Dance Marathon

By T.E. Kalem

MASTER HAROLD" . . . AND THE BOYS

by Athol Fugard

A boy sometimes cherishes a surrogate father more than his own. But if the boy is white and the man is black, and the locale is South Africa in 1950, a day of reckoning is inevitable. No one knows this better than Athol Fugard, who has probed the corrosive effect of apartheid on his fellow South Africans in eight of his 16 plays, ranging from The Blood Knot to last season's award-winning A Lesson from Aloes. To each of his works, he brings a tormented conscience, a touch of the poet and a scalding honesty.

After having had its potent and lacerating world premiere at New Haven's Yale Repertory Theater, his most recent play has now opened at Broadway's Lyceum Theater. The initial scenes of "Master Harold"...and the Boys are amiable, even cozy. It is a rainy late afternoon, and two blacks are tidying up the St. Georges Park Tea Room, a modest luncheonette. The elder and brighter, Sam (Zakes Mokae), putters about while Willie (Danny Glover), a simpler soul, mops the floor. The two interrupt their labors from time to time to polish up fox-trot and waltz steps for a much anticipated dance contest.

In comes Hally (Lonny Price), the teen-age son of the owners of the tearoom. He is instantly at ease, having spent more warm and happy hours since boyhood with the servants than with his parents. Sam and Hally teasingly argue about whether dancing is an art or merely entertainment. Hally scoffs that the dancers fumble around and bump into one another. No, says Sam, seraphically. "It is like being in a dream about a world without collisions...and it's beautiful because that's what we want life to be like."

The quiet interlude is broken by a ringing phone. It is Rally's mother telling lim that she is bringing his crippled, alcoholic father home from his latest hospital stay. The boy remonstrates with her and, almost in tears, finally blurts out, "I'm warning you now; when the two of you start fighting again, I'm leaving home!" What follows is an example of Fugard's psychological astuteness. For the father he cannot strike, Hally substitutes the father who cannot retaliate. He tongue-lashes Sam for not doing his work, not keeping his place, not showing proper respect, and he finally spits in his face. Sam wipes away the spittle with the resignation of centuries.

It would be difficult to overpraise the one-man magnetic field that is Mokae's Sam, or the audacious emotional tightrope walking that Price does with Hally, or the unyielding, unquestioning goodness that Glover puts into Willie. A taut grace governs all under Fugard's flawless direction. The final scene will not leave the mind's lens. Willie shoots his carfare money into a jukebox. Lena Home chants the lyrics of Little Man, You ve Had a Busy Day. The two men take each other's arms and glide across the stage in the manner of Rogers and Astaire, while the audience sits desolate in pain.

--By T.E. Kalem

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