Children! My Africa! as well as the New York debut of The Train Driver. He is now back at the Signature with the world premiere of The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, a potent tale of apartheid and its effects on three people that distills right to the core the policy of racial segregation that dominated South Africa for nearly fifty years, and its legacy today. Inspired by real-life outsider artist Nukain Mabusa, who painted flowers on rocks in a stone garden in Revolver Creek for more than a decade, the play takes place in 1981, as an elderly farm laborer (Leon Addison Brown) and his young helper (Caleb McLaughlin) prepare to paint the Big One, an enormous rock on a hill on land owned by Elmarie Kleynhans (Bianca Amato) and her husband, an Afrikaner couple who employ the man, called Tata (“father”) by the boy, known as Bokkie (“small buck”), and Outa (“old father”) by Elmarie, who uses the generic, derisive Afrikaaner terms for them rather than their names. Bokkie is eager for Tata to paint the Big One, but Outa is hesitant. “He is bigger than me. And I know that he is my last one . . . so I am frightened,” Tata says of the inanimate object. “But he is only a rock,” Bokkie explains. “I have got no more flowers in me, Bokkie,” Tata replies. However, soon Bokkie and Tata are painting the rock together, the old man sharing the story of his hard life, passing it on for future generations. “What do you see standing here? Old Man? Just another old kaffer?” he says to the rock, asserting himself for maybe the first time ever. “No, Big One, I am not old man. I am not kaffer. I am MAN.” When the religious Elmarie arrives, she doesn’t understand what Outa has painted and wants him to replace it with something much prettier. “Next Sunday, why don’t you wipe that all away and make it a big flower, your biggest flower . . . to thank the Lord for all his blessings,” she says. The old man is faced with a choice, a decision that will have great impact not only on himself but on his young friend as well.

Jonathan Sejake (Sahr Ngaujah) and Elmarie Kleynhans (Bianca Amato) argue over the new South Africa in THE PAINTED ROCKS AT REVOLVER CREEK (photo by Joan Marcus)

In the second act, it’s twenty-two years later, and the boy, now a grown teacher (Sahr Ngaujah), returns to Revolver Creek, in a South Africa that has ended apartheid and has a new constitution giving equal rights to blacks. He is met by Elmarie, who does not recognize him at first, holding a gun on him until he explains who he is and tells her why he is there. “So what gives you the right to come here and paint that rock without permission? Let me remind you, this is private property, Bokkie,” she says. “Nobody calls me that anymore, Mrs. Kleynhans. My real name is Jonathan Sejake,” he responds with pride and determination. He also explains that Tata/Outa had a name as well, Nukain Mabusa. Jonathan and Elmarie then engage in a heated verbal battle over the current state of the nation, the way things used to be, and what the future promises, arguing about land ownership, violence, and personal identity. As in the first act, Fugard, who also directed the production, includes long, sharply written monologues that both expand on the characters and serve as a microcosm for the arguments that have plagued South Africa since even before apartheid officially began in 1948. The absorbing dialogue is expertly performed by the outstanding cast, who lend nuance and believability to roles that could have been clichéd and predictable. Christopher H. Barreca’s set features an array of rocks covered in fading painted flowers, centered by the Big One, which embodies the seemingly impenetrable gap that exists between blacks and Afrikaners. Just as Tata and Bokkie gave eyes to the rock, Fugard invites the audience to see the vast intricacies of apartheid rule. He imbues The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek with a captivating sensitivity, avoiding becoming overly treacly or didactic as the well-drawn, multidimensional characters make their cases. And although the play is specifically about South Africa, it also relates to the racial tensions that have gripped America in Baltimore, Ferguson, and elsewhere. The play is part of the Signature’s Legacy Program, and Fugard has stated that it might be his “farewell to the stage.” If that is indeed true, he has left behind quite a legacy himself, concluding with one of his most softly intelligent, illuminating works.